S. Lane Faison Jr., Art Historian And Professor, 98
DGH
S. Lane Faison Jr., an art historian who cut his teeth cataloging
Hitler's collection of plundered paintings, then, as a Williams
College professor, inspired students who went on to head many of
America's leading art institutions, died on Saturday, November 11,
2006, at his home in Williamstown, Massachusetts, at the age of 98.
Morton Owen Schapiro, the president of Williams, who announced the
death, said his "legacy will forever be spread far and wide through
the countless students he turned on to art."
Mr. Faison's achievement was taking young men at what was then an
all-male school and diverting them from careers as doctors and bank
executives by turning them into art history majors. A typical disciple
was Glenn D. Lowry, a pre-med student in the early 1970's whose main
interest was skiing but who tagged along on an impromptu tour Mr.
Faison happened to give of Williams's highly respected art museum.
"Off we galloped," Mr. Lowry said. "We spent hours there, and I
was transformed."
Mr. Lowry is now director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Others who studied with Mr. Faison and his renowned colleagues Whitney
S. Stoddard and William H. Pierson include Earl A. Powell III, director
of the National Gallery of Art, Thomas Krens, director of the
Guggenheim Foundation, and Kirk T. Varnedoe, chief curator of painting
and sculpture at the Modern until his death in 2003.
Still others include Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art; James Wood, former director of the Art Institute of
Chicago; John R. Lane, director of the Dallas Museum of Art; and E.
Roger Mandle, president of the Rhode Island School of Design.
Part of Mr. Faison's winning pitch was persuading students that art
history was not incompatible with masculinity by attending their
athletic contests and fraternity parties. A larger part was nudging
them to see art differently, sometimes by holding a work upside down or
sideways to judge whether the composition hung together. He gave
innovative assignments like comparing the book "Tom Jones" with a
Hogarth painting.
"There was something about those wonderful courses that Lane Faison
and the others taught that just wouldn't let go of me," Mr. Powell
said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004.
Some of Mr. Faison's own art education came from being assigned to
sift through the thousands of pillaged artworks Hitler had stored in a
salt mine until he finished building a museum to be named after himself
in Linz, Austria. (It wasn't completed.) Mr. Faison's wry humor
could not help cropping up in the top-secret report he completed in
December 1945. (Only 58 copies were printed.)
"Like many a small-town boy made good, Adolph Hitler wanted the home
folks to bask in his success," he wrote. "Linz was the center of
the region graced by the accident of Der Führer's birth. Here he
attended school and passed his tender years. It was natural, therefore,
that Linz should figure prominently in his post-victory plans."
Samson Lane Faison Jr. was born in Washington on Nov. 16, 1907. His
father was an Army general and he grew up in many places. He fell in
love with art when a high school teacher took him to see the Chartres
Cathedral. "I haven't been the same since," he often said.
He graduated from Williams, where he studied with Karl Weston, the art
department chairman who spawned an earlier generation of art-world
luminaries. He earned an M.A. from Harvard and an M.F.A. from Princeton
and taught for several years at Yale before joining the Williams
faculty. He taught there from 1936 to 1976; was chairman of the art
history department from 1940 to 1969; and was director of the Williams
College Museum of Art from 1948 to 1976. He retired as the Amos
Lawrence Professor of Art.
Mr. Faison wrote essays and articles in many publications, and several
books. In an essay for The Times in 1950, he lamented that modern
buildings seldom had art as good as their architecture.
He married Virginia Gordon Weed in 1935; she died in 1997. He is
survived by his sons Gordon, George, Christopher and Samson; seven
grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
His experience as curator of Hitler's art began when he joined the
Office of Strategic Services in 1945. Part of his job was interrogating
Nazis about the plundered pieces. In 1950, he went back to Munich to
work with the State Department in returning art to its owners.
In an interview with The Worcester Telegram & Gazette in 2000, Mr.
Faison said Hitler's drive to accumulate great art grew out of his
own failed efforts at an artistic career. He could not resist a
professorial comment on Hitler's works.
"His early watercolor paintings had a certain nice quality to
them," he said.
NY Times -- DOUGLAS MARTIN
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