Reminiscences of My Remaking

A reunion of the Williams College art-history graduate program, which has created professors, museum directors, curators — and at least one art critic

L ast weekend was the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Williams College graduate program in art history, with a reunion of all alumni in Williamstown in bucolic northwestern Massachusetts. I owe my career and the trajectory of my life after, say, 1990 to Williams, which runs the program in conjunction with the Clark Art Institute.

I never took an art-history course at Wesleyan, where I went to college. I’d always been a museumgoer and loved travel, but the art-history majors frightened me, country soul as I was, since they wore black and smoked and were mostly from New York and L.A. Pallid, undernourished, jargon-rich, and la-di-da, they enchanted not, and neither did the subject. I was bound for law school and politics. Serious and no-nonsense.

Funny how things turn out. I did law school, practiced in a big firm, and landed in the state capitol in Hartford managing the Republican side of the legislature’s staff. Locally, I chaired the board of finance, among other things, in the town where I grew up. North Haven was, and still is, a Republican-machine town. It’s nice to win all the time, and nicer to use that power to do good things.

Very few people in that era changed careers, much less remade themselves. Political life never bored me. I loved the excitement, and even the sleaze, or insalubrious camaraderie, had its charms. I did a lot for my town. After a few years, though, it seemed like a dead end and ungratifying. In the mid ’80s, I started taking art-history courses at night, after work, for what I called “diversification.” I learned I loved it.

In 1990, my boss, the senate minority leader, decided he wasn’t going to run again. Lowell Weicker was running for governor on, ego of egos, his own ticket, upheaving Connecticut’s conniving, thieving double machine. I’d gotten everything I could from politics. I was offered a job in the White House working for Mitch Daniels, but I didn’t want to go to Washington. It seemed like a good time to do something drastically different. I thought I’d try art history. After years in the political pressure cooker, school looked like both heaven and a fresh start. In politics, as in much else, best to leave on top. I didn’t want “one day a peacock, the next a feather duster” as my epitaph.

I applied to only one place — the Williams program — because it was a two-year degree. If I didn’t like it, not the end of the world. It didn’t demand the commitment of a Ph.D. program, and I didn’t have the credentials for one. My parents owned a farm in Stamford in Vermont, very close to Williams, so I knew the area. Williams is in a rural valley by the Berkshire mountains. “Bucolic” comes from the Greek word for “oxen.” I’ve never seen an ox in Williamstown, but cows are aplenty. The Williams graduate program operated from the Clark, where a fully populated cow pasture abutted its land.

As I drove from Connecticut for my interview at Williams, doubts grew like feeding maggots. I was too old for this. It was too risky. They’d never take me in. I got off the highway in Holyoke to cancel the interview. Every pay phone I found had been vandalized. That was Holyoke. I’m sure by now they’ve all been stolen and sold as scrap to fund the drug trade. After a few minutes, I collected myself. “Oh, do it,” I thought. If Williams rejected me, at least I tried.

When I got to the Clark, I met Sam Edgerton, the director of the program and a Williams professor. After shaking hands, he said, “Oh, we’ve already decided to accept you, with a full scholarship. . . . I just wanted to make sure you weren’t crazy.” I wasn’t crazy. Rather, I was about to do this crazy thing. I said, “I do.”

Sam Edgerton was a distinguished, idiosyncratic scholar. He was famous for his work on Giotto and geometry. A Renaissance man in specialty but also in attitude, he was a scholar of Mayan art, too. He also, God bless him, took risks on people. I was a risk, not a hazard, but an untested, expensive risk.

The Williams program suited me. Then, it filled a niche as the only terminal M.A. in art history in the country. Terminal not in the sense that you left feet-first but “terminal” in providing high-octane art-history study for people who weren’t sure they wanted a Ph.D. or were sure they didn’t. Lots of Williams M.A.s went directly into museum work. The program was perfect for people from untraditional backgrounds, too. Then and, I think, now, the program served people coming directly from college but also people who’d done something else, for three, five, or, like me, ten years.

Then, and I know this is still the case, the Williams program is nearly unique in its emphasis on connoisseurship. This is part of the Williams art philosophy, which is driven by close looking at art and by aesthetics, and Williams undergraduates get this training, too. This is the foundation for what’s called the Williams Mafia. The college and the graduate program are, together, a font of museum directors and curators. I think a natural empathy for art’s got to be in the soul to be a good art historian. Some people don’t have this. For those who do, Williams hones and cultivates it.

There’s an army of art historians, mostly young and trendy, who don’t love art for art’s sake.  They’re didacts who use art for illustration, nearly always to push a grudge or a grievance. Williams isn’t a place for them. The study of art is about art, first and foremost. Every other direction needs to spring from the art in all its autonomy and splendor.

This is where the Clark looms large. Williams M.A. students are intimately and intricately bound to the Clark. Their carrels are in the Clark’s superb library, and these digs are the most contemplative in the annals of scholarship. They promote monkish study but are far cushier, and, unlike the days of the monks of yore, there’s no Black Death. The Clark’s collection — paintings, prints, drawings, photography, sculpture, porcelain, and silver — figures in most classes. It’s gloved-hands-on teaching and learning. Dürer prints, Degas pastels, Lamerie silver, and, of course, Renoir and Sargent paintings are staples in study. I spent lots of time in the print room at the Clark but also at the Williams College museum, learning from the collections.

In my era, Mass MoCA hadn’t opened but was in the works. Today, it’s thriving and integral to the Williams program. I focused on Old Masters, Impressionism, and pre-1900 American art, but today most art-history students want contemporary art. The Williams program is very good at teaching these students a simple reality: All living artists, unless they’re nihilists, look at the Old Masters.

The M.A. program is small, with ten or so students in each class. The college’s art department is small. Professors there and curators at the Clark, the Williams museum, and MoCA are among the best in the country. This all means individual attention. Standards are very, very high. In the cause of candor, in my era there was some degree of eccentricity, and some loosey-goosey methodology. I think there were more wild-card students. I was one but was intense and focused and anything but offbeat. In the distant past, the offbeat cohort might have been bigger, but the program started in the early ’70s. Different zeitgeist, different students.

This mix is among the secret sauces making the Williams program unique. First of all, alumni cherish their memories, and the Clark, Williams, and the ambiance of art study there wear well. The reunion last weekend was the program’s first, so graduates older than 50 gathered. There was a gala on Saturday night. I’ve been to a million galas but never one with so much warm, festive feeling. Williams, in part because it’s in the country, tends not to produce snoots, but something else is at work. I think alumni of the Williams program look at their two years there as among the best in their lives.

The Williams program sends its graduates to Ph.D. programs, directly to museum work, and, for some, out into the world to be scintillating in whatever they do. Some go to law school or business school — big mistake — and, of course, some get married and raise a family at home. When I was a curator at the Clark, I taught at Williams and knew all the graduate students. They’ve all done great things. Art history and classics are the very best foundations for leading a good life since they’re rooted in beauty, wisdom, history, and refinement. Both are antidotes to a world filled with brutes and bores.

Williams, which is raising money to endow a scholarship fund for its M.A. students, is the only elite liberal arts college with an M.A. art-history program. In ancient times — my era — that made the program an outlier at Williams Central. Now, though, after 50 years, it’s integral and one golden thread running through the Williams identity. I think the reunion is a measure of this. The Williams M.A. program remains unique, even as art-history graduate programs have proliferated. It’s a good cause to support.

After a month or so at the Williams program in 1990, my former secretary at the capitol in Hartford called me in a panic. The factionalized staff and Republican senators there were in meltdown mode, with knives out, circular firing squads forming, and heavy artillery on the way. My rule had been despotic but calming. I was a bottom-line person and held the drunks and crooks in check, even if they were legislators, but did allow for the imperfectability of mankind. Burkean with a bludgeon.

I was needed back to soothe. I drove down for the day and refereed among the ignoble and spitty. The mere sight of me scared people not out of their wits but into their best behavior. After all, I might decide to come back to Hartford for good. No one, after all, ever left a nice capitol job for art history.

That night, back in Williamstown, I went for a swim in the college pool. As I floated in the temperate water, my water wings on since I actually can’t swim, I thought about my day, coming to Williams, and how happy I was with my classes. I’d made the best decision in my life.

One of the beauties of the Williams program, and the college art department, is the centrality of mentorship. The Williams faculty and the Clark curators are practiced, passionate mentors. This works for each student in a different way, and Williams doesn’t have the sole concession on mentorship. Art-history study in the graduate program is very serious, but I can’t help thinking that kindness and concern play a larger role at Williams than in lots of other places. There’s something called the Williams Way, and it’s a big topic I won’t probe, but kindness and concern are in the blood.

After a year at Williams. I decided to stick with art history. I did very well in the program. When I applied for my Ph.D., Sam Edgerton, Christine Kondoleon, who taught medieval art and chaired the art department, and Rafael Fernandez, the Clark print curator, made it a cause to place me. So did Chuck Parkhurst, who taught me Italian Renaissance art as a visiting professor. Chuck had been the deputy director of the National Gallery. They understood the value of advocacy and were extraordinary networkers. They knew everyone. I know they went to bat for me at Yale. After Yale, I went back to the Clark as a curator.

I haven’t written a lot about art-history pedagogy or about graduate programs. On graduate study, Ph.D. programs at places such as Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and the Institute of Fine Arts possessed a tiny, discernible prejudice against Williams M.A. people for two reasons. First, they liked training their students from scratch. Second, these programs focused on students who wanted to be professors, not curators or other museum professionals, and the Williams program had a slight orientation toward museum work. Some Williams alums were accepted into the Ph.D. programs, but not many.

Starting in the ’90s, the big university departments changed their collective tune. They discovered curators weren’t second-class citizens. They also discovered that Williams M.A.s were exceptionally well trained, mature, and in all ways up to snuff. Now, Williams M.A.s are prized in Ph.D. programs. Many are now professors and accomplished scholars.

At the reunion dinner, I sat with the Williams M.A. class of ’15, not by design but chance, since that’s where we found seats. It was good to get the youth perspective. I can supply the warhorse perspective by the tankerful. Two were curators, one at Mass MoCA and one at the Whitney. Two were in Ph.D. programs, one at Princeton and one at Johns Hopkins. Their projects were fascinating, if exotic. I was delighted to see they’re doing well. They loved their years at Williams. Meeting them made me even prouder of my own.