It is with deep sorrow that I submit the following obituary… and yet I cannot help but celebrate a life well-lived and a friend who meant so much to me.
William A. Peniston, Ph.D., Librarian/Archivist, The Newark Museum
William J. “Bill” Dane (1923-2019)
The “dapper, refreshingly irreverent art scholar,” who began his career as a clerk in the Art and Music Department of the Newark Public Library in 1947 and ended it 62 years later in 2009 as the Supervising Librarian of Special Collections,
William J. “Bill” Dane died on Saturday, July 13th at the age of 96.
“Renowned in art circles for his unimpeachable manners, his implacable curiosity, and his unassailable scholarship… but perhaps, most revered for his impeccable eye…,” Dane took charge of a very rich collection founded at the turn of the
20th century and expanded it so that it is now a comprehensive survey of the graphic arts from the Renaissance to the 21st century, from Europe, America (both North and South), as well as Asia, all in a variety of formats. It includes
over 25,000 fine prints, 5,000 posters, 1,000 autographs, plus artists’ books, pop-up books, and rare books, greeting cards and postcards, even shopping bags. It contains some real treasures: one of his personal favorites was Red Grooms’ portrait of Gertrude
Stein, because it reminded him of the time that he met her and her partner Alice B. Toklas after the war at a lecture given by the famous writer for the soldiers in Nancy in France. As he tried to engage her in conversation, she asked him to watch her poodle
Basket. “So many pieces of artwork,” Dan Schnur, his long-time exhibits designer, once noted, “he has a personal story about them all. The collection is not dated. It’s ongoing, very open, very democratic.”
“Dane has been an ideal custodian of the art collection,” art historian Ezra Shales said in an appreciation, “because he understands that they were created in the first decade of the 20th century to entertain and inform the library’s
patrons… [He] has been careful to preserve the emphasis on aesthetic pleasure…, [but he] has pushed the envelope.” In another article, the independent journalist John McIntyre wrote, “Dane’s work as a collector has deepened his engagement with the community
around him. Rather than endlessly pursuing his darlings, so to speak, Dane sought to acquire works by artists whose background and style would resonate with the city’s changing population.” In his own words, Dane defined his guiding principle as “a magical
thing really.” “I love abstraction. I love realism. I love non-objective. I love bright colors and lines, and exploratory graphics. I don’t have any personal barriers for that sort of thing, which helps.”
Born and raised in Concord, N.H., where his Irish-born father ran an auto repair shop, Dane was an inquisitive child. After his father became a state legislator, he often attended legislative sessions to watch and hear the debates from
the balcony. “It was a wonderful thing to do,” he said later, “because I saw democracy at work.”
His education at the University of New Hampshire was interrupted by World War II. He joined the Army right way in 1942, underwent basic training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and was then sent to the Newark College of Engineering (now
the New Jersey Institute of Technology) to study bridge-building. It turned out that the Army didn’t need bridge-builders so his infantry division (the 69th) was sent to Belgium in December 1944 and he spent the rest of the war “dragging a 155-mm
gun” across most of central Germany. His division was the one that met up with the Red Army at Torgau on the Elbe River in April 1945.
While stationed in Newark, during the war, during one of his free weekends when he was not attending a performance at Radio City Music Hall, he wandered into the Renaissance-style palace on Washington Park known as the Newark Public Library.
“I sat on one of the windowsills in the stacks and chose a book to read. It was such a relief to get away from engineering books, a luxury to enjoy something I selected for myself. In those days, I never dreamed that one day I would return to the library and
spend [more than] half a century working in the building…”
Thus it was in the fall of 1947, having finally finished his degree in liberal arts and without a clue as to what to do with it, he applied for a job at the Newark Public Library. He was hired, assigned to the Art and Music Department,
and began to learn about art. “I circulated books, shelved and moved materials, and I picked up all kinds of information relating to the subject areas of art and music.” He furthered his education through generous leaves of absences granted by the library
administration and through the support of the G.I. bill.
Over the course of his many decades at the Newark Public Library, he curated over 350 exhibitions on topics as diverse as etchings by old masters, prints by modern masters, “Mostly Pop and A Little Op,” Japanese traditional woodblocks,
Japanese modern woodblocks, work by African American artists, Puerto Rican artists, and numerous individual artists, posters on circuses, films, opera, and music, “fantastic tales” as illustrated in children’s books, “the magic world” of adult illustrated
books, “A Potpourri of Pop-Ups,” playing cards, antique maps, shopping bags, “Fashion and Color” on “feminine modes,” and so many more.
It was in these years that Dane started calling himself “the Keeper of Prints” – a royal title that he had given himself after a visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 1997 the collection was named “The William J. Dane Fine
Print Collection” in his honor, and in 2004 he established “The Gertrude Fine Prints Endowment Fund” in memory of his sister with an initial contribution of $30,000 and $10,000 from the Dodge Foundation.
An active member of many professional organizations, in 1972, along with James Humphrey from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Judith Hoffberg from the University of California at San Diego, Dane and other librarians founded the Art Libraries
Society of North America. In those early years, Hoffberg served as its executive director and Dane served as its treasurer. In 1998, the organization gave him its Distinguished Service Award. Other organizations have all recognized his contributions to their
goals and objectives.
In summing up his career, Dane once said, “I feel very lucky that early on I fell into a professional subject area that I found very rewarding and filling… No two days have been the same.”
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