The Yale Journal of Criticism

As I thought about thirty-five years of teaching at Yale and considered what I might say to you briefly this evening, I found myself remembering my own teachers. I would like to say a few words about them. When I was an undergraduate English major at Lafayette College, I thought I would probably go into some aspect of journalism. One year I went to summer school at the University of Wisconsin, and a friend took me to hear some art history lectures by James Watrous. Sitting in the front row, as the colors of impressionist and post-impressionist painting washed over me, I had what Bryan Wolf calls an epiphany. Back at Lafayette, the only art history then offered was a single one-term course taught by the Latin professor, Johannes Gaertner, an inspirational but idiosyncratic undergraduate teacher. One day when we came into class Professor Gaertner, usually formal and dapper, was seated at his desk, staring straight ahead, with a white handkerchief over his head and a stack of books in front of him. When we were all seated, he suddenly stood up, swept all of the books off of the desk, threw a knife into the floor that quivered next to the books, and said, “Gentlemen, this is Dada!” I loved art history.

But still being uncertain as a Senior about what I was going to do after college, I asked several of my professors who knew me pretty well for advice. They said, “Well, you have discovered that you love art and you like to live well, so you should be an art dealer.” That sounded good to me, so I asked them “how do I do that?” They said, “you go to Harvard and study at the Fogg Art Museum.”

So I did; it was obviously a lot easier to get into Harvard in those days. The Fogg at that time was a center for German formalism, led by Jacob Rosenberg and Wilhelm Koehler, refugees from Nazism like Gaertner. From Rosenberg I learned systematic formal analysis, which became the basis of the methodology with which my students are all too familiar. From Koehler I learned the value of close analysis; he would often give a two-hour seminar using one slide. For my term paper on variant states of Rembrandt’s etching, The Three Crosses, he told me not to look at a single book—only the etchings, and that object-oriented approach has been fundamental to my teaching, although I do encourage my students to read books.

When I went on to try my hand at art dealing in New York, I found out two things: 1) I was no good at it and 2) I discovered American art—something I had not heard about at Harvard. Thanks to a fellowship I was able to study American art at Winterthur where I learned some important things from teachers very different from those I had at Harvard, especially from Anthony Garvan, son of the Garvan Collection Garvans. Tony had studied at Yale and been influenced by young [End Page 9] George Kubler. He was convinced that works of art, in addition to being subjects for traditional formal and iconographic analysis, were also cultural documents. Moreover, he was experimenting with one method that became very important for me in my later work on Copley—the use of the computer for statistical analysis—which he was using in a study of early American church silver.

After I returned to Harvard to complete my Ph.D., I was greatly influenced by John Coolidge, Director of the Fogg, from whom I took a Museum course and whose assistant I was for two years. At that point I thought I would go into museum work, and my first two summer jobs were directing small museums—in Newburyport, Massachusetts and York, Maine. When I was finishing up at Harvard, John Coolidge asked me where, as an Americanist, I would go next. I said I didn’t know. He asked, where is the best place? I said Yale—it has the best collections. He said, well, Sumner Crosby from Yale...