S. Lane Faison

Samson Lane Faison, Jr. (November 16, 1907 – November 11, 2006) was an American art historian, professor, and director of the Williams College Museum of Art.

Biography
Faison was born in Washington D.C. to Eleanor Sowers and Samson L. Faison. His father was a West Point graduate and a general in World War I. Lane had one sibling, a younger sister named Eleanor. A boyhood trip to France that included a chance visit to Chartres Cathedral awakened a passion for art and inspired his future career. Faison later headed the art history department at Williams College from 1940 to 1969 and remained on the full-time faculty until 1976. Several of his students went on to direct major museums including Earl A. Powell III of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Glenn D. Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Thomas Krens of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

He was himself trained at Williams (class of 1929) by Karl E. Weston, who inspired an earlier generation of art scholars in the 1920s. During the 1930s, after receiving an M.A. from Harvard (1930) and an MFA from Princeton (1932), he was a very close assistant to French visiting scholars at Yale, Marcel Aubert and Henri Focillon. He translated into English the major work of Focillon, La vie des formes (The life of forms in art, New York, Wittenborn, Schultz, 1948).

In 1935 he married Virginia Weed (d. 1997), a native of Savannah and graduate of Smith College. They had four sons: Gordon Lane (b. 1937), George Weston (b. 1940), Christopher Maury (b. 1944), and Samson Lane III (b. 1947).

Mr. Faison was a Navy Reservist during World War II, attaining the rank of lieutenant commander. In 1945 he was posted to the Office of Strategic Services' Art Looting Investigation Unit. He wrote the official report (see selected publications) on Adolf Hitler's collection of stolen art. Five years later, he supervised the return of stolen art under the direction of the Department of State. In 1952, he was awarded a Chevalier of French Legion of Honour for his service.

In 2004 the following quote appeared in the New York Times: ''I always stressed two things. One has to do with the connection of art to history, with the fact that every work of art was done somewhere and some when, and that this is very important to understand. The other side has to do with the medium of art, which is quite different from the subject. What we're talking about is color and shape. You'd be surprised at the number of people who come to Williams, and I think this is generally true of American students, with absolutely no idea of what the word 'shape' means or what you can do with it and why it's important. They have easily mastered the medium of language, but many of them know very little about the medium of art.''

S. Lane Faison, Jr. died on November 11, 2006 in Williamstown, Massachusetts five days shy of his 99th birthday.

Selected publications

 * Faison, S. L., & United States. (1945). Hermann Voss. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army, Office of Strategic Services, Art Looting Investigation Unit.


 * Faison, S. L., & United States. (1945). Linz: Hitler's museum and library. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army, Office of Strategic Services, Art Looting Investigation Unit.