S. Lane Faison, 1907-2006.(Notes & Comments: December 2006)(In memoriam)

We cannot mention "loss" without thinking of S. Lane Faison, the influential art critic and teacher who died last month a few days shy of his ninety-ninth birthday. As art critic for The Nation in the early 1950S and as a teacher--at Yale in the 1930s and then at Williams College from 1936-1976--Faison was an immense and beneficent presence in the life of American art. He helped track down hordes of art looted by the Nazis and, in the early 1950S, helped to organize the first retrospective of work by Jackson Pollock. As a young assistant professor at Yale, Faison team-taught courses with the French scholars Marcel Aubert and Henri Focillon in alternate semesters. They spoke mostly in French, so Faison found himself translating for the students. Focillon's classic La Vie des Formes (1934) made a deep impression on Faison. Indeed, its title--"the life of forms"--became a critical watchword, a definition of his vocation as a teacher and critic. Like Focillon, Faison always gave priority to the visual reality of the art object: to what we actually experience when looking. There is some irony in the fact that so many dubious figures from the contemporary museum world passed through Faison's tutelage at Williams--we think, for example, of Thomas Krens, who labored mightily to transform the ...