Anne Coffin Hanson; Yale Professor of Art History
Hyfler/Rosner
Anne Coffin Hanson, 82, Yale Professor of Art History, Dies
By ROBERTA SMITH NY Times
Anne Coffin Hanson, an art historian and curator and the
first woman to be hired as a full tenured professor at Yale,
died yesterday at her home in New Haven. She was 82.
Her death was announced by the Yale University Gallery of
Art.
Prof. Hanson was an authority on late-19th-century and
early-20th-century European art, specifically the paintings
of Édouard Manet and the multifarious Italian Futurists.
During more than two decades at Yale she also organized and
wrote catalogs for numerous exhibitions at the Yale
University Art Gallery, including "The Futurist Imagination:
Word + Image in Italian Futurist Painting, Drawing, Collage
and Free-Word Poetry" in 1983 and "Severini Futurista,
1912-1917" in 1995.
Her best-known book was "Manet and the Modern Tradition"
(Yale, 1977), which won the Charles Rufus Morey Award for
art history scholarship.
Professor Hanson's presence as a teacher, role model and
mentor inspired many students, especially women, to become
art historians and curators.
Elizabeth Easton, curator of European painting at the
Brooklyn Museum, who studied with her at Yale in the late
1970's, said yesterday in an e-mail message that her
teaching never prescribed a particular method or course of
study, but worked from her students' initiatives - "in the
way our minds worked" - to help them realize the best, most
rigorous result.
Professor Hanson initially trained as an artist. She was
born in 1921 in Larchmont, N.Y., where her father, Francis
Coffin, was an Episcopal minister. After attending Skidmore
College, she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in
painting from the University of Southern California in 1943.
In 1944 and 1945, she studied at the Arts Students League in
New York City. She earned a master's degree in painting from
the University of North Carolina in 1951.
By the late 1950's she was recently divorced, teaching art
at the University of Buffalo and supporting three small
children. She returned to graduate school, earning a Ph.D.
in art history from Bryn Mawr College in 1962 while also
teaching there. Her dissertation on the Renaissance sculptor
Jacopo della Quercia was published as a book in 1965.
Over the next several years Professor Hanson taught at
Swarthmore College, Bryn Mawr and New York University and
was a consultant at the International Study Center of the
Museum of Modern Art. In 1969 and 70 she was a visiting
lecturer at Yale and later in 1970 joined the Yale faculty
as full professor, the first woman to do so. At the time,
only two of Yale's 363 full professorships were held by
women, and they had been promoted from within their
departments.
In 1971, shortly after being hired at Yale, Professor Hanson
was the plaintiff in a suit to admit women on the Yale
faculty to Mory's, the all-male eating club. Mory's lost its
liquor license in 1972 and admitted women in 1974.
From 1974 to 1978 she was chairman of the art history
department, the first woman at Yale to become a department
chairman. In 1978 she was named John Hay Whitney Professor
of the History of Art at Yale. She retired in 1992.
Professor Hanson served as president of the College Art
Association (1972-74), was acting head of the Yale
University Art Gallery (1986-87) and a Samuel H. Kress
professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual
Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (1992-93).
She is survived by her companion, Bernard Hanson, whom she
married in 1960 but later divorced; the children of her
first marriage, a daughter, Anne Blaine Garson, of Amherst,
Mass.; and two sons, James Garson, of Houston, and Robert
Garson, of Pittsburgh; six grandchildren; and one
great-grandchild.