Sacha Kolin (9 May 1911 (Paris, France) – 14 February 1981 (New York City, United States)) was a French-born painter. She lived in Austria and other countries for several years before settling in the United States.

Life and work

Kolin was born in

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

Ukrainian Ukrainian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Ukraine * Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe * Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine * So ...

Jews Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

Julius and Malwina Kolin. She spent parts of her early life in

Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...

and

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia a ...

before her parents settled in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

. Kolin trained at Vienna's School of Arts and Crafts and the Academy of Fine Arts before moving to Paris in 1933 to study under Naoum Lvovich Aronson. She exhibited at the

Paris Salon The Salon (french: Salon), or rarely Paris Salon (French: ''Salon de Paris'' ), beginning in 1667 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Between 1748 and 1890 it was arguably the greatest annual or biennial art ...

from 1934 to 1936. Concerned with Nazi persecution of Jews in nearby Germany, Kolin's family emigrated to the United States in 1936 and settled in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. The family were well-to-do, and chose prestigious

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

residences such as Essex House and the

Esplanade An esplanade or promenade is a long, open, level area, usually next to a river or large body of water, where people may walk. The historical definition of ''esplanade'' was a large, open, level area outside fortress or city walls to provide cle ...

. Kolin soon began exhibiting her art at venues including

Rockefeller Center Rockefeller Center is a large complex consisting of 19 commerce, commercial buildings covering between 48th Street (Manhattan), 48th Street and 51st Street (Manhattan), 51st Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The 14 original Art Deco ...

and the 1940 World's Fair. In the 1970s, Kolin was an avid participant in third-party donations to museums encouraged by the

Tax Reform Act of 1969 The Tax Reform Act of 1969 () was a United States federal tax law signed by President Richard Nixon in 1969. Its largest impact was creating the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was intended to tax high-income earners who had previously avoided incur ...

. She would convince a museum

curator A curator (from la, cura, meaning "to take care") is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the parti ...

to provide a letter indicating that the museum would like to add her artwork to its collection. She would then sell a painting at a discount to a wealthy collector. The collector would donate the painting to the museum, receiving a tax deduction for the market value of the painting. After Kolin's death, several artists and collectors were prosecuted for this scam. Kolin had expensive tastes in food and fashion, and in her later life, when her artwork failed to sell consistently, she fell into debt, borrowing money to feed her pricey habits, or trading artwork for goods. She produced and distributed so much artwork in this fashion that the value of her work dropped. With the landlords of successive grand apartments, Kolin bartered artwork for rent, and with her two large dogs turned at least one dwelling into a squalid mess. Kolin was a longtime friend of artist

Ray Johnson Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson (October 16, 1927 – January 13, 1995) was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as

and an early member of his New York Correspondance School.

Art

Kolin's artwork has been exhibited at the New York World's Fair, the

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...

, the

Boston Museum of Fine Arts The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...

, and the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

among numerous other venues, and her art is in the collections of the

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds o ...

and the

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum housed within the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New York City, along the Upper East Side's Museum Mile. It is one of 19 museums that fall under the wing of the Smithsonian Inst ...

among others.Thaler, pp. 357-358 She produced abstract paintings and aeronautically-inspired, Minimalist sculpture.

Sources

Footnotes

External links

Sacha Kolin website, designed by Christian Marc Schmidt and maintained by Kolin's biographer Lisa Thaler
* ttp://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2009/03/sacha_kolin_the_big_con.html "Sacha Kolin: Lives of an Unknown Artist, by John Perreault, Artopia {{DEFAULTSORT:Kolin, Sacha 1911 births 1981 deaths Artists from Paris Austrian women painters 20th-century American women artists 20th-century Austrian women artists Austrian emigrants to the United States