Where's Willibald? A bittersweet NYU Institute of Fine Arts interlude 1963-1965

A gifted young German scholar of French medieval art, Willibald Sauerländer (b. 1924) was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1961, where he and I had come as Panofsky protégées. That great humanist urged my senior Institute of Fine Arts colleagues to include the budding European academic among their roster. Willibald (or any other accomplished medievalist) was then sorely needed since our only instructor in that field - and then one of the Institute's three American-born faculty - proved radically unsatisfactory on many counts. The second American was the awesome, aristocratic Alexander Coburn Soper (1904-1993), a great expert in Chinese, Indian and Japanese arts. The third, Robert Goldwater (1907-1973), politically extremely conservative, like his distant relation the Arizona politician, was especially concerned with tribal cultures. He also directed Nelson Rockefeller's short-lived museum devoted to that area and briefly and unhappily, the Institute.