Tales of an Epoch : The Origins of Art Education in America Hardcover – December 22, 2025

The art museum as we know it today has diverse origins some going back centuries, but the object-centered Museum Course taught by Paul Sachs and others in close affiliation with Harvard’s laboratory-oriented Fogg Art Museum deserves a special place, both for its radical impact and ongoing relevance. As Harvard celebrates 150 years of fine arts education, Paul Sachs’s engaging memoir Tales of an Epoch is being published for the first time, thoughtfully introduced, edited and contextualized by Felipe Pereda, Fernando Zóbel de Ayala Professor of Spanish Art and head of Graduate Studies in Harvard’s Department of History of Art & Architecture. Recognition of Paul Sachs has faded with time, but his legacy lives. A telling measure of his influence is the cast of students, colleagues and friends populating Tales of an Epoch. Future museum directors and curators enrolled in the course include Chick Austin (Wadsworth Atheneum), Alfred Barr (Museum of Modern Art), Sherman Lee (Cleveland Art Museum), James Rorimer (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Perry Rathbone (Boston Museum of Fine Arts) and John Walker (National Gallery of Art). The future director of the Fogg and a research assistant for Sachs, Agnes Mongan was named Keeper of Drawings at the Fogg in 1937, a title only elevated to Curator in 1947 after the war. Future collectors include Lincoln Kirstein, Henry McIlhenny, Joseph Pulitzer and E.M.M. Warburg. Illustrious colleagues, mentors and protégés include Aby Warburg, Bernard Berenson, John Coolidge, Edward Waldo Forbes, Maurice Wertheim, and Grenville Winthrop. Tales of an Epoch and a “where did they go” list tracking the careers of Museum Course alumni in the Appendix amplifies the depth and range of Sachs’s influence on museums as we experience them today. Both scholars and general readers with an interest in the cultural evolution of museums over the past 100 hundred years will find the pairing of Sachs and Pereda both illuminating and thought provoking—not just in retrospect, but in looking ahead. Read more