Anne Coffin Hanson (1921–2004)

Anne Coffin Hanson was born in Larchmont, New York. She earned a bachelor of arts degree in painting from the University of Southern California, planning to become an artist. She married Warfield Garson, with whom she would have three children, before graduating. She lectured at Wagner College and studied at the Arts Students League in New York City in 1944-1945. She took her master's degree in painting from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After a divorce from her first husband, she taught at Princeton Day School and the University of Buffalo. She accepted a teaching assistant position at Bryn Mawr College while learning Italian in order to complete a study in Florence for her PhD thesis on Jacopo della Quercia's Fonte Gaia (published as a book in 1965). After completing her doctorate in 1962, she held professorships at Swarthmore College, Cornell University, and Bryn Mawr College before joining the staff at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In 1968, she was named Director of MOMA's International Study Center. Two years later, she became the first woman to be hired as a full tenured professor at Yale University. In 1978, she was named the John Hay Whitney Professor of the History of Art. She remained a member of the Department of the History of Art until her retirement in 1992.
As an art historian, Prof. Coffin Hanson was renowned for her research on the works of Edouard Manet and the 20-century Italian art movement of Futurism.
She was an avid women’s rights activist and fought for gender equity at Yale during her entire time there.
After retiring from Yale, she became the Samuel H. Kress Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Her most notable published work was Manet and the Modern Tradition (1977), which won the Charles Rufus Morey Award for art history scholarship.