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Lois’ Gift
Lois Swan Jones, art historian, bibliographer, friend and mentor of
generations of art librarians, was a woman of many parts.
Although our paths had crossed already a couple of times before we did not become really well acquainted until we had lunch together during a leisurely break in a busy excursion trip to Buffalo and Niagara Falls during the 1979 Toronto Conference . Sharing a table we were soon engrossed in an animated and very fruitful conversation about the art and science of teaching historical bibliography and research methodology to art history students. At that point I had not even seen Research Methods and Resources: A Guide to finding Art Information(1978) which had only just been published but as soon I had read it its seminal importance obvious -- and it contained a special gift !
After our promising first encounter we managed to get together at every
subsequent ARLIS/NA conference for long talks, usually over a meal or drinks. On
these occasions our conversations continued, but -- and this may perhaps come
as a surprise to some readers -- the topic of our conversations changed from
things bibliographical and didactic, activities in which we were both engaged on a day-to-day basis, to the
activities of professor Jones’ alter ego: that of world traveler and entrepreneur art photographer, film- and video producer
and publisher, fascinating activities
that were uniquely hers.
Jeff Weidman in his l reminiscences of Lois
< one of a kind> [ARLIS-L of August 9], pays warm tribute to Lois’
first work , Research
Methods and Resources: A Guide to finding Art Information ( 1st edition,
1978). This book and its subsequent editions and all the works which she published later
are listed in the obituary in the Dallas
Morning News of
August 9. They are important tools for the art historian’s
and art librarian’s trade and all
did, of course, become entries in he
bibliographical guides that I prepared
for my first-year graduate students. Due to the particular admissions policy at Harvard at the
time that favored people with
backgrounds in languages and literatures
or classics most of the new graduate students that were admitted to the graduate
Fine Arts degree program had not been
art history majors as undergraduates and were therefore very much in need of instruction
in historical bibliography and
research methods.
So what was this gift to me that I have
alluded to in the caption to these reminiscences ? It was the following simple and brilliant
idea:
Having meticulously recorded all
the steps that went into the creation of a major scholarly treatise on an artist,
from the original conception of the research idea to the imprimatur
Lois in her book retraced these steps one-by-one and discussed them thoroughly from every angle for the benefit
of the student. As an object lesson she proposed the creation of a dissertation on the life and works of Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), the French impressionist master. With him she had wisely chosen a figure who lived though one of the great sea changes
in the history of French painting. This versatile
artist was
truly of his time. He was a painter, a friend of
artists, writers and other prominent members of the cultural
establishment , a man who had contacts
in the worlds of politics and of business as well and who was also an art collector to boot. This presented the author
a splendid opportunity to introduce the novice scholar step-by-step to every conceivable
source and format of pertinent information both textual and pictorial that he
would need to illuminate his subject. The
obvious merit of this approach is that it makes the student realize that the
paces he is being put through in this course are not busy work but have real
relevance for what he is about to undertake, his future life’s work as a
scholar.
Thus inspired by Lois, the great teacher, I have used her clever device, i.e. teaching research methodology by dissecting a work of
scholarship into its technical components
and putting it together again in
front of a class for many years with success. I never had I to worry how to motivate students!
That was the gift of Lois to me for which I am grateful,
Wolfgang M. Freitag