Art and Soul: What Professor Nemerov cares about and why
Photo: Toni Bird
Alexander Nemerov curls up into himself, legs crossed, shoulders bowed, cocooned on his couch. Here in his Palo Alto home, the art historian known for his larger-than-life performances at the lectern is small. His voice doesn’t fill the room. He’s thin, silver haired. Elfin, some might say, as in, having a mysterious or magical power to attract.
“This film is really about a lonely child and the curse of an imagination,” he says. In the glow of his TV, he’s watching a scene from the 1940s thriller The Curse of the Cat People—“one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.” He stares at the little girl, whose father is threatening her with punishment if she continues to insist that she sees a woman, her imaginary friend, in their backyard. Nemerov, who says he speaks with artists (whether dead or alive) rather than about artists, starts a conversation: “Right, right, she’s brave,” he says to the TV, nodding vigorously. He listens to the little girl defy her father, pointing to the woman right in front of her. “See there, she’s honest. There’s no shame.”
Nemerov writes about The Curse of the Cat People in his 2005 book, Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures, which uses the director’s 1942–46 films to illuminate the more melancholy, less war-glorifying side of Americans during World War II. “Curse of the Cat People is really about overcoming loneliness through your power of imagination, and through your faith and love that go into that imagination,” he says. “And how, moreover, the world hates that. And will try to kill that.”
On one level, Nemerov uses art to make sense of America. His first book was about Frederic Remington’s depictions of the West at the turn of the 20th century; his 10th, about abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler in 1950s New York. On another level, he uses art to make sense of the self. During his career as a professor at Stanford, then at Yale, then at Stanford again, he has examined his parents’ marriage, the death of one of his brothers, and the artistic legacies of his father and aunt—the poet Howard Nemerov and the photographer Diane Arbus. In the process, he says, he has transformed from critical scholar into “an artist whose medium is scholarship,” creating things of beauty rather than tearing them down.
Then he brings both knowledge and self-knowledge into the classroom. Nemerov teaches a survey course each fall, How to Look at Art and Why: An Introduction to the History of Western Painting. It’s known by students as simply Nemerov, as in “Are you going to Nemerov today?” His fans sometimes refer to the course in religious terms, which is fitting since Nemerov considers the lecture hall a sacred space. “His lectures are like these confessional experiences,” says Noah Sveiven, ’23, who admits to having teared up in class a few times. They are “a kind of testimony, an invitation for further thinking with which listeners may do what they wish. The dominant narrative about technology in Silicon Valley—that technology is triumphant—Nemerov pushes back against. He pushes back against easy answers to hard questions.”
On the first day of class this fall, Nemerov paces the stage, seeming to inhabit the images of the paintings he flashes up on the wall behind him. To help discover what he calls the “mysteriousness” in life—that realm of the world that includes wonder and beauty and meaning—he gets close up, sweeping an arm across a ray of sunlight in a Caravaggio or tracing the fingers of God in a Michelangelo. Then he asks his students to find that mystery within themselves. “Make it a force in the world,” he says. “That’s the goal of this course.”
The course has evolved since Nemerov began teaching it at Yale in 2007 from a scholarly endeavor to one with a loftier goal: to feed souls. A lecture once titled “The Italian Renaissance” might now be dubbed “Love” or “Beauty.” His goal isn’t to teach historical names and dates, but to share with students what moves him so they might discover what it is that moves them, whether it’s Raphaelle Peale’s still life titled Blackberries (1813) at the de Young Museum in San Francisco—“Oh my god, wait till you see them! They glisten!”—or Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth, a painting by the 17th-century Spaniard Francisco de Zurbarán, and how the way the Virgin looks at her adolescent son taught Nemerov so much about his own mother.
“The history of art is the merest scaffold,” he says. “I’m talking about moments of truth. Delicate things, scenes in a movie of a little girl, apples, blackberries, the small, the fragile, as being profoundly strong foundational aspects of our lives.”