Charles Ray’s “Boy With Frog” (2008) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The exhibit “Embracing the Contemporary: The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Collection” runs through Sept. 5. Credit Tim Tiebout
PHILADELPHIA — After perusing “Embracing the Contemporary: The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Collection” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a big exhibition featuring works by many famous artists of the last 50 years, including Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter — a visitor might wonder, “What about the great female artists?”
The Philadelphia collectors Keith L. and Katherine Sachs have been avidly acquiring works of contemporary art since the early 1980s. Recently they promised to give 97 works, more than half their collection — to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the present show offers an extensive sample of their munificence.
Curiously, of the 51 artists in the show, only three works are by women: Louise Bourgeois’s small sculpture of an anthropomorphic building (1947-49); Kiki Smith’s, life-size statue of a young girl (2004-05); and Yael Bartana’s, 2013 video called “Inferno.” (Nine female artists, in total, are represented in the gifts).
Demographics aside, there’s not a single piece in the collection that the museum shouldn’t be grateful to own when the time comes. Organized by Carlos Basualdo, whose official title is the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, it’s a beautifully installed show, with several rooms devoted to individual artists.
One space features five elegant abstractions by Brice Marden dating from 1972 to 2010. In an adjoining room are pieces by Jasper Johns from 1982 to 2014 that recycle his familiar motifs like letters, numbers and silhouetted figures. The next room offers six works by Robert Gober, including unnervingly creepy confections like “Untitled” (1992) and a child’s Mary Jane shoe made of beeswax with human hair growing from its inner sole. Then comes a gallery full of art by Ellsworth Kelly, including geometric collages from the 1950s and large, near-Minimalist paintings, one each from 1966, 1990 and 2002.
Louise Bourgeois’s “Portrait of Jean-Louis” (1947-1949). Credit Philadelphia Museum of Art
While there are several all-white abstract paintings by Robert Ryman, the best white-on-white experience is in a room occupied centrally by Charles Ray’s “Boy With Frog” (2008), an eight-foot tall, snowy-white figure of a nude boy holding up a frog. Each of six surrounding walls is adorned by a single instance of Richard Tuttle’s series “Paper Octagonal” (1970), a piece of colorless, irregularly octagon-shaped paper pasted to the wall. The convergence of Minimalist ephemerality and neo-Classical realism creates a spectral, ecclesiastical feeling.
In galleries occupied by multiple artists you find amusing juxtapositions like Thomas Demand’s “Daily #21” (2012), a photograph of constructions made of colored-paper, this one representing a bar of soap on a sink corner, hanging next to Jeff Wall’s “Diagonal Composition” (1993), a backlit photographic transparency depicting a real bar of soap on the corner of a spectacularly filthy sink.
A nearly life-size, light-box-mounted photographic transparency by Rodney Graham called “Small Basement Camera Shop Circa 1937” (2011) represents the artist’s recreation of an old photograph of a camera store with himself as proprietor behind the desk. This sweetly humorous piece hangs next to Marcel Broodthaers’s sculpture “Chaise Lilas Avec Oeufs” (1965), a chair with its seat covered by eggshells — a joke in that you can’t sit on it. And that is next to another Jeff Wall work called “Card Players” (2006), a big, backlit transparency of three middle-age women seated at a table playing cards in a homey dining room. It’s a takeoff on Cézanne’s great paintings of card players.
Howard Hodgkin’s “Keith and Kathy Sachs” (1988-1991). Credit Philadelphia Museum of Art
An interview with the Sachses in the catalog is revealing. They describe how they made lists of artists whose works they wanted to acquire and how they set out to do so. Big-game hunters, they developed relationships with a handful of high-end dealers in New York and London, and they made friends with certain artists represented by those galleries, including Mr. Kelly and Mr. Johns, both represented by Matthew Marks. Also acquired from Marks are works by Mr. Ray, the painter Terry Winters, the team of Peter Fischli and David Weiss and the sculptor Vincent Fecteau. Other galleries supplying works by multiple artists were Marian Goodman, Pace, Sperone Westwater and David Zwirner, all among New York’s most powerful purveyors of extremely expensive art.
It’s a finely tuned and self-perpetuating system: Elite collectors, galleries and museums routinely work together to maintain the blue-chip reputations of artists they’ve invested in. The present exhibition is a perfect example of the system at work — a system, not just incidentally, that for whatever reason has been benefiting male more than female artists for a long time.
It’s also noteworthy that Mr. Sachs has been a trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1988. Of 104 works in the exhibition, 62 have been promised or given by the Sachses; 42 remain in their personal collection. While the artists’ reputations have been well established, their values can still be raised by display in a major museum and reproduction in a lavish catalog.
A spokesman for the Philadelphia Museum of Art said it was “ the Museum’s policy to show private collections only when a significant proportion of the works are gifts or promised gifts,” adding that “Keith and Kathy Sachs have made generous gifts to the Museum over the course of many years and we believe that longstanding commitment and generosity will continue in the future.”
In their interview, the Sachses talk about their collecting predilections. They explain that they lean toward formal, abstract sorts of art, avoiding Pop Art, for example. There are no Warhols in their collection. But nowhere in their interview does the dearth of female artists in their collection come up. Considering how hugely active and influential female artists have been in many different genres during the time the couple has been collecting, why does the show focus almost exclusively on white, male artists in its embrace of the contemporary?
The question lingers.
