The list of your service to this college over the past 70 years is of near-Biblical proportions—teacher for 40 years, department chairman for 29 years, successor to Karl Weston as director of the Williams College Museum Art for 28 years—while outside the College you served as president of the College Art Association of America and lent your knowledge of art and your detective skills to the effort to return to its rightful owners art plundered by the Nazis. You wrote a book on Manet, guides to the museums in New England and New York State, scholarly articles, and art criticism for such publications as The New York Times, Saturday Review and Tile Nation. But your career, like a work of art itself, has been much greater than the sum of its parts. You have combined wit and erudition, imagination and deep respect for the intellect of students in training generations of Williams men and women to delight in the pleasures of the eye. The effects of this teaching have been prodigious. “Lane Faison invented us,” Jack Lane has said. And this is true not only of the most influential art museum directors in the country and of all those we honor here this evening, but of all the countless Williams students in whom you’ve inspired a life-long passion for art.
Megamenu Social