Williams College Art History Graduate Program Reunion

Last 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.

About the Author

Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

Last 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.