Nagy was the perfect television artist: he wore plaid shirts, dress slacks — never jeans. Often he made his entrance smoking a pipe. Sometimes he even rolled up his sleeves. He had a beard — a small, neat one. Everything about him was redolent of autumns on Provincetown beaches. He had an oboe of a voice, and his bearing was that of your most sympathetic summer camp counselor. The show was aimed wholly at making pictures that looked like something. Weekly he went over those principles that have organized Western figurative drawing and painting since the Renaissance: vanishing points, horizon lines, one-and two-point perspective. (“For objects sitting on the ground or parallel with it, the vanishing point — or points — are on the horizon, which is always at about eye level, even if it’s behind a hill or a house. Always sketch it in, however lightly. And even if you don’t, always be aware of where the horizon line is in your picture…” What a revelation for the nine-year-old sketcher of city streets and Central Park paths!) The program’s teaching plan was wholly imitative. Nagy had his sketch pad, his pencil, his eraser, and — mysteriously and most importantly — his paper stomp. (Could anyone draw anything without a paper stomp? Apparently Nagy didn’t think so.) You had your sketch pad, pencil, eraser — and used your fingertip for the stomped-in shading (then got prints all over the rest of the page). Nagy would draw a line or a shape; you would draw that line or that shape. (“If it doesn’t look exactly like mine, don’t worry. Just relax and do the best you can. You’ll still be surprised at the results.”) And at half an hour’s end, both Nagy and you would have a basket of flowers on a table, a boat hulk beached against a grassy dune (like I said, P-town), a dog sitting before a fireplace, or a small house at the end of a path among the trees and hills.
Two or three times, Nagy actually had a young woman sit and model for him, while he, I, and how-many-thousand-more New Yorkers spent Saturday morning “trying for a likeness.” There was much analysis of the young woman’s head into those eternal basic forms; and he would point out how the rectangular solid that made up the lower part of her jaw was much longer than the one that made up the lower part of his.
By program’s end, we both had faces on our sketch pads. But neither was much of a likeness. “Well,” Nagy mused on the screen, regarding his sketch, clearly dissatisfied, “to get a likeness in a half an hour — with ten minutes out for commercials — is difficult.” (His show, too, was live.) “If you want to do this kind of thing, figure on spending an hour, an hour-and-a-half at it. Maybe even longer, at least when you start.”
Another revelation!
Now, beginning artists throughout the city had an idea of the duration of the task we’d undertaken — and an example from the internationally known Nagy himself of what would happen if you rushed it.
After the show, my younger sister and I would chase each other up and down the stairs, from the second to the third floor, bawling at one another, “Salagodoola! Menchicka Boola! Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo — !” unaware that the song’s writer was the same Walt Disney staff musician who, twenty years before, had written “Mairzy Doats.”
Our art program at school was, however, entirely different. The move from Third Grade to Fourth Grade — from the heights of the Lower School to the bottom rung of the Middle School — was, at least for me, primarily the move from art classes with Miss Dorothy Andrews, a tall, black-haired woman with a bun, who wore dark turtlenecks and long gray jumpers, but with a wholly open and experimental policy as far as the art room was concerned (whose limits I only strained once when, in my earliest years, I took off my shoes and socks and painted both my feet blue: it was reported to my parents), to art classes with Gwendolin Davies, an irrepressible woman with an English accent, bright red hair, cool-colored sweaters, and frequently some enormous piece of free-form aluminum jewelry. Older students had storied her eccentricities to us by then, so that on our first day in the new art room we were all expectant.
“No, no!” Gwenny said (we already knew we were to call her that), as some of us made tentative moves toward the paper piled on the shelves and the paint cans on the counter — as would have been proper the year before, upstairs with Miss Andrews. “We’re going to talk a bit, first. Find a seat, now. That’s right, you can sit over there. Up on the counter with you. And you lot can sit over there under the window — that’s right. No talking now; we’re big Middle Schoolers and quite grown up, all of us — aren’t we? So let’s have some attention here!”
Here, apparently, not only were we going to make art; we were going to discuss it.
Once the dozen of us were seated and silent, Gwenny clapped her hands together with the sober-eyed satisfaction of someone who had just created a masterpiece. “Now — ” (We were perched around the room, some on the shelf running under the window, some on the waist-high table with cabinets beneath, down the room’s center.) “I have a question for you. What is a picture made of?”
On shelves to the side were rows of clay and wire sculptures, piles of finished watercolors.
“Has the cat got your tongue?” she demanded of one of us. “It must. You’re not saying anything. Now, tell me. What goes into a picture?”
The gravity with which she put the question made it clear that she did not want an answer such as dogs, cats, or flowers. From my seat under the ridged wire window guard, I raised my hand.
“Yes…?”
I ventured: “The horizon line — ?”
“Absolutely not!”
The crisp denial startled me. However tentatively I’d given my answer, I’d expected praise.
But Gwenny went on. “Horizon lines, one- and two-point perspective, incident light, reflected light, isometric projections — that sort of thing: that’s precisely what we are not interested in, in this class!” She glared at me. “And I never want to hear you mention them in here again!” Then, incongruously, she smiled: “All right?”
Bewildered, I nodded.
“Good!”
Today I wonder whether Gwenny had ever caught Nagy’s Saturday morning show, to loathe it for the anti-art experience it was.
At the time, though, I was only awed by her knowledge: Nagy had never mentioned anything so complex as “isometric projections.” “Incident light…?” What, I wondered, could they possibly be; and why were they not for us?
“Now.” She turned to the rest of the room. “Can somebody do a little better than that? What goes into a picture? Someone else. Tell me… What? No idea? Well, it’s not an easy question. But, here — I’ve got a piece of paper, all tacked up. And I’m going to make a picture.” She picked up a crayon and rapidly drew an informal amoeboid line that came back to close on itself. “What’s that?”
Was it Debbie, with her pale blond hair, who volunteered from where she sat cross-legged on the central counter, “It’s… just a kind of… shape?”
“Very good!” Gwenny whirled about, practically to incandesce! “What was that word again?”
But Debbie was as nonplussed by her success as I’d been by my failure.
“You had it right!” Gwenny declared. “Just say the word once more!” But it was someone else who finally offered: “… shape?”