I'm not an intellectual. I like to touch. It's my hands that make my head work.
César
As consummate patrons of the arts, Acey and Bill Wolgin did not just live with the art that they collected—they lived alongside the artists who made it. Through their generous support of both individual artists as well as institutions they cherished, the Wolgins became widely celebrated collectors known for their friendships with artists—including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Arman, and Robert Rauschenberg—that were sustained, not least, by legendary parties thrown at their Philadelphia apartment.
Bill Wolgin, who practiced as a urologist, met Acey through her brother with whom he attended medical school. The pair married and made strong roots in Philadelphia—indeed, the Wolgins may be credited for having a significant role in elevating the City of Brotherly Love to the cultural destination that it is today. In the 1960s, Acey was a founding member of the Arts Council at the Young Women’s Hebrew Association, which helped spark the city’s contemporary art scene. In 1974, Acey became one of the first women elected to the board of the Philadelphia Art Museum, where she served as a trustee and trustee emeritus for the rest of her life. When Robert Indiana’s LOVE stamp was released at that museum, Acey’s birthday party doubled as the event after-party. Among the attendees was the artist Arman, who absconded with a piece of the LOVE stamp-themed cake in order to seal it in resin.
The Wolgins would later relocate to Boca Raton, where they became actively involved in the Boca Raton Museum of Art and eventually funded the Wolgin Education Center. After returning to Philadelphia, Bill Wolgin would become involved in the Woodmere Art Museum as a trustee, helping to guide the institution’s expansion. Works from the Wolgin Collection are now held in all three of the institutions where they became involved, including Yves Klein’s Portrait Relief I: Arman at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fletcher Benton’s Donut with Balls and Half Moon at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, and a group of large-scale sculptures by Sam Maitin at the Woodmere Art Museum.
Surrounded by his parents’ collection from a young age, Richard Wolgin recalls meeting many of the artists whose works he knew intimately—especially memorable was the flaming red hair of Jeanne-Claude when she and Christo dropped in one weekend. (When they weren’t celebrating together, the Wolgins kept correspondences with many of their artist-friends, who sent postcards and, sometimes, drawings.) As kids, Richard and his sister would, naturally, delight in playing with one of Harry Bertoia’s sound sculptures. When Richard was twelve years old, Acey gave him his first work: Roy Lichtenstein’s CRAK!, which he affixed to his bedroom wall with thumb tacks—inadvertently bringing the work back into the realm of mass media and pop cultural detritus that so inspired Lichtenstein.
The works featured in The Acey and Bill Wolgin Collection represent a life lived through, and for, art—“It’s not just buying something to hang on the wall,” says Richard, “it’s a piece of their lives, that are now part of our lives.”
César (César Baldaccini) 1921–1998
César was born César Baldaccini, in Marseilles, France, in 1921. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Marseilles from 1935 to 1939 and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1943 to 1948. In a career lasting nearly five-decades César had countless gallery exhibitions and major museum retrospectives, including one as part of the Venice Biennale in 1995 and another at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1997. César is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea, and numerous other public and private collections. César died in Paris in 1998.
Spending his entire career in Paris, César was among the most prolific of European artists that did not adopt New York as their post-war home. A maverick of materials, César pioneered sculptural applications for scrap-metal, car bodies, plastics, and later molten crystal. A member of the artist collective Nouveau Réalisme, the artist was a central fixture in a group founded on the principle desire to relink art and life in the burgeoning age of mass-production. His earliest sculptures from the early 1950s were fashioned from welded bits of scrap-metal, and quickly developed a following for their interpretive, brutalist depictions of insects, animals, nudes and other biology. In the ‘60s, and for the remainder of his career, the artist began utilizing a compressor to crush automobiles into dense packet-like rectangles, tactics for which he received great praise. César found his work to be contrary to his classical education and instead related it to the world of factory labor and reclaimed materials. In the mid-60s César adopted plastics, making figural molds, and later pouring them with polyurethane which would expand and solidify. A fixture of latter twentieth century art practices, César used the ready-made as a springboard into unknown realms of sculptural investigation through the properties of materials and their yet-unknown uses.
Auction Results César (César Baldaccini)
