Paul Joseph Sachs (November 24, 1878 – February 17, 1965) served as Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard between 1927 to 1948, and as Associate Director of the Fogg Art Museum between 1909 and 1945.

Sachs began lecturing in art history from 1916 to 1917 at Wellesley College where he had been appointed "Lecturer in Art." He was made an assistant professor in the Fine Arts department at Harvard in 1917.

Between 1921 and 1948, Sachs taught a year-long graduate class at the Fogg titled "Fine Arts 15a: Museum Work and Museum Problems." According to Andrew McClellan, co-author of "The Art of Curating" and an art history professor at Tufts University, this course “decisively shaped the development, character, and ethos of the American art museum.” The course trained curators and museum directors in a systematic approach that encouraged students to understand the inner workings of museum work, from connoisseurship to operating the heating system. This hadn’t been attempted before, and Sachs taught 338 students, many of who staffed over 100 American museums and 70 universities.¹

Some of the big names that emerged from his course were Alfred Barr (first director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art), H. W. Janson (who wrote the seminal History of Art textbook still used today), and Perry Rathbone (director of the St. Louis Art Museum and then the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

In 1929, Sachs became one of seven founding members of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) and gave it its first drawing, a George Grosz portrait of the artist's mother.

During World War II, Sachs, along with disciple George L. Stout, helped develop plans to safeguard American works of art. This helped set in motion the task force (later known as the Monuments Men) of American military officers who rescued European art and architecture during the war. In 1945, Sachs retired from Fogg, while he remained on the teaching faculty of Harvard until 1948 when he was named a professor emeritus.