S. Lane Faison Jr., 98; professor left prominent legacy in the field of art

S. Lane Faison Jr., an art history professor at Williams College whose passion for the subject inspired generations of students, a number of whom became curators and directors at top U.S. museums, has died. He was 98.

Faison, who was also an expert on art confiscated by the Nazis during World War II, died Nov. 11 at his home in Williamstown, Mass. The cause was not given.

As a teacher, Faison helped students see the complexities of fine art, sometimes turning a slide of a famous painting upside down to point out the expert composition.

Other times he asked students to research a certain work and talk to the class about it, his way of making them slow down and look carefully.

A mentor as well as a teacher, Faison encouraged many of his students to make careers in art. A group of them, known as the “Williams art mafia,” are now directors of leading art museums.

The group includes Earl A. “Rusty” Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and formerly of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; Thomas Krens of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York City; John R. Lane, director of the Dallas Museum of Art; and Michael Govan, current director of LACMA.

“Lane had an extraordinary rapport with students, especially unlikely students, football players,” Powell said in an interview with The Times this week. Powell started at Williams as a pre-med student but became an art history major.

Faison “made art challenging, interesting,” he said. “He was a brilliant teacher. He could make you see things you wouldn’t know were there.”

In a letter to the “Williams Community” posted on the school website, President Morton Owen Shapiro referred to Faison as “a mentor whose legacy will forever spread far and wide through the countless students he turned on to art.”

Long before Faison gained a reputation as a teacher and mentor, he was a naval reservist in 1945. He was appointed to the Art Looting Investigation Unit of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA.

He interrogated Nazi officials about Adolf Hitler’s personal stash of about 6,000 paintings, several thousand drawings and watercolors, hundreds of sculptures, tapestries and antique furnishings. Hitler planned to install the works in museums in his native Austria. Faison wrote the official report about the collection.

In 1950 he was appointed director of the Central Collecting Point in charge of returning the stolen works to their original owners. Searching for information about the origins of the pieces, Faison read “piles and piles of documents,” he said in a 1998 interview with the Toronto Star.

Most often, the art went to government leaders of the country where the works had been confiscated. France was the hardest hit by the lootings, Faison said.

“If you were a Rothschild and your collection was well known and well documented, there was no problem. But for others it wasn’t so easy,” he told the paper.

It took decades, lawsuits and media attention to get some of the works back to the families that originally owned them.

Faison, who was born Nov. 16, 1907, in Washington, D.C., became interested in art history at 16 when he was living in Switzerland with his family for a year. He stumbled on his career path during a visit to Chartres Cathedral in France. “I haven’t been the same since,” he often said of that trip.

He graduated from Williams in 1929, earned a master’s degree at Harvard and a master of fine arts degree at Princeton.

He taught at Yale for several years before he joined the Williams faculty in 1936. He was chairman of the art history department from 1940 to 1969 and became an emeritus professor in 1976. He wrote a number of essays and books, including “The Art Museums of New England” in 1982.

As a teacher, Faison developed an eye for students with promise in his field.

“Lane gave his students unstinting support that continued after they graduated,” Powell said, recalling books, articles and notes he received from Faison through the years.

At age 98, Faison was still attending exhibition openings that involved his former students.

His wife, Virginia, died in 1997. He is survived by four sons and a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

mary.rourke@latimes.com