William M. Ivins

Less today but in the old days of the Century there were always one or two, two or three, members whose emphasis was taken by dignified and sensitive older men for rudeness. Some of us can remember being at first scared by these apparently fierce characters and later loving them for their honesty and for the warmth that lay beneath their crustiness. Most of them—immortals now—were motivated in their sometime rages by their abhorrence of the stuffed shirt, of the holier than thou, of the pretentious, the complacent, the pompous, and the ponderous.

Bill Ivins could startle, stimulate, provoke, and often devastate. Young men (in spirit not years) sat at his feet and listened with delight; the old ones whose wisdom had become a burden to them, shied away lest he tread on their precious toes. But many, who had listened, honestly argued, and sincerely inquired, were often beneficiaries of Bill’s kindness, for to them he was inexhaustibly helpful. There was no distance he would not go to set a student on a right road; as a friend said: “He saw what others did not or could not see. He opened men’s eyes, pointed to untrodden paths and re directed their thoughts.”

Bill’s interests were wide, ranging from art criticism to social history, from mathematics to medicine, and from literature to law. He admired Gallic clarity, conciseness, and wit and had vast scorn for ponderous Germanic scholarship. What had started as a hobby became his vocation; in it he was one of the experts that determine its trends, its cults, and its vogues.

When he graduated from Harvard in 1901, he was un decided about his life work. He studied briefly at the University of Munich, held briefly a job on the editorial staff of World’s Work, and in 1904 entered Columbia Law School. Three years later, he was admitted to the New York Bar. All this time, and even after he had begun practice in the law, he had been collecting prints and becoming an expert in their appraisal. His talents could not long be hidden from the directors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and when they asked him to be the museum’s curator of prints, he abandoned the law and accepted.

From a small collection, Ivins built the Metropolitan’s large and varied treasure house of some 150,000 items. His understanding of prints soon became so celebrated that he had only to mention a name and repeat it a few times at cocktail parties to have every print dealer in New York place examples of the artist’s work in his window.

Bill Ivins was a prolific writer on his subject. His books were Prints and Books, On the Rationalization of Sight, Art and Geometry, and Prints and Visual Communication. In 1946, he retired from the museum and went to live in his house in Woodbury, Connecticut, in which he had his own collection of rare books and works of art—among them a series of woodcuts by Titian. He raised peonies in congenial soil and carried on a large correspondence with people all over the world. He wrote his letters with quill pens he cut himself, with black ink he made, and on paper he selected with his usual meticulous care. Occasionally he wrote on handmade sheets a hundred years old.

In his last years, he became something of a hermit, and visits to New York were rare. In older times, he loved the Century, captivated the long table with his spirited talk, played a leisurely game of billiards, and those who were not scared of him gathered round him to talk and listen.

He was a Centurion for more than half his life.

Roger Burlingame
1962 Century Association Yearbook