Allen Staley

Allen Staley, a professor emeritus of art history at Columbia and a key figure in the revival of interest in the British Pre-Raphaelite movement, died Oct. 2. He was 88.

Staley passed away in his longtime home on Central Park West in New York after a multi-year illness with kidney cancer. He is survived by Etheleen, his wife of 55 years and co-owner of the Staley-Wise Gallery; his sons Oliver and Peter; his daughter-in-law Effie Phillips-Staley; and his grandchildren Fiontan, Owen, Marisol and Icy.

After stints as lecturer and curator at New York's Frick Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Staley taught at Columbia University for more than 30 years, and served as chairman of the art history department.

He is the author of five books on British art, including The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, first published in 1973 and re-issued in 2001, and Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature (2004), the catalog of a major exhibit of more than 150 paintings shown at the Tate Britain in London as well as in museums in Berlin and Madrid. The Tate exhibition, organized by Staley and Christopher Newell, was the first to focus on the movement's landscape painting, and was praised for its sweep and ambition

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in the 1848 and which include painters such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais, eschewed what they considered the cold and mechanical painting practiced by adherents of Raphael, and instead embraced a lusher and more realistic approach to the world found in Italian art of the 14th century.

The movement, which initially shocked the art world of Victorian Britain, eventually fell out of favor among collectors and scholars in favor of Impressionism and Modernism. The scholarship of Staley and his colleagues helped renew interest in the then-obscure artists, and paved the way for a major 1984 exhibit at the Tate that re-established the movement in the popular eye.

Staley also served as a trustee of the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, and helped secure a 7 million pound gift from Edwin (Jim) Manton, the former chairman of AIG, for the expansion of the Tate Britain.

As a professor at Columbia, he inspired generations of students, some of whom chose to major in art history after attending his lectures.

Allen Percival Green Staley was born in 1935 and raised in Mexico, Missouri, a company town where his maternal grandfather and namesake, Allen Percival Green, built the company that built the town. In 1910, Green, an engineer and entrepreneur, acquired a struggling factory that produced firebrick, the heat-resistant building blocks used in the furnaces essential for the steel industry. By 1929, the A.P. Green Firebrick Company was the largest such facility in the world.

A.P. Green's second daughter, Martha, met Allen's father, Walter, at a dance in New York City, where she was attending art school. Walter Staley was a West Point cadet, born in Indian Territory (soon to become Oklahoma), and the descendent of farmers, gold miners and Civil War veterans. Walter and Martha settled in Mexico, where Walter worked for his father-in-law, and had three children: Martha (Marcy), Walter, Jr. (Wally), and Allen, the youngest. Walter, Sr. spent much of World War II in North Africa and Italy, and retired from the military as a Lieutenant Colonel.

Allen was raised as the affluent son of a prominent family-his first cousin, Christopher "Kit" Bond, was a Missouri governor and senator-and wanted for little. His father was an avid equestrian and the children competed in horse jumping and particularly the three-day event, with Wally taking part in three Olympic games, and winning a bronze medal in 1952. Allen was offered a place on the team training for the 1956 Olympics but declined, choosing to focus on his studies.

Both Staley boys attended Governor Dummer Academy, a boarding school outside of Boston now called the Governor's Academy, and Allen went on to Princeton University. There, at the suggestion of his advisor, he took his first art history course, a class in Italian renaissance painting which would change the course of his life.

"The experience was magical," Staley would later write in an unpublished memoir. "When the lights went out and the slides started to appear on a large screen, it was like nothing I had heretofore experienced in high school or college: fun, like the movies, but far better, because I was learning new and wonderful things."

After a summer in Paris and Rome that cemented his enthusiasm for fine art, Staley went on to major in art history. While it was a departure from what might have been expected of a young man from rural Missouri, his parents didn't object, in part because his mother was a skilled amateur painter and an admirer of anything that suggested European sophistication.

Staley began graduate studies at Yale, interrupted by brief detours for obligatory military service and extended travels throughout Europe as a self-described playboy. Frustrated with his progress at Yale and in search of a subject to study, Staley almost by chance stumbled on Pre-Raphaelite works at London's Tate in 1960. In the detailed and vivid landscapes of John Brett and Ford Madox Brown, Staley found "the allure of the unknown and unstudied." He quickly abandoned plans to spend a year in Germany and embarked on what would be his life's calling.

Completing his Ph.D. coursework in 1962, Staley fled New Haven for New York and a job lecturing at the Frick, which also included giving short talks about art during WNYC's classical music broadcasts. His supervisor at the Frick was so appalled at hearing Staley's Missouri accent over the air that he arranged for sessions with a voice coach, erasing what Staley called his "midwestern twang."

It was while living in New York he met Etheleen Lichtenstein, at a Christmas party. A young Jewish woman from Detroit, Etheleen was then living by her wits in New York, and they could not have been more different, but they fell in love and married in 1968. In 1981, Etheleen and Taki Wise opened the Staley-Wise Gallery, specializing in fine-art fashion photography, in New York's SoHo neighborhood. The gallery remains a New York institution.

They spent much of the next year in London, as Staley worked to turn his graduate dissertation into his first book.

In 1965, Staley took a position as assistant curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where, among other projects, he organized an exhibit on Romantic Art in Britain which opened in 1968. Included in the catalog was an essay by art historian Robert Rosenblum, whom Staley first met at Princeton and who was a lifelong friend until Rosenblum's passing in 2006.

Based in part on a recommendation from Rosenblum, Staley was offered a job at Columbia in 1969, which he accepted. He received tenure in 1974, and remained at Columbia until 2000. He was briefly tempted by an offer in 1975 to become the inaugural director of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, but practical concerns about commuting to New Haven and philosophical issues about the museum's potential direction led him to stay at Columbia. He did, however, leverage the offer into a promotion.

At Columbia, he was part of a Murderer's Row of art historians, which over his years included luminaries such as Meyer Schapiro, Barbara Novak, James Beck, Kirk Varnedoe and Rosalind Krause. Along with offering seminars on British art, Staley lectured undergraduates in 18th and 19th century European painting, and taught Art Humanities, the mandatory survey course taken by all Columbia students.

In 1969, Staley and Etheleen bought an apartment in the Dakota, the storied Upper West Side landmark, where neighbors included Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, and, sharing a landing on the seventh floor, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In 1978, the Lennons bought the apartment, offering to pay whatever it cost to find a suitable replacement. So the Staley family moved three blocks north to 151 Central Park West, where they lived ever since. Lennon remained in the Dakota, and the rest is tragic history.

Staley's sons were born in 1971 and 1973, and aside from a year spent in London during Staley's sabbatical year, were raised on the Upper West Side.

In 1974, the family bought a second home in Amenia, New York, a stately Victorian on 7.5 acres where they spent most weekends for the five decades. Maintaining the home, and particularly mowing its lawn and tending a vegetable garden, became labors of love for Staley, who took great pleasure in serving salads of his home grown lettuce, and bridled at the idea of store-bought tomatoes.

Other enthusiasms included skiing with his sons, first on weekend outings to Vermont, then on extended trips to Colorado and Utah; scuba diving on annual winter holidays in St. Croix, where his parents had retired; and reading voraciously. Thrillers and detective novels were a particular pleasure, as were the novels of P.G. Wodehouse. He read more substantial works, and in the last years of his life read the complete novels of Philip Roth.

In his retirement he became a serious pedestrian, walking huge distances across New York, such as strolling from the Upper West Side to Coney Island.

Staley was a dedicated traveler, and along with many trips to Europe for work and pleasure, with Etheleen, toured Egypt, Morocco, India, China and Japan.

After decades of visiting and living in London, in 1999 the Staley's bought a flat in Chelsea, between the King's Road and the Thames, "the very neighborhood where I had dreamed of living when I first came to study in London in 1960," he wrote.

The flat became a useful base for Staley's work on the Tate Pre-Raphaelite show, as well as visits to the family of his son, Oliver, when they lived in South London from 2012 to 2016.

Along with the Pre-Raphaelites, Staley was a scholar of other Victorian artists, among them James McNeil Whistler, Edward Lear, George Watts, Frederic Leighton and Albert Moore, all of whom he wrote about or organized exhibits of, and often both.

Staley is also the author of The Paintings of Benjamin West (1986), a monumental catalogue raisonné of the prolific, American-born court painter of King George III. Staley picked up the project from its initial author, Helmut von Erffa of Rutgers University, who Staley later said had assembled "a chaotic accumulation of a vast amount of information von Erffa had been gathering since the 1940s."

With a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities, Staley spent a decade taming von Erffa's chaos, supplementing it with extensive research of his own, and largely writing it from scratch. The final work of 600 pages, which tips the scales at nearly 8 pounds, was greeted with an exhibition of West at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and in 1989, a major show of 77 works by West at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

In 2011, Staley published The New Paintings of the 1860: Between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement, a book he first conceived in the 1990s that focused on a separate and new movement that emerged from the Pre-Raphaelites.

His final book returned to a familiar subject, Benjamin West, and West's relationship with another American in Britain, John Singleton Copley. Copley and West in England 1775-1815 was published in 2021.

He is remembered by those who knew him as kind, thoughtful and gracious; a loving husband, father and grandfather; and a man who lived a rich, full and rewarding life.