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www.privateairny.com Private Air New York | Fall 2015 32 ART A lice Sachs Zimet has a knack for getting in early. Not only did she begin assembling her own prized collection when the photography market was nascent, she also demonstrated her proclivity for pioneering by creating the first sponsorship program in a commercial bank at e Chase Manhattan Bank, where she was Director of Cultural Affairs. Of course, true innovation is best identified in hindsight. "You don't know it at the time – I think you are just living in that moment. It's only when you can go back and take a look at it with a little distance," Zimet reflects. Today, Zimet is immersed in the photography world, chairing the Photograph Collections Committee at the Harvard Art Museums, serving on the Acquisitions Committee at the International Center of Photography and on the board of the Magnum Foundation, as well as teaching at New York University. In addition she runs her own arts consulting group, Arts + Business Partners. Art was a presence in Zimet's life from birth, an event which was celebrated by her parents – in the same way her siblings' births were – by buying art. A series of 13 Bonnard lithographs, titled Quelques aspects de la vie de Paris, marked Zimet's arrival and are now counted in her own collection. However, the family ties to the art world go back beyond her art-collecting parents to her great uncle Paul Sachs, who, much like Zimet herself, had a penchant for innovation. Sachs, the Associate Director at the Fogg Art Museum, was a pioneering figure in museology, developing one of the first museum studies courses at Harvard. While her sisters headed to Harvard, Zimet eschewed family tradition to pursue an art history education in New York. After a few twists and turns of life, including a stint at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Zimet – armed with a top-tier art education – found herself in a rather unexpected place: e Chase Manhattan Bank. Here she plugged away in the Rockefeller-run bank's philanthropy office, convincing the conservative corporate management to pledge money to everything from the arts to the AIDS crisis. After seven or so years, she moved into the role of Cultural Affairs Director, establishing the bank's first corporate sponsorship scheme. ough now de rigueur, this type of program was practically unheard of in commercial banks at the time. Zimet's passion for photography has its roots in a stretch at the International Center for Photography, where she interned during its opening year. "It influenced me tremendously," she says. "But I wasn't ready to collect. I didn't know how to collect." at chapter was still to come. Her first acquisition came in the mid-1980s, round about the same time as she began her marketing role in the bank. A time when the photography market, "Was just in its early stages and you could actually get your arms around it." While attending an exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, Zimet found what would be her first photography purchase: Andrew Bush's Columbines. Only she couldn't stop at one. Already demonstrating that common collector's affliction – an insatiable appetite for art – Zimet purchased a second piece by Bush, Studio Kitchen, to pair with it. "I committed to buy it, but I couldn't just have one. So I bought two pieces because I thought it needed a partner. In retrospect, I realize that was the seed of a manic collector. You just can't have one." In the years that have followed, Zimet has amassed more than 300 works with 100 or so artists represented. Among the predominantly black- and-white collection are numerous portraits of visual artists. For instance, Cecil Beaton's shot of David Hockney with his then-lover Henry Geldzahler (whom Zimet happened to intern under when he was the Metropolitan Museum of Art's first 20th-century curator), and Robert Capa's image of Pablo Picasso shading Françoise Gilot from the sunshine with a huge umbrella. Artists' studios, such as Cezanne's and Picasso's by Bill Brandt and Brassai respectively, feature as do portraits of performance artists, including one of George Platt Lynes's famous images of the New York City Ballet. From exclusively artist's portraits, Zimet branched out, allowing the collection to develop along with her eye. "I kept the portraits but it became not artists but people living their lives." She describes them as, "Sometimes tough, but always about humanity… Portraits that are not easy-listening. Portraits of people living their lives. Where maybe you see a little bit more into it, but it's not somebody sitting there smiling." A trio of portraits by Zanele Muholi, a South African photographer and visual activist documenting the black lesbian community in post-apartheid South Africa, are among the most recent acquisitions. While building her personal collection in the 1980s and 1990s, Zimet was also making waves in the banking realm, where her corporate sponsorship program generated "over a billion dollars in new assets under management for the private bank and another billion dollars or so for other areas within the bank." In 1999, she

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