Awards
2009 Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
Charles W. Haxthausen, Williams College
Charles W. Haxthausen has provided long, transformative, and inspiring leadership to one of the most important master’s degree programs in art history in the United States. As Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History at Williams College in Massachusetts and director of the Graduate Program there from 1993 to 2007, he has served as an enthusiastic and energetic intellectual model, with his love of scholarship and carefully crafted and innovative pedagogy creating a degree program that in turn has produced numerous leading scholars, teachers, and curators in art history.
Known to his colleagues and students as Mark, Haxthausen has taught across the country, at Indiana University, Harvard University (where he was also associate curator at the Busch-Reisinger Museum), Columbia University, Duke University, and the University of Minnesota. He received his BA from the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, in 1966, and his MA and PhD with distinction from Columbia University in 1976. He has received numerous grants and fellowships including a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship, two Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowships, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award; he is also a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Haxthausen’s service to the field has been exemplary, especially in his international role as a curator and consultant in the field of modern German art. Known for his work on Paul Klee, he has published numerous articles on German painters, sculptors, and critics, and he coedited books on modern German painting as well as The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University. His latest work, Refiguring Vision: The Art Criticism of Carl Einstein, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.
Among the accolades of students and colleagues, one observation resonated with special force: “If the teaching award is not only about personal interaction with students, the way an instructor can inspire and support, but also about how an individual can create an institution that represented the most advanced and cutting-edge thinking about art history, then it seems to me that this prize should undoubtedly go to Mark.” The writer references the remarkable pedagogical edifice built by Haxthausen at Williams. The famous and mandatory symposium “cycle” that dominates a student’s second year constitutes the program’s keystone academic event. A highly rigorous form of intellectual training, the requirement is an academic structure extending over an entire semester that allows students to envision themselves and indeed operate as public intellectuals in the visual arts. Beneficiaries of a brilliantly conceived and student-centered curriculum, graduates of the Williams College program have pursued doctorates at leading schools, obtained prestigious internships in the US and abroad, and taken curatorial and administrative positions at such institutions as the Albright-Knox Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center.
Comments from his students reveal the depth of Haxthausen’s legacy on a more individual level as well. They note his ability to inspire and challenge through “brilliant and fascinating” lectures, emanate enthusiasm for teaching and the field, and express “extraordinary generosity” as a professor and mentor. When asked how he could juggle so many book projects, reviews, classes, and other professional commitments, he told one student: “Because I love art history!” This love of the discipline resonates through his career of teaching and interactions with students. One student recalled that after a long day of looking at art at the Louvre, he said to the group: “An art historian never tires of looking at art!” In Haxthausen’s case, it is clear that he has never tired of bringing his enthusiasm for the field to his teaching and his students. His deep care for his students is apparent through the time and devotion he has spent in assisting in their advancement. “Always available to students and utterly approachable,” Haxthausen is known for his generosity of time. One student remarked that the “level of energy, dedication, and commitment that Mark brings to his students’ intellectual development is nothing short of remarkable.” Students fondly remember him for the “endless hours logged in symposium dry runs” and for his winter study excursions to Europe. But perhaps most notable in his significant teaching career is the way he has motivated students while challenging them with “rigorous but inspiring instruction.” As one colleague has noted, “Mark Haxthausen has transformed lives through the unwavering belief that his work as a teacher is important.”
Jury: Rebecca Corrie, Bates College, chair; Barbara Jaffee, Northern Illinois University; Carol Purtle, University of Memphis; and Aimée Bessire, Maine College of Art.
