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.”
Piero Dorazio 1927–2005
Born in Rome the youngest of six children, painter Piero Dorazio was a pivotal force in bringing abstraction to Italy. An ardent believer in the power of abstract art as a social force, Dorazio made canvases with thick bands of color and cross-hatched lines, remaining consistent in this style for his entire career. As Dorazio himself wrote in his 1955 book The Fantasy of Art in Modern Life, he believed that “Abstract art could change the world…That just as science and technology were destroying the barriers between different cultures, so the new 'universal style' would lead to a 'universal civilisation'.”
As a child, Dorazio drew the natural world around him and received an eclectic education at the Julius Caesar lyceum, where subjects included entomology and monument restoration. World War II forced Dorazio’s family to flee to Abruzzo in 1943, but he returned to Rome after the war where he began to study architecture and make the acquaintance of artists including Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Renato Guttuso. In 1947, Dorazio was awarded a prize from the French government that allowed him to study at the École des Beaux-Arts of Paris. That same year, he became a founding member of Forma 1, a group that promoted abstraction as a revolutionary and necessary movement. Along with fellow Forma 1 co-founders Mino Perilli and Mino Guerrini, in 1950 Dorazio founded L’Age d’Or, bookstore and gallery space dedicated to the abstract avant-garde.
Dorazio traveled to the U.S. for the first time in 1953, when he was invited by Harvard University to teach a summer course. Remaining in the U.S. for a year, Dorazio met many of the era’s most significant artists, including Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, and Jackson Pollock, whose action painting techniques influenced Dorazio to an extent. Dorazio took a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in the early 1960s, working one semester every year and dividing his time between the U.S. and Italy for nearly a decade. In 1970, he permanently returned to his native Italy, where he lived until his passing in 2005. Today, his works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.
8: 09: 32
An Architectural Vision: A California Collection
10:00 am pt
