The Philadelphia Museum of Art announced the acquisition of one of the nation’s leading private collections of contemporary art, formed by Keith L. and Katherine Sachs. Ranging in date from the 1950s to the present, the promised gift of 97 works from the Sachs Collection represents a transformational moment for the institution and its collections. It is exceptional for a concentration of works by American masters Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly, a strong focus on major British and German artists, and important works of outdoor sculpture, large-scale photography, and video art. The couple, closely associated with the Museum for decades, has been collecting art with great dedication for more than forty years, and Keith Sachs has been a Trustee since 1988.
The Museum will officially name the galleries in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Sachs in a dedication ceremony scheduled for March 3, 2014. In summer 2016, the Museum will also present a full-scale exhibition devoted to the Sachs Collection, accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, in the Dorrance Galleries.
The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Collection contains important paintings and sculptures by some of the most influential European and American artists of the last fifty years, among them Robert Gober, Gerhard Richter, Katharina Fritsch, Georg Baselitz, Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, Gabriel Orozco, Joel Shapiro, Howard Hodgkin, Robert Ryman, Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Hamilton. The collection includes a wide representation of video art—one of the most fruitful channels of expression for artists working today—by such celebrated figures as Bill Viola, Pierre Huyghe, Steve McQueen, Francis Alÿs, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, and Willie Doherty. It also features an exceptional group of outdoor sculptures, with major works by Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Richard Long, Scott Burton, and Charles Ray. Among the large-scale photographs in the Sachs Collection are important works by Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer, Jeff Wall, Thomas Ruff, and Clifford Ross.
The collection’s strengths in works by Johns and Kelly, pivotal figures in the history of twentieth-century American art, richly complement the two galleries that the Museum has dedicated to these artists for many years. It also includes the first works by other important artists, including Carl Andre, Serra, Baselitz, Smith, and Piero Manzoni, to enter the Museum’s collection.