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nts and birds do it. So do dogs, various rodents, some species of crabs, and so does homo sapiens. What all these creatures share is an impulse to gather and put aside material
things that are not essential to their survival. Studies have confirmed that
among humans this impulse may be hereditary and that a child often
exhibits the instinctive actions of a collector from its earliest years. It
clings to bits of material, dolls and lead soldiers, writes Maurice Rheims,
once a leading French auctioneer but also an art theorist, objects are its
playthings, offering security as the only tangible matter in its universe.
As a childs taste develops, he goes on, so does its spirit of competition as
it learns to discern the quality of material objects. This growing aptitude
is the childs first occasion of measuring up to adults. The collecting
instinct can also nurture rebellious rejection, sibling acrimony, and scarring memories that endure for a lifetime (as in the loss of a childhood
sled called Rosebud in Orson Welless Citizen Kane, a film inspired by
the career of William Randolph Hearst, himself an insatiable collector).
Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, the deeper roots of the collecting instinct and its obsessive manifestations still elude comprehensive analysis and explanation. Sigmund Freud, a collector of antiquities,
traced the compulsion to unresolved conflicts related to toilet training;
his colleague/rival Carl Gustav Jung stressed its link to the collective unconscious. Hence it is the more regrettable that Dr. Arthur M. Sackler,
whose collecting career we now examine, did not reflect analytically on
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the sources of his own collecting instinct. Not only was he a psychiatrist
himself, but so were his brothers Mortimer and Raymond. Moreover, in
foraging for Chinese art treasures, Arthur Sackler teamed up with Dr.
Paul Singer, a Hungarian-born, Vienna-bred psychiatrist, and also a selftaught connoisseur of Oriental art. The Sackler and Singer collections
today form the core of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, which is twinned
with the Freer Gallery of Art on the National Mall in Washingtona
conspicuous tribute to two licensed explorers of the subconscious.
Indeed, Dr. Sacklers career established an important subsidiary
variant to the collecting instinct. Not only can the proud possessor gain
personal satisfaction in perusing and displaying his precious hoard, but
its existence can serve as leverage for obtaining cost-saving storage arrangementsand through the contacts it encourages, lead to brokering
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retroactive tax deductions in deals with major museums. Finally and not
least, through dexterous financial donations to universities and libraries, as well as museums, the collector can give his family name global
resonance.
All this Dr. Sackler achieved; he himself is immortalized on the
National Mall, while there is also (among others) the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art at Harvards Fogg Museum; the Princeton Art Museum Sackler Gallery of Asian Art; the Sackler School of Medicine in Tel
Aviv; the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Beijing
University; the Arthur M. Sackler Science Center at Clark University in
Worcester, Massachusetts; and, at the Metropolitan Museum, not just
the Sackler Gallery of Asian Art but also a supersize Sackler Wing enclosing the Egyptian Temple of Dendur, with its adjoining pool, which he
and his two brothers helped underwrite.
Still, Arthur M. Sackler was more than a vanity-obsessed self-
promoter. Granted, as a collector of artworks, his enthusiasm exceeded
his discernment. Princetons Wen Fong, while serving as a consultant to
the Metropolitan Museum, expressed a common complaint in a 1966 letter to Berkeleys James Cahill. He termed Sackler difficult to manage and
excessively ambitious, adding that he failed to spend sufficient time on research. Yet Sackler himself was aware of his deficiencies, which is why he
preferred to buy in bulk. I collect as a biologist, he once explained. To
really understand a civilization, a society, you must have a large enough
corpus of data. You cant know twentieth-century art by looking only at
Picassos and Henry Moores.
Creditably, Sackler acknowledged the superior learning of other collectors, to the extent of generously subsidizing the purchases of Dr. Paul
Singer, whom he first met at an auction in 1957. His fellow psychiatrist
was a micro rather than a macro buyer, a self-taught connoisseur who
targeted smaller, eccentric objects passed over by others, which he then
squirreled away in his cramped two-bedroom apartment in Summit,
New Jersey. Sackler conditioned his subsidy on the understanding that
the Singer trove would end up in a Sackler-named institution. And following Singers death in 1997, more than six thousand objects valued at
$60 million did pass to the Sackler Gallery, more than doubling the size
of its then-existing collection. Much of the added hoard consisted of archaeological objects whose interest and rarity were confirmed after careful scrutiny, sustaining their donors judgment. Why did Singer collect?
When I see something I like, I feel a visceral excitement, he explained to
Lee Rosenbaum, author of The Complete Guide to Collecting Art. In fact,
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Dr. Paul Singer in his object-crammed New Jersey apartment. As Sacklers collecting
partner, he donated more than 6,000 pieces to the Sackler Gallery.
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the Sackler Gallery on the same patch along the National Mallunderground, to respect building restrictionsthe Freer would have remained a static academic establishment. Instead, in December 2002, a
gala celebration in Washington marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of
the Sackler, presided over by the donors British-born widow, Dame Jillian Sackler. Its director, Julian Raby, had this to say about the unusual
institutional marriage: You have two very different buildings with very
different characters. One is almost a temple of calm: the Sackler needs
to be much more lively, innovative, risky. What I want is a contrast, as
opposed to some undifferentiated style. One million dollars was raised
at the gala, and the twinned museums may yet become, in Melikians
phrase, the Western worlds capital of Asian art integrated into [a] living
culture.
All of which leads to three unaddressed questions: How did
Dr. Arthur M. Sackler acquire the wealth essential to accumulating his
collection? Why did he turn to the elusive arts of China, and for what
purpose? And are American taxpayers getting fair value from federal support of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Art?
As to the first question, Arthur Sackler, like his younger brothers
Mortimer and Raymond, benefited generously from, and contributed to,
the dramatic surge in American spending on health care owing to new
discoveries, an aging population, public and private health plans, and
saturation advertising, especially on television. It is commonly reckoned
that America, by a huge margin, leads the world in both per capita and
overall expenditure on health care. Additionally, beginning in the 1960s,
pharmaceuticals were seen as effective medication for depression and
other mental disorders. As investors in the health care industry, the Sackler brothers rode the crest of both the overall and the secondary surge,
and in Arthurs case, a combative spirit helped propel their rise.
All three Sackler boys were born in Brooklyn, New York, where their
father, Isaac, had migrated from what is now Ukraine; their mother, Sophie, was born in Poland. Isaac managed a grocery store. Arthur Sackler financed his medical studies at New York University by working at
a pharmaceutical advertising agency, later becoming its proprietor. His
brothers independently followed his career path.
Sackler by then had honed his bargaining and promotional skills
through years of practice in the pharmaceutical trade. He published journals and financed research, and in 1952, when all three were working at
Creedmoor, a state psychiatric hospital, the brothers together acquired
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with barbed and angry criticism from Sackler, who was not happy with
the presentation and use of the costly Sackler Wing, and he had other
grievances. These were itemized by Michael Gross in a gossipy study of
the Metropolitan, Rogues Gallery (2009). According to the author, Sackler offered a litany of complaints to Tom Hoving. He believed that Ashton Hawkins, then the museums legal counselor, had kept him off the
Metropolitans board, and he was furious over the way the museum was
using the sacred Dendur enclosure for parties, calling a recent private
dinner for the fashion designer Valentino disgusting; and he thought
a photo of Montebello in a fashion magazine denigrated the museum.
In 1982, Arthur Sackler announced that he was giving $4 million
and the best of his collection to the Smithsonian Institution, which in
turn agreed to create the Sackler Gallery of Art on the National Mall.
In the end, as earlier noted, the nation indeed benefited, and the Freer/
Sackler are today priority destinations for tourists and area residents alike
(admission gratis).
And what possessed Dr. Arthur Sackler? As the French aphorist La
Bruyre said of collecting, It is not a pastime but a passion, and often
so violent that it is inferior to love and ambition only in the pettiness of
its aims. Or adds the British connoisseur Kenneth Clark: Why do men
and women collect? As well as ask why they fall in love: the reasons are irrational, the motives as mixed. In the end, however elusive the source of
these out-of-body affairs, museums all over the world are filled with their
progeny. Who or what has the superior moral claim to their possession is
a matter we discuss in our epilogue.
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