Arthur Mitchell Sackler (August 22, 1913 – May 26, 1987) was an American psychiatrist and marketer of pharmaceuticals whose fortune originated in medical advertising and trade publications. He was also an art collector. He was one of the three patriarchs of the controversial Sackler family pharmaceutical dynasty.
Sackler amassed the largest personal Chinese art collection in the world, which he donated to the Smithsonian. He provided the funds needed to build numerous art galleries and schools of medicine. Sackler's estate was estimated at 140 million.
Since his death, Sackler's reputation has been tarnished due to his company Purdue Pharma's central role in the opioid crisis. Many of the museums and galleries that Sackler donated to have distanced themselves from him and his family in the wake of the opioid crisis and the Sackler family's resulting reputational fall. On December 9, 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City officially removed the Sackler family name from galleries which had been named after them.
Early life and education
Born Abraham Sackler in Brooklyn to Isaac and Sophie () Sackler, Jewish grocers who came to New York from Ukraine and Poland before World War I, Sackler was the eldest of three sons. Sackler graduated from Erasmus Hall High School. In The New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe called him a polymath for his varied interests. He attended New York University School of Medicine and graduated with an M.D. Sackler paid his tuition by working as a copywriter in 1942 at William Douglas McAdams, an ad agency specializing in medicine, a company that he would buy in 1947 and revolutionize. He also studied sculpture at the Educational Alliance and art history classes at Cooper Union.
Psychiatry
Sackler completed his residency in psychiatry at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center. From 1949 to 1954, he was director of research at Creedmoor Institute for Psychobiological Studies. He specialized in biological psychiatry. Sackler collaborated on hundreds of papers based on neuroendocrinology, psychiatry, and experimental medicine. He was said to be the first physician to use ultrasound as a diagnostic tool. All three brothers studied in Scotland, became psychiatrists, and joined the research staff at Creedmoor. They had a friend and collaborator, director Johan H. W. Van Ophuijsen, who was described by Arthur Sackler as "Freud's favorite disciple."
In 1951, the three brothers and Van Ophuijsen published a summary of their work, which became known as the "Sackler method." Human subject research, which was stopped for the most part after World War II, did not yet have the oversight of the Nuremberg Code and later the Declaration of Helsinki and the Belmont Report. The Sacklers sought to find a substitute for what could be relatively intrusive electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). They treated with histamine persons who had schizophrenia, persons who had bipolar disorder then termed manic depression, and persons with involutional psychosis, now an unrecognized illness somewhat like depression. Patients were given injections of histamine of increasing strength for up to 24 days. The treatment caused their blood pressure to drop; when their blood pressure recovered, they were given a stronger dose, until blood pressure reached 60/0 mm Hg. Some patients received combination treatments of histamine coupled with insulin or ECT.
Art collection
Sackler and his wife Else began collecting art in the 1940s, shortly after his graduation from NYU. Initially they were attracted to contemporary artists like Marc Chagall but later also collected Renaissance majolica and Post-Impressionist and School of Paris paintings. He considered himself "more of a curator than collector" who preferred acquiring collections to individual pieces. His collection was composed of tens of thousands of works including Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern art as well as Renaissance and pre-Columbian pieces. In a speech at Stony Brook University in New York, he discussed his idea that art and science were "interlinked in the humanities".
A small Chinese table in a New York furniture dealer put Chinese art into focus for Sackler who thought, "that here was an esthetic not commonly appreciated or understood." Following the Chinese Civil War, exporters cashed out their holdings and young collectors like Sackler were fortunate to be good targets. He amassed tens of thousands of objects in his life, representing wide and varied interests—Shang dynasty oracle bones, Achaemenid vessels from Iran, and South Asian temple sculpture from the tenth to fourteenth century. Some works are of exhibition quality and some are more appropriate for studies.