I was too much a daughter to my father to know much about his career as a professor of the humanities, other than a few days I went to work with him as a kid.

But his job was glamorous; it struck a natural chord in me which craves getting dirty, having my clothes covered in paint, and my nails filthy. His world smelled of turpentine and sawdust, fixatives and adhesives, clay, oil paint, lacquers and charcoal dust. The cement floors were speckled with the splatters of an ebb and flow of students, natural light from the windows competing with fluorescents, easels placed in a round robin with charcoal drawings on them, featuring greater or lesser suggestions of the anatomy of those who posed.

A bored or sleepy nude would be in the center of the studio, lying or sitting in front of fifteen or twenty people all working to capture the shadow of a calf muscle or the curve of an elbow. Once, it was my mother there, as I ran in to embrace the naked lady on the pedestal, my goddess of a mom, exposed but so distant and compelling there with nothing but a weaselly chair and a brightly colored cloth as a prop. I was mesmerized; it’s not every day you get to see your mother in the role of muse and demigod, nude as Venus rising from the foam.

The observers looked at the boobs or goody bags, but were no more or less intrigued by the various portions of meat presented there. My Dad wove his way through the observers, commenting here, suggesting there, and then back to his own easel for a quick scribble.

Or he would be in front of a room, talking about art as seen through the carousel of slides he had put together, and his basso profundo would reach the furthest corners of the room, lights out save for the glowing icon (a real one, from Russia, gilt and holy) on the screen. School in the dark? It was awesome.

But I don’t have the experience of having been taught by him in this setting, though I understand he was as committed and dedicated to the cause of education as anyone I’ve ever met. He wanted people to learn how to think, not learn how to recite, and he made students work for it. I have a suspicion that the bozos who took his classes thinking that “Art History” was an easy way to make up elective credits were sorely disappointed: he did not suffer fools. He graded hard but fairly. You weren’t going to squeak out of his class without working.

But Dad has a touch of the devil in him, if we’re going to be completely honest, and a certain mercurial impishness that is piqued by ignoramuses. Students who chose willful ignorance over challenging their own points of view got a big goose egg from him, both grade-wise and, I fear, in the flick of his eyebrows as he stared them down during their fumbling nonsensical arguments.

And when push came to shove, Dad always got their attention.

One of his favorite classes was a seminar he taught with another colleague about Dadaism and Surrealism. (We’ll call it, “Dada meets the Waffle Knife: Thirty Bombasts and a Thicket.”) And because it was a seminar, it was full-contact discussion about all the greats: they read surrealism, looked at art, and debated it.

Every class has one. You’ve met them: the one student who refuses, whether through sheer belligerence or simple contrariness, to get a grasp on the subject being discussed. Asking questions bearing no relevance to the issues on the table, challenging people with half-formed arguments because they don’t like the subject in the first place.

My Dad doesn’t mind fruitful debate. He minds stupidity. So this woman in seminar was probably getting on his nerves. She may have been getting on the nerves of the other students as well, who were actively engaging with the work and chewing on the intense and strange world the Dadaists introduced. I would have been annoyed myself.

So one day she raised a question.  “André Breton, what does he mean when he says, ‘Beauty will be convulsive or not at all?’” she asked.

My father began twitching and violently lurching in his seat, falling to the floor with a heaving thrust, spastic thrashing and foaming at the mouth in front of the shocked expressions worn by the students. Then he got back in his seat and crossed his legs. “I think that’s what it means,” he replied.

He had a point.

The class went on its break. The students came back, all save one. She didn’t come back after the break, and she didn’t come back the next session. She just didn’t come back.

Though I’m sure she’ll never forget that quote by Breton.

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