More than thirty years ago, when I was a graduate student, a college classmate and her husband took me to meet a friend of theirs. I remember almost nothing about the evening except entering the apartment and being stunned by the sight of two walls double-hung with first-rate Egon Schiele drawings. Who was our host? Serge Sabarsky, a name that would be attached, within a few years, to a Madison Avenue gallery dedicated to Austrian and German Expressionism. There it was soon evident that the man with all the amazing Schiele drawings was as rigorous in selecting the art he offered for sale as in choosing the works he lived with. The gallery’s reputation quickly grew.

Then, in the 1970s when I was a fledgling curator at a small museum, eager to do shows more ambitious than our limited resources permitted, I found that the Sabarsky Gallery would occasionally lend works more significant than I had any right to hope for, thanks to its director’s passion for the art he exhibited and his desire to inspire that passion in others. My having been introduced to him by my classmate helped, of course, and I confess to, for several years, taking shameless advantage of the combination of Sabarsky’s generosity and my luckily enhanced credentials. As time went on, though, I concentrated more and more on shows of American modernism and although I continued to visit the gallery because of its always interesting exhibits, I saw little of its silver-haired, unfailingly