An Inventive Professor Inspired This Art Historian’s Career

Alan Wallach ’63, GSAS’73 is the author of Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (1998), co-curator and principal catalog essayist for Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (1994), co-editor of Transatlantic Romanticism (2015) and author of Trouble in Paradise: Twenty-four Essays on the Social History of American Art (2024).

Wallach taught at Kean College of New Jersey from 1974 to 1989 and was the holder of an endowed chair in art history and American studies at the College of William and Mary from 1989 until his retirement in 2011. He has been a visiting professor at UCLA, Stanford, CUNY, the University of Michigan, the University of Delaware, Williams College, Boston University and the Free University of Berlin. In 2007 he received the College Art Association’s award for the Distinguished Teaching of Art History. Wallach is currently a professorial lecturer in art history at The George Washington University’s Corcoran School.

He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Phyllis Rosenzweig, poet, critic, and curator emerita at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

What were you like when you arrived at Columbia?

Norman Podhoretz ’50 famously wrote, “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan.” For me, that journey did not go well, at least not at first. I arrived at the College in the fall of 1959 possessing minimal social skills and suffering from a bad case of imposter syndrome. Would I fit in? Did I want to? In high school I had aced the SATs and earned a New York State Regents math and science scholarship. But in a Cold War world of strident anti-communism, loyalty oaths and a terrifying arms race, I was, at 17, already a committed “peacenik.” Consequently, I found it impossible to envision a career in math or science that would not, however indirectly, support the U.S. war machine.

What do you remember about your first-year living situation?

On a hot day in late August, my father and I took the subway from Flatbush Avene to 116th St. We soon found ourselves in the lobby of the just-completed New Hall (today Carman Hall). My father, a deeply unhappy high school math teacher, had opposed my attending Columbia, which, despite my Regents scholarship, would be expensive, unlike Brooklyn College, which in 1959 was virtually free. No surprise, then, that he was in an especially sour mood that day. Bad enough, from his point of view, that he had to help me schlep my suitcase, typewriter and briefcase from deepest Brooklyn to Morningside Heights. Worse, when we arrived at New Hall, we discovered the elevators weren’t working. My suite, which I would share with three other freshmen, was on the seventh floor. We were thus obliged to carry my luggage up six flights of stairs. Climbing those six flights, my father was grim — but I was excited at the prospect of entering a new life.

What Core class or experience do you most remember, and why?

In the spring of 1960, I enrolled in Art Humanities. I had been interested in art since I was 5 or 6, although an art class at Midwood H.S. had put an end to my artistic aspirations. Still, I hadn’t lost interest in art.

Art Humanities was then devoted to the study of great monuments of western art — The Parthenon, Chartres Cathedral, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, etc. Howard Hibbard, 31 at the time and in the first year of what turned out to be a distinguished career at Columbia, was my instructor. Hibbard’s enthusiasm was contagious, his scholarly authority reassuring, his belief in our intelligence bracing, his approach to the material inventive. For example, studying Leonardo’s Last Supper, he had us spend an entire class scrutinizing Last Supper frescoes by Andrea del Castagno and Domenico Ghirlandaio — Florentine artists who had preceded da Vinci. By then I was hooked.

Over the course of the semester, Hibbard suggested three extracurricular readings: Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History (1915), Erwin Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955) and Arnold Hauser’s four-volume Social History of Art (1951), all of which I enthusiastically read. Undaunted by abstract theories and awkward translations, I managed to grasp Wölfflin’s “principles” and Panofsky’s iconographical approach to Medieval and Renaissance art. But it was Hauser’s social history, with its broad historical sweep and powerful insights, that most engaged me.

Although I was unaware of it at the time, Hibbard’s inspired teaching provided me with a solid foundation for additional art-historical study. It reinforced my passion for art and history, and thanks to my reading of Hauser, it awakened in me an interest in the social history of art. It also planted the germ of an idea. Far-fetched as it might have seemed at the time to a freshman obliged to major in math or science, I began to imagine myself becoming an art historian.

Fast forward: In the spring of 1963, I graduated from the College with a degree in mathematics. The following fall, I enrolled in the M.A. program in Columbia’s Department of Art History and Archaeology.

Did you have a favorite spot on campus, and what did you like about it?

As a freshman, I liked to hide out in the John Jay cafeteria, which usually was empty during the afternoon. There I could sit undisturbed reading Wölfflin, or Panofsky, or Hauser, and smoke — a habit I’d picked up during my senior year in high school.

What, if anything, about your College experience would you do over?

Like all freshmen, I had to take a swim test. At camp in 1954, I had been the fastest swimmer in my age group, but I had not pursued the sport while at Midwood, which in any case did not have a pool. At the test, Columbia’s swimming coach observed me doing the crawl and afterward asked me if I’d like to train with the team. I said no thanks. What I didn’t say was that I preferred to smoke and stay up late and talk politics in The West End bar. Training with the team would have forced me to give up smoking, provided me with badly needed exercise and furnished opportunities to bond with fellow Columbians. Sixty-five years later, I still regret my decision.