William C. Agee ’59

    Bill, among American Modernism’s most respected curators, scholars, and teachers, died Dec. 24, 2022. 

Born Sept. 26, 1938, in New York City, he came to Princeton from Andover, where he was on the football and baseball teams and captain of the basketball team. At Princeton, he played freshman football and basketball and participated on several IAA sports teams after joining Tiger Inn. He roomed with Allen, the Belz brothers, Pachios, and Viola. He graduated with a degree in history of art and archaeology and earned a master’s degree in art history in 1963 from Yale. After directing a study on the New Deal and the Arts for the Archives of American Art, he joined the Whitney Museum as an associate curator.

In 1968, he became an associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, leaving there in 1970 to become the director of the Pasadena Art Museum. From there he moved to Houston to become director of the Museum of Fine Arts until 1982.

In his museum jobs, Bill helped mount a long list of important exhibits and wrote or contributed to their accompanying catalogs. He became one of the most influential voices in American Modernism before entering academia in 1988, when he joined Hunter College as a professor of modern art, remaining there until his retirement in 2014 and the publication in 2016 of his magnum opus, Modern Art in America 1908–1968.

Bill is survived by his wife, Elita; daughter Cintra; son Matthew; and three grandchildren.