Meetings of Minds

Meetings of Minds

I last saw Andrea on a chilly, rainy night in early November, cold by sunny Los Angeles standards. She called me at 11:30 that night, just as I was getting ready to go to bed, anticipating teaching the next day’s 8:00 am class at my university. Congested wet freeways, forty miles during peak commute. LA’s worst.

“Joan, I’m at a hotel on Normandie, and they won’t take my check for a room for tonight. Can you come? Charge it on your credit card? I’ll write you a check,” she told me.

When I started to say “no,” she stopped me with a sentence that took me away from my awaiting bed and transformed my understanding of my obligations to others – and to my life’s work.

My connection with Andrea had followed a circuitous, improbable path that began years before I met her. In the late 1970s, my husband Dan and I spent a year circling the Mediterranean Sea in a battered VW van we named Vanguard. We stashed Vanguard in the intestines of a ferry and went up on deck. We met a couple from Toronto who led to my improbable friendship with Andrea over a year later. Jim and Beth were both university professors. Jim taught Ancient Greek History and he entertained us with stories about the country ahead.  Fascinated by his knowledge of the culture and place, Dan and I asked if we could follow them from the Corfu dock to Athens.

As we drove eastward, Jim would motion us to a stop on the side of the two-lane road. Leaning against his car, Jim would wave and expound  in fluent detail: “This field is where they fought the Battle of Thermopylae. The Spartans advanced from over there” (another wave) and “The Athenians came from those hills.” And so it went, from there to the Oracle at Delphi, Corinth, and Athens.

Watching Jim’s knowledge flow from him so easily awed me. Over the day, I realized how ignorant I was – of my culture, history, and understanding of the world, both past and present. Not stupid, but sadly ignorant. Although apparently smart in elementary school, my intelligence decreased as my breasts grew.  I fled high school with a D average and deservedly flunked out of community college in my second year.  

Nevertheless, in Athens, I applied to California State University, Northridge and received conditional admission. In Europe, with no previous knowledge of art, I had fallen in love with the modern art I'd seen in London and Paris. More than anything, I wanted to take a class in it. But I learned I had endure two semesters of History of Art pre-requisites. <groan> before I could advance to Modern Art. So I took them, yawning at Greek and Roman sculpture and medieval paintings (except Vermeer and Renoir). A full year later, showed up at 8:00 am for History of Modern Art – and there she stood in the front of the room. 

Andrea was a painfully unattractive young woman with thin, stringy brown hair, bad skin, thick lips, and bulging eyes behind smudged glasses. She had a fine figure, though, tall and slim, perfectly attired in the academic female’s garb of an expensive, relaxed blue dress and jacket.  Then, in her rich-girl, private school drawl, Andrea spoke.

Over the term, she didn’t tell us how to look at art like a museum tourist. She didn’t teach us what a work meant, or why the artist painted it. Oh, she might talk about how the work came about, but not very often.

What Andrea taught me was how to see.  Over the years, I have considered many times just how she taught seeing, because acquiring that knowledge changed my life. It won’t sound like much, but here’s how it went: When she showed an image of Self-Portrait with a Hat by Paul Cezanne (1898), for example, she didn’t tell us anything. Instead, she asked questions:

-  What would happen if the subject was in the middle of the canvas?

-  What difference would it make if the brown round daubs in the background were blue? Or green? Or red?

-  He’s looking sideways, almost over his shoulder at the

   viewer…how would it look if he turned full face, or away to the 

   edge of the painting?

-  How would a specific, detailed background change the painting?

-   How would a light in front of the subject change it?

And so on and so on and so on. I now recognize the Socratic Method, and it worked for me.  But most of the students hated it. They wanted real lectures that would lend themselves to note-taking and test-taking, preferably multiple choice or short answer essay exams. In the Commons, they complained that she didn’t explain things fully enough or cover the who, what, and where of the painting, to reveal why the artist or painting was even important. And what the hell was she going to ask on the midterm, anyway?

The staff didn’t much like her either. Andrea demanded, patronized and, worst of all, approved yet another messy class project – one that involved students printing their own names on adhesive-backed stars and sticking them to the hallway floors. (The college had to close the arts building for three days to allow a team to come in to remove the adhesive from the floors and re-wax them.)

For me, I had been given a new, enchanting world of seeing.  This profoundly important knowledge now informs everything I see and understand to this very day. I went on to become a documentary writer, then TV producer, making more than fifty long and short-form videos over the next two decades.   Because I could see and contemplate alternative visual possibilities.

After my class, Andrea and I developed a friendship away from school. Such a cliché – my art teacher was the first lesbian I’d ever met (at least who I’d known was gay). My husband tolerated Andrea, but soon became bored by her abstruse conversation and intellectual witticisms. Her speech wasn’t conversational. She spoke in phrases or koans that made a point (or even insults) that weren’t easily comprehensible. For example, at a party I heard a previous student try to ingratiate himself with Andrea.

“Oh, Miss Levine, I really miss your class,” he gushed, earning himself a sharp look from her. 

“That’s positively 4^th Street,” she replied.

Seeing his confused look, I whispered to him, “Bob Dylan,”  What I didn’t say was that the song’s lyrics described the dismissal of someone who was a “drag to meet,” and I was pretty sure that was what she had meant.

Andrea winked at me and told him, “Joan’s my translator.” At times, when I struggled to understand her most obscure comments, I thought that might be true.

At the end of her first year, the university fired Andrea. She went to work as a curator at the famed Gemini Gallery in Los Angeles, where she helped artists Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenbourg, Jasper Johns, and other luminaries in choosing the final prints of their artworks. 

I saw her a few times, even after she left Northridge. I visited her at the Gemini Gallery to watch her examine newly struck prints. I drove out to Malibu to see her and her new lover Kate at the Albatross Inn, a once-famous hideaway hotel right on the beach. Andrea, Kate, and I burned bright sparklers as we frolicked naked in the sand at 2:30 in the morning, dipping our toes in the waves as they rolled in.

Then she and Kate moved to New York to paint full time, living at Bob Rauschenberg’s apartment while he was away for half a year. A few months later, Kate called me, in distress, to tell me that Andrea had had a serious mental breakdown. 

“She’s roaming the streets, picking up garbage to add to her paintings. I don’t know what to do,” she told me. I suggested she call Andrea’s parents. I had a new job shooting video all over the country for a TV network and didn’t talk with Kate again. When I finally tried to reach her, the NY number was disconnected, and Andrea’s parents didn’t answer my calls. Busy working, I didn’t think about it.

Two years later, I saw Andrea at the CVS drugstore parking lot on the southeast corner of La Cienega and Beverly Boulevards in Los Angeles. She wore disheveled clothing, face framed by wild, uncombed hair, and pushed a shopping cart filled with a haphazard heap of objects.  When I said hello, she didn’t recognize me. I started to shake and, not knowing what else to do, I drove away.

A year after that, her mother brought Andrea to my apartment for a visit. Thank God, she was off the street. But she was heavily medicated. I couldn’t discern even a shadow of the eerily brilliant, irritating intellectual artist she had been. Her mother blamed it all on a bad LSD trip.

Many years later, on that cold, rainy November night when I answered my phone, Andrea  didn’t sound like the professor of my college days. But I recognized her voice instantly. Then she asked me for help with the hotel.

I said “No,” that it was too late for me. She told me it was cold and wet, and she needed help. I demurred again, telling her I had to go to work early in the morning. She stopped. She paused.  I could hear her breath on the line.

Then she said the sentence that changed everything. She said it sternly, a sentence that carried a reckoning.

“Joan. I was your teacher.”

I drove to the hotel, hugged Andrea, paid for her room, refused her check, and got up tired in the morning to teach my class.  

I have never regretted giving up a few hours of sleep to help this year-ago friend -- who had given me the gift of seeing. I have since taught many classes and tried to help many students, passing on the Andrea’s gift of seeing to them, as well as another contribution she made to my life – the gift of purpose. It keeps her alive in my mind and the minds of many others.

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