I could do whatever I wanted, whether people liked it or not.
Niki de Saint Phalle
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.”
Niki de Saint Phalle 1930–2002
Niki de Saint Phalle was born Catherine-Marie-Agnès-Brandon Fal de Saint Phalle in France in 1930 to an upper-class Franco-American family. They lost their wealth during the Great Depression and moved to the United States in 1933. Saint Phalle attended the Brearley School in New York City until she was expelled for defacing statues on the school’s campus (she painted the fig leaves on nude figures an offending red). She was later sent to the Oldfields School in Maryland and graduated in 1947. After school, she modeled for Vogue and Life magazine, married a childhood friend when she was 18 and became a mother two years later.
In 1952 Saint Phalle and her husband moved back to Paris, where he studied music and she studied theater. The following year, after a period of intensive travel throughout Europe, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized; she took up painting to help with her recovery. In 1955 the family again moved, this time to Mallorca and Saint Phalle gave birth to her second child. While in Mallorca, she was exposed to the architecture of Antonio Gaudí, who would become a major influence for the imaginative style and ambitious scale of her work.
Saint Phalle returned to Paris in the late 1950s and she and her husband separated in 1960. She quickly established a studio, met artist Jean Tinguely who she’d have a long-term artistic and romantic relationship with and became part of the Nouveau Réalisme group that included Tinguely, Christo, Yves Klein, Arman and other artists working from the inspiration of Dadaism with an iconoclastic approach to artmaking. She became part of the artistic milieu, being friendly with Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí and held her first solo exhibition in 1961. During this time, she was creating her Tirs (Shoot) paintings, which were participatory performances where she and others took turns shooting at canvases covered with plaster balloons full of paint.
In the mid-1960s she began creating her most well-known and celebrated series of works, the Nanas, which were meditations on both the exalted and disparaged position women held in society (“nanas” in French is a slang term meaning “broads”). She was inspired to make these works after a visit with Clarice Rivers, the wife of the artist Larry Rivers who was a close friend and also pregnant at the time. Saint Phalle’s Nanas are expressive, exuberant, archetypal, cartoonish, engaging, fertile and imaginative. In the 1970s she began working on a more monumental scale, creating public sculptures, sculptural environments and buildings. In 1979, the foundations were laid for the Tarot Garden in Tuscany, which featured twenty-two sculptures over 14 acres and was completed in 1998. In 1982 she finished The Empress, an imposing sculptural building that she lived and worked in for the next ten years. Throughout the 1980s she returned to her Nanas and also began making kinetic sculptures in the 1990s as homage to Tinguely after his death in 1991.
Saint Phalle’s work combined mediums in new ways, blending and dismantling hierarchies between painting, sculpture, and performance. She also brought exuberance for the female body and spirit to the forefront of her work, when many of her contemporaries were working in a stark, modernist, masculine style. She died in 2002 due to complications stemming from the toxicity of the materials she used to create her singular and visionary body of work. She was 71.
Auction Results Niki de Saint Phalle
