A Memoir on Art at Columbia
Arthur C Danto
2007
I met Andre Racz in the early 1950s, when I joined the philosophy department at Columbia as an instructor. We were introduced through Pepino Mangraviti, then chair of the art department, though I have no recollection of how I had gotten to know Pepino. Mangraviti was a short, dapper, sociable man, well-connected in the university, though I have no sense that he was a very serious artist. In any case, I must have been put in touch with him by someone who knew about my interest in art. He said I must meet Andre, since he had an interest in philosophy. The art department at that time was in a temporary building left over from the war, on the northeast corner of Amsterdam and 116th Street, where the Law school now stands. One of my children was in the Greenhouse, a nursery school nearby, and I just went in and introduced myself one day. Andre at the time had flaming red hair and a red beard, as well as a very romantic persona - a kind of paradigm artist. He had been part of the American Surrealist movement, and had shown at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century Gallery. He had an apartment in New York, but had found through friends a studio in a deconsecrated church in Demarest, New Jersey, and was going through - or coming out of - a period as a religious artist: I think he had converted to Catholicism, though I did not feel that he was especially observant. He moved to Demarest when he married Claire, a beautiful woman who had been his model. They had three Springer spaniels- Pepa, Bruna, and a third whose name I have forgotten - though I think it was Trini. Claire was a Madonna-like woman, and the dogs were her life, apart from Andre - she worked as a bookkeeper at Ethical Culture. Andre had moved to Chile when he left Europe - he was a Romanian - where he had married and had children, but the marriage was rocky, and when a divorce came through, he and Claire married. The church-house-studio was like a portrait of their marriage, with a wonderful garden - Andre had studied botany in Romania - and I remember him moving huge rocks around with his bare hands. He was immensely strong, with, as I say, a romantic temperament. He and Claire lived what seemed to me an exemplary life, between Demarest, Vinlalhaven (Maine), where Andre did sea-scapes, and New York. They became close friends of mine and of my family until Claire was killed in an automobile accident, driving back from Maine, I think around Thanksgiving one year. After that Andre fell apart, and friendship with him became impossible. He became angry and bitter at life. There was always that in his personality, but Claire, a gentle person, kept it in check.
I admired Andre greatly as a draughtsman, and think his drawings and prints of animals, flowers, sea life, truly great. I was not an art critic at that time. But I did write about his work in my book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, published in 1981. As far as I know, his work is still in storage somewhere, but I think his family could not afford the kind of care it required. It was all ink and wash on paper, with some water colors, and it would be a tragedy if it were lost. I own two drawings, a beautiful ink drawing of a dead bird that Andre had found in his garden. He gave it to me as a gift after my first wife died, saying that she had wanted to buy it for me. And the other a large drawing of some bittersweet that his son Andres, a film-maker, gave me when I wrote something about Andre - perhaps it was the memoir I published in American Artist. Andre liked to boast that it was he, not Pollock, that had discovered the drip. That was preposterous, really: he did have a drip of red blood-like paint in a small religious self-portrait, but that was not the meaning of the drip in American painting. They do not, in any case, make artists like him any more, and my life is richer for having had him as a friend. I have at times thought of trying to rescue his work - there was a young curator from Chile who visited me and who tried to organize an exhibition, but nothing so far as I know came of it. I suppose it is not an unusual story. Andre would have been lost in the post-romantic art world of today. It would have added to his bitterness. But I have a fantasy that his work, especially and maybe only the great large drawings of flowers and animals will be discovered, and a place will be found for him in the history of American art. He was a difficult but poetic man, and really, I feel, touched greatness, though his huge religious canvases were clearly a bit absurd. I spoke both at Claire's and at Andre's memorial services, and lived with one of the springers Claire helped me find for many years, and with whom I had a deep fraternal relationship.
Both Andre and Pepino were, I felt, the right sort of chairmen for an art department at a great university that was, like Columbia, a bit uncertain whether an art department belonged in a university at all. They participated in university affairs, and really represented the department in an active way. And they embodied the idea of The Artist in different ways. Pepino was sophisticated and cultivated, Andre was bohemian, with his fierce beard and long hair, his beret and pipe, and the heavy homespun shirts that Claire made for him. The Columbia College administration was hostile to the visual arts, I felt, especially in the making of it, which must have been a deep humanistic prejudice against using the hands - though Ad Reinhart and Scott Burton were College undergraduates. The College was quite open to art as a subject of scholarship, and the general education course in art humanities exemplifies what it thought the place of art was in the making of a Columbia man - the College was all male until the early eighties. Certainly the idea of a fine art major, other than in art history, was unthinkable. And there was genuine doubt in the higher administration as to whether there should be an advanced degree - an MFA - in art at all. I attended several meetings with the committee on instruction of the graduate school, as an advocate for the program, though even I was convinced there was no good reason for encapsulated art school in the Sixties and Seventies - though the whole conception of art and the art-school began to change in the early eighties, when it seemed to me that the question of what is art became central in advanced artistic practice, as a kind of philosophical question of art's identity. Really, I think, this happened in the 1960s, around the time I myself began to think about art philosophically in response to what was happening all across the field. In art departments, art became a field of practical philosophical investigation, though in a very different sense than Andre Racz, let alone Pepino Mangraviti, would have understood. At some point, art students were required to take some classes in liberal arts, which meant, mostly in art history and in aesthetics, and possibly in psychology.The one student I remember at all well was Laurie Anderson, who took a seminar I offered in Merleau-Ponty. It was clear that she was a very gifted person. But I did not really get to know her at the time. I was pleased that she and I both were given honorary doctorates by Columbia in - I think - 2005, by which time, of course, I had formed a very high opinion of her remarkable achievement.
I don't know when, exactly, the visual arts part of the School of the Arts became what it is today, a really great school. My hunch is that Bruce Ferguson had a lot to do with it. He made a great difference. I did serve on various ad hoc committees, dealing with questions of tenure during his administration. I used to visit the classes of Ron Jones, where he and I had dialogs, but I never taught in the School in any way. Though my work as a philosopher of art and as an art critic were accepted and recognized, I always felt that it was appropriate to keep apart - though I do know that when, in 2004, there was a three day conference on my writing, the School of the Arts was one of its sponsors.