William Pierson; art professor influenced generations of curators
With a rich baritone, equally at home singing in a choir or delivering actor's lines, William H. Pierson Jr. introduced decades of Williams College students to the wonders of architecture, painting, and photography. And when class ended, he did something most teachers would consider outlandish.
"After each lecture, he tore up his notes so he would never get stale," said his daughter Elizabeth Pierson-Rainey. "The temptation to do the same thing again and again, and not have to prepare, is pretty big, but he never did. He never gave the same lecture twice. He always started fresh."
Still seeking fresh territory in his late 90s, he was working until recently on a fifth book for his series "American Buildings and Their Architects" and meeting daily with friends at the Williams Faculty Club for spirited lunchtime discussions.
Dr. Pierson, part of a trio of Williams professors who taught a large number of future leaders of major American art institutions, died of heart failure on Dec. 3 in the Williamstown house where he had lived since 1946. He was 97 and had suffered a bout of bronchitis in October.
"They were inspirational teachers," E.J. Johnson, the Amos Lawrence professor of art at Williams, said of Dr. Pierson and his colleagues, S. Lane Faison and Whitney Stoddard. "They trained the most remarkable group of museum directors that I think any college this size has ever produced."
The three professors, who all lived to 90 or beyond, were known at the college as the Holy Trinity, and their student progeny were dubbed the Williams Art Mafia. The institutions those students went on to lead include the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and museums in Dallas and St. Louis.
"The list just goes on and on," Johnson said.
Dr. Pierson was the last surviving member of the trio. Faison died at 98 in 2006; Stoddard was 90 when he died in 2003. Age slowed but never stopped the three friends.
"They were all enthusiastic and all had an appetite for life that was astonishing," Dr. Pierson's daughter said. "They were being wheeled in wheelchairs to museums in their later years."
Former Major League Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, who used to have lunch with Dr. Pierson on campus, wrote in a tribute that "Bill was the captain of the table and though he arrived in a wheelchair, his youthful laugh and joyful participation in the storytelling that was the stuff of our lunchtimes will be sorely missed."
For three decades, until Dr. Pierson retired in 1973, his presence was deeply felt by those he taught. Though he was offered administrative jobs with more pay and prestige, he preferred to stay in the classroom, his daughter said. He knew well the weighty responsibility of his daily task.
"During the years I have been teaching, that which has moved me the most deeply has been the direct simplicity with which the vast majority of my students have accepted what I have told them as the truth," Dr. Pierson said in a 1960 speech to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities.
"There have been, of course, the brilliant young men who have questioned me at every turn, but for most of them, the ideas expressed by me have gone unchallenged," he said. "This is a sobering thought."
William Pierson grew up in Bloomfield, N.J., the older of two brothers. He was an athlete, a student leader, and a burgeoning singer when his high school art teacher noticed his talent and introduced him to Charles Warren Eaton, a noted landscape painter who lived nearby and became Dr. Pierson's mentor.
Homesick and almost penniless, Dr. Pierson was a freshman at Yale University when he stepped into a chapel his first weekend on campus and listened to a choir. Enchanted, he stuck around, struck up friendships, and eventually was invited to sing with a group called the Stone Age Quartet. He paid for Yale with the money he earned performing with the quartet and singing in choirs.
Dr. Pierson graduated in 1934 with a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting and stayed to receive a master's in painting from Yale in 1936. During those years, he met Margaret Post, a sculptor, and they married in 1936. She died in 2002.
By Dr. Pierson's calculation, he spent three years drawing the male and female figure, three hours every morning, six days a week, "in every position a model could hold." He taught life drawing at Yale and then went to New York University, where he received a master's in art history in 1941.
During World War II, he served in the Navy and was a commander, overseeing the installation of radar on ships in the Mediterranean and the Pacific Ocean. He was awarded a Bronze Star and two Navy commendations and remained in the Naval Reserves until 1971.
Back at Yale after the war, he received a doctorate and his dissertation, "Industrial Architecture in New England," was considered the first scholarly look at that field of study. In later years, he worked with preservationists to keep intact the 19th-century industrial mill architecture of Harrisville, N.H.
Because of his background in painting and art history, Faison recruited him to teach at Williams, where Dr. Pierson created the studio art curriculum and launched the school's first courses in American art and photography. He also performed on stage at Williams and sang with a local choral society and in the choir at the First Congregational Church in Williamstown.
Although Dr. Pierson lived a life of the mind in the classroom and as an artist, he was quite comfortable outdoors. A pilot, he was the faculty adviser for the Williams Flying Club. Introduced by Eaton, his first art mentor, to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dr. Pierson considered himself a transcendentalist.
"He was never happier than when he was fly-fishing in the streams of Maine," his daughter said.
"I've been saying to people that even though he was 97, it was an untimely death, because there was never a day when he wouldn't have wanted another day," she said. "He had such an exuberant enthusiasm for life."
In addition to his daughter, Elizabeth, Dr. Pierson leaves another daughter, Sally Pierson-Bennett; and two granddaughters.
A service will be announced. 