Paul Joseph Sachs

Paul J. Sachs was an influential museum administrator and businessman best known as director at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum from 1915 to 1945 and a professor whose object-based teaching profoundly influenced curatorial practices and museum studies in the United States. His substantial collection of prints and drawings, ranging from fourteenth-century Northern European drawings to modern works on paper, was bequeathed to the Fogg upon his death.

The grandson of Bavarian Jewish immigrants, Sachs was the eldest of four children born to Samuel and Louisa (born Goldman) Sachs and an heir to the fortune of the banking firm Goldman Sachs, formed by his maternal grandfather in 1869. As a child Paul attended the Sachs School, a preparatory school in New York City founded by his uncle Julius Sachs, and later studied at Harvard, receiving a bachelor of arts degree in 1900. Shortly after graduating college, Paul was employed by Goldman Sachs, where he was made a partner in 1904. That year he also married Meta Pollak, the daughter of Austrian and Polish immigrants, with whom Sachs went on to have three daughters.

Although Sachs entered the family business, art had been a constant focus of his early life. As a student, he began amassing a collection of pre-nineteenth-century prints. He sought out new works, attended sales, and discussed his collection with future director of the Fogg Museum and fellow collector Edward Waldo Forbes, forming the basis for one of the most important friendships of Sachs’s life. Their relationship established a model for the collaborative approach that Sachs took to building his collection in later years—with his former student and colleague Agnes Mongan from 1929 and the print collector W.G. Russell Allen from 1935. After joining Goldman Sachs, he continued to purchase artworks and visit public and private collections around the world. He began donating prints and drawings to the Fogg Museum and then, in 1911, a small collection devoted chiefly to the Italian Primitives; his first gift was the Rembrandt etching The Great Jewish Bride (1635).

In 1915 Forbes, by then director of the Fogg Museum, appointed Sachs as assistant director despite his lack of professional qualifications. Sachs left Goldman Sachs that same year to tour Italy in preparation for his new role. While he would remain wealthy his entire life, his decision to leave the firm meant that he could only build a collection of the scope and quality he desired by largely limiting himself to prints, drawings, and books. In addition to his work at Harvard, Sachs accepted a lectureship at Wellesley College in 1916–17, initiating his long tenure as a university professor of art history. He subsequently joined Harvard’s Department of Fine Arts as a professor, dividing his time between the museum and teaching.

In the early 1920s Sachs began teaching his pioneering “museum course,” widely considered a progenitor of the discipline of museum studies. His classes covered both the administrative and curatorial aspects of museum work, privileging connoisseurship and direct contact with works of art, including those from Sachs’s own collection. The course did much to shape the professionalization of museum management in the United States, with former students such as Arthur Everett “Chick” Austin Jr., Alfred H. Barr Jr., William Lieberman, and Perry T. Rathbone—all influential future museum directors—having an especially pronounced impact on the visibility and understanding of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art.

Throughout this time Sachs continued to build his collection. He frequently vacationed in Europe and acquired works during his stays in France in 1918 and again in 1932–33, when he was an exchange professor at the Sorbonne and other French universities. During these visits he principally bought from dealers, such as Paul Rosenberg and Paul Durand-Ruel, and public sales, including the Edgar Degas estate sales held at Galerie Georges Petit after the artist’s death in 1917.

Modern artists represented in Sachs’s collection include Degas, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, and Diego Rivera. Among the key works in the collection are Matisse’s drawing A Lady with a Necklace (1936) and Young Woman in Street Costume (ca. 1879), one of a large number of Degas drawings owned by Sachs, and one frequently exhibited by various institutions in the United States following its acquisition from Durand-Ruel in 1929. The Picassos owned by Sachs testify to the modernity of his taste, as well as his strict preference for portraits and figure drawings, ranging from the classicist work on paper A Mother Holding a Child and Four Studies of Her Right Hand (1903–4)to the advanced Cubism of the etching Mademoiselle Léonie in a Chaise Longue (1910).

Sachs’s modern tastes also influenced the acquisitions he made for the Fogg Museum, such as the Picasso drawing Weeping Woman (1937), purchased in 1940, which was shown alongside Guernica (1937) at the Museum in 1941 and 1942, a loan secured with the help of Sachs’s connections at the Museum of Modern Art. As a founding trustee of the latter museum, Sachs recommended his former students Barr and Lieberman for the posts of director and of curator of graphic arts, respectively. He also gifted the museum its first drawing, Anna Peter (1926–27) by George Grosz, soon after its opening in 1929.

Sachs retired from the Fogg Museum in 1945 and was named professor emeritus at Harvard in 1948 (after having received an honorary doctorate in 1942). He left some four thousand volumes to the Harvard College Library upon his departure from the university and bequeathed over two thousand prints and nearly five hundred drawings—a collection spanning six centuries and including significant contemporary work by European and American artists—to the Fogg Museum upon his death, where it remains today.