HANSON, Anne Coffin 1921-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE— See index for CA sketch: Born December 12, 1921, in Larchmont, NY; died September 3, 2004, in New Haven, CT. Art historian, educator, and author. Hanson was an authority on French and Italian art and a professor emeritus at Yale University. Originally, she trained to be an artist, attending Skidmore College and then earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California in 1943. Over the next two years, she attended the Arts Students League in New York City, then earned a master's degree from the University of North Carolina in 1951. After teaching art at Miss Fine's School in Princeton, New Jersey, in the early 1950s and at what is now the State University of New York at Buffalo in the late 1950s, Hanson went back to school and earned a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in 1962. She next accepted a post as an assistant professor of art at Swarthmore College for a year, and then taught at Bryn Mawr from 1964 to 1968. From 1968 to 1970, she directed the International Study Center at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and in 1970 she became a professor of art at Yale University, the first woman to be hired by the university as a full professor. Hanson remained at Yale until her 1992 retirement. During this time, she enjoyed a distinguished career, serving as the first woman to chair the art history department at Yale from 1974 until 1978, the same year she was named John Hay Whitney Professor of the History of Art. In another advance for her gender, Hanson also fought to have women admitted to the all-male eating club called Mory's, a fight she and others won in 1974. Hanson is best known for her expertise in nineteenth-and twentieth-century French and Italian art. She was, in particular, an authority on Édouard Manet and the Italian futurists; her book Manet and the Modern Tradition (1976) is considered an especially important work, winning the Charles Rufus Morey Award for art history scholarship. Hanson was also the author of such books as Édouard Manet: 1832-1886 (1966) and Severini Futurista, 1912-1917 (1995). In addition, she wrote numerous art exhibition catalogs for the Yale University Art Gallery, where she served as acting head from 1986 to 1987 and acting curator of European and contemporary art from 1995 to 1996. Hanson was a former president of the College Art Association and, from 1992 to 1993, Samuel H. Kress professor at the Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, September 7, 2004, section 3, p. 4.

Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2004, p. B9.

New York Times, September 4, 2004, p. A14.

Washington Post, September 12, 2004, p. C10.