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 Solomon R.
Guggenheim museum into the art world equivalent of
Bloomingdales. But it would be unfair to judge Faison by his
students—or, rather, it would be unfair to judge him by the
most notorious of his students. As a corrective, consider
this passage from Karen Wilkin’s in her introduction to
Expressing Abstraction (Williams College), a collection of Faison’s writings
which appeared only days before he died. Wilkin often
accompanied Faison to art exhibitions when he came to New
York.

As we move through
the exhibition, Lane offers penetrating observations, based
equally on his long experience of looking and his direct
response to the works before him; I’m expected to add what I
can. As anyone who’s heard him lecture knows, Lane is a
splendid performer, with great anecdotes, and his intense
visual interrogation of works of art is exciting and
enlightening. But there is no escaping his often very
difficult questions. Museum visits with him are always
mind-stretching, never easy, no matter how well I know the
material, and exhilarating.

It is always sad to register the passing of a great teacher.
It is some consolation to know that, in the case of Lane
Faison, his example lives on in the work of a new generation
of critics.