William Bradley “Brad” Isham Collins, Jr, of New York City and Fishers Island, NY, died on February 16th at home in Manhattan after a year-long illness. His wife, Amy Fine Collins, and his daughter, Flora Collins, were at his bedside. Brad had been working until this past year as an art history professor at Parsons School of Design, where he taught for thirty-seven years.
Brad was born in 1955 in New York City, the son of William Bradley Isham Collins Sr, an independent investor, and Carol Ohmer Collins, a philanthropist and former president of the Colony Club. Brad’s family’s tenure in New York extended back to 1661, when his antecedent, John Bowne, established himself in the Colonies. A Quaker, Bowne was a renowned abolitionist and advocate for religious freedom in New Netherlands.
Growing up on the Upper East Side, Brad attended the Buckley School. Brad moved on to the Groton School in 1969, in Groton, Massachusetts, where he distinguished himself as the first graduate ever to be awarded every prize on Prize Day. From there, Bradley matriculated in Harvard College (class of ’77), where he was a concentrator in Psychology. In defiance of his conservative upbringing, Brad engaged in anti-war protests, briefly associating with the SDS. (In 1970, Groton bussed Brad’s entire class to an SDS rally in Cambridge Common. Then, during his freshman year of college, he was seen handing out mint-green flyers for the radical organization in the lobby of the Harvard Union).
A maverick and non-conformist, Brad differentiated himself from his peers by rejecting membership to the elite Porcellian Club when he was tapped, and, counter to the counter-culture, wearing jackets and ties instead of blue jeans.
As an arts contributor to the Crimson, Brad became known for his astringent cultural criticism, particularly of television and rock music, during a period of massive shifts in those media. Widening his audience, Brad applied his incisive writerly prowess to a stream of well-regarded, influential, and often controversial music reviews for the now-defunct Boston Phoenix. He covered indie acts such as the Ramones, skewered sacred cows such as the Grateful Dead, and vaunted such outlier artists as Bryan Ferry, whom he called “an Epicurean Elvis.” Brad would attribute his later hearing impairment to his ubiquitous presence at rock concerts.
After graduation, on the advice of the Whitney Museum’s director Thomas Armstrong, Brad entered the museum’s Independent Study Program, then under the direction of Lisa Phillips. There, he curated the show “Enclosure and Concealment,” featuring works by Lucas Samaras and Joseph Cornell, among others. He overlapped by less than one day with his future wife, Amy Fine; she entered the internship program as he rotated out.
In the fall of 1980, Brad and Amy re-encountered each other as incoming students at Columbia University’s Art History PhD program. Brad worked under Professor Theodore Reff as a research assistant, focusing on Degas. He wrote his Master’s thesis on Jean Arp and the Origins of Biomorphism under Professor Kenneth Silver. Although he majored in Modernist art, with minors in American and Southern Baroque, Brad diverged from that path to write a groundbreaking dissertation on Leonardo da Vinci and psychoanalysis, with Reff as his advisor. This dissertation was the basis of his first book, Leonardo, Psychoanalysis, and Art History: A Critical Study of Psychobiographical Approaches to Leonardo da Vinci (Northwestern University Press). This important study brought him into the fold of like-minded art historical and psychoanalytic scholars, who invited him to become a founding member of the Arts Committee of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Brad returned to Modernist art with his second book, Van Gogh and Gauguin: Electric Arguments and Utopian Dreams, continuing in this rigorous, elegant volume to combine the disciplines of psychoanalysis and art history.
At CUNY Hunter College, New York University, and for nearly four decades at Parsons, Brad, an innate teacher, became a faculty member in the discipline of art history. His elective courses on Michelangelo and Leonardo incorporating psychoanalysis with art history and his examinations of the nude in art became gold standards of the Parsons curriculum. The popularity of his classes motivated Brad to join the school’s curriculum committee. Brad also contributed numerous articles to periodicals including Art Journal, Art in America, Psychoanalysis and Visual Arts, Source: Notes on the History of Art, Atelier, Psychoanalytic Psychology, Woman’s Art Journal, and The Village Voice. He gave talks regularly at College Art Association and American Psychoanalytic Association conferences, the Warburg Institute, and the International Psychoanalytical Association Symposia in Florence.
In New York, Brad supported the local institutions that formed the fabric of his life: The Frick Collection, The Whitney Museum, The Metropolitan Museum, The Jewish Museum, and the Central Park Conservancy. In a similar spirit, he helped to support local institutions on Fishers Island, where he happily spent summers since childhood, including the Fishers Island Conservancy, the Island Health Project, the Henry L Ferguson Museum, Lighthouse Works, and the Fishers Island Library, on whose board he served.
Brad’s pastimes included reading the complete works of Aristophanes, Ovid, Dante, and Freud as well as the entire texts of the Quran, the Torah, and the New Testament. The breadth of his reading also encompassed English, Russian, and French literature; academic studies of these novels and poems; Lionel Trilling and Pauline Kael’s oeuvre; and Raymond Chandler and Elmer Leonard’s detective novels. He subscribed to periodicals covering the full range of the political spectrum, while also daily consuming the New York papers, pop culture news, glossy magazines, and essentially any bit of printed matter placed before him.
He was a dedicated viewer of television and movies of all genres, gravitating to Hitchcock, the noir films of Samuel Fuller, and the screwball comedies of Preston Sturges. An inveterate night owl, he would stay up to all hours watching nature or history documentaries and reruns of such favorite shows as “Law and Order,” “The Odd Couple,” and “Mary Tyler Moore.”
On any given day, Brad could be found meandering through museums and art galleries, keeping up with his monthly list of both contemporary and historical exhibitions. He also roamed the city streets, architectural guide in hand, familiarizing himself with overlooked decorative elements of buildings and the obscure names of their makers. Stemming from his days as a reviewer, Brad possessed eclectic tastes in music, reveling equally in Miles Davis, Mozart, Elvis Costello, Dolly Parton, and modern-day hip-hop.
Brad also enjoyed jogging around the Central Park Reservoir (having grown up across the street, he knew the park by heart), and on the Recreational Path on Fishers Island. On Fishers, he typically ordered three beverages at dinner (a Diet Coke, a glass of Pinot Noir, and a margarita on the rocks with salt), and delighted in seaside sunsets as much as he did cityscapes. On nights when the moon appeared particularly beautiful, he would often excitedly exclaim, “The moon! Look at the moon!”
Brad endeared himself to those who knew him with his dry wit, his omnivorous erudition, his kindness, his gentleness, his patience, and his modesty. His inherent stoicism was evident in the face of his fatal diagnosis in early 2025. Though Brad was quiet and reserved, content to spend time alone with his books, he was devoted to his family and lifelong friends. When his daughter, Flora, was small, he would diligently type out the made-up stories she would dictate to him, taking great care to print out these tales and organize them in labeled file jackets (Flora is now a published novelist).
Brad possessed the singular ability to engage earnestly in intellectual repartee with anyone who crossed his path, from a student to a dinner party companion, to a young friend of his daughter’s.
Brad is survived by his siblings, James Connell Collins and Carol Collins Malone, his wife of 39 years, Amy Fine Collins, his daughter, Flora Collins, seven nieces and nephews, and his sister-in-law, Erika Fine. His sister, Louise Collins, predeceased him by three weeks.
