NEW YORK — When Gudmund Vigtel was named director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 1963, civic leaders asked him to do more than create a better museum to reflect the city’s rising cultural ambitions. They wanted a living monument to the more than 100 Atlanta art patrons and their family members who had died the year before in a plane crash.

The group, members of the Atlanta Arts Association, had been on a museum-sponsored tour of Europe when, on June 3, 1962, a chartered Air France jetliner crashed on takeoff from Orly Airport in Paris.