I've got my prejudices here, which I'll divulge eventually, but I like to imagine Prof. Ada Berta Caldwell, just a year or so into what would be a long, long tenure at the new land grant college, suddenly coming upon the upstart talent of a real Dakota sodbuster named Harvey Dunn, as unlikely an artist as any unlettered farm kid the school enrolled. Like his father, in all likelihood he was something of a clod, except with a brush and palette.
Whereas she--well, look at her. She knew very well at what angle to wear a hat like that, how to tease that scarf into hanging loosely about her neck. She'd been reared, after all, in Lincoln, Nebraska, home of the university, and she'd lived downtown Chicago, where she'd studied art at the Institute and seen far more than her share of the world's great art. She'd taken this agricultural school job with dreams of a bright future for the institution, in a prairie world just beginning to fill with all kinds of newcomers.
Ada B. Caldwell is eminently worldly, and her student is essentially a sweet bumpkin of a guy, and a big one at that, big-boned, big-shouldered. He's nice--everybody likes him, she could see that; but he'd never been any farther east than the Big Sioux River. Brookings was a metropolis to him. Eager, sure--but in many ways not a purposefully high-achiever.
But, my word, this big guy could draw, could see, could mix color, could dream on a canvas. What an incalculable joy he must have been for Prof. Caldwell, a brand new teacher in a brand new job. What a blessing to find right there among all those farm boys a kid who didn't need to be told what was and what wasn't beautiful, a boy capable of turning out beauty all by himself from what seemed a bottomless resource of God-given talent.
A boy whose talent would, a couple decades later, put this kind of portrait on canvas, should not be sentenced to this kind of life. He had talent to show the world.
I'd love to know how it was she dared suggest he tell his parents that he wasn't coming home to farm, how she broke the news to him that she had other plans for his raw-boned talent, that he should think instead of going east to Chicago, to the same Art Institute where she'd spent four lovely years. Would she have used the word lovely? How did she speak to him anyway? As his teacher--she wasn't much older than he was. As an artist?--what if he determined her language and carriage too intimidating? How did she even dare steer his life the way she found herself powerless not to?
Did it ever occur to her that in simply raising so unimaginable a future, she would be sending him after pipe dreams that would make him forever incapable of working the land or feeding cattle the way his father did and, in all likelihood, figured his son destined to do? Did she worry about destroying his parents' sense of their son's future?
I'm thinking not. I'm thinking one of the elements of this significant moment in life of Harvey Dunn, illustrator and artist, is Prof. Caldwell's relative youth. Ada B. Caldwell went on to a long and spirited tenure at South Dakota State University. She wasn't simply an artiste. Just a few years later, she ran the women's dorm and, when that went well, became the Dean of Women. She wasn't monkish at all. I'm guessing she could well have donned a beret, she was clearly no flighty aesthete.
But Ada B. Caldwell hadn't had an abundance of students when Harvey Dunn from Kingsbury County came lumbering into her classroom. And while it was clear he drew figures like no one else in that class, she probably hadn't seen that kind of talent before. Ada B. Caldwell, Chicago Institute of Art alum, really hadn't had many students when Harvey Dunn came along.
She, well, lost it. You have to go on, she said, probably impulsively, like a rookie might. You have to keep working, Mr. Dunn, she probably said. You can't just turn your back on so much God-given talent.
And more.
"I really don't care what your father will say, Mr. Dunn," she probably said. "What you have to offer is something you just have to do."
What did she know anyway, young as she was?
(more tomorrow)
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