Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 70th post, Helena recalls taking a Pratt art course with a famous sculptor at a formative time in her life. Enjoy!
Three-Dimensional Design, part 1
Walter Erlebacher introduced himself to us that first week of Art School, all of us sitting in rows, at desks that could have been in any classroom anywhere—but the tops of these desks were hinged. Inside each desk, laying flat to the bottom, was a wooden two-by-two, worn and yellowed with years and handling, that was also hinged and lifted to fit a perfect notch on the underside of desktop, transforming it into an easel, a work surface, forty-five degrees. The tops were black, as I recall them, and were separated from the bottom edge of the desk by an inch, maybe a two-inch ledge, a place an 18x24 inch drawing pad could rest, rather than slipping to one’s lap. Were the desktops black wood? Painted black? They weren’t slate, but they were something other than an ordinary wood desktop, that was my impression. This desktop was a tabernacle, something Other, something to design on, to make art on, surrounded by other people making art in an environment built for artists. I’d crossed a parallel, a divide, into a sacred country. And childhood was over.
Mr. Erlebacher sat behind a high desk at the front of the room, higher than all of us.
“You’re in college, now,” Mr. Erlebacher said, a pronouncement. “Here we can say ‘balls.’” There was laughter, uncomfortable. I was frozen, the camera I always was. Taking it in, unprocessed. But it had its impact—it knocked up against my adolescent daze.
I didn’t like Erlebacher, and I never grew to like his class. Like other male teachers at Pratt in the sixties, you could read him as arrogant, and I guess I did. I didn’t say that to myself, arrogant; that thought was too sophisticated for my sixteen-year-old mind. Erlebacher was just out of my reach, beyond my capacity to then comprehend. So, forced inside myself and shut away, I sat in that room among twenty or twenty-five young artists, some of whom were high-powered talents. I didn’t perceive myself to be one of them, and I wasn’t one of them, because I wasn’t one of any group. I wasn’t, it seemed, built for groups. I realize I was what the education community now would call a self-learner. I moved solo, took in information, but rarely could I perform in a group. The group wiped me out, overcame my consciousness, any self I had then.
I would have to figure out how to process Erlbacher’s assignments, by myself, in my own company, at home in my room, the room in our Queens apartment, the door closed. My mother had closed the door first, when I was fourteen and began painting. My father had set up the metal folding table I still have that must have been for company. That was a sacrifice, I realize now, an act of respect, acknowledgement. And I misunderstood my mother’s closing of my door as something other than acknowledgement, too. I might do the same. Close away a table full of paints and paintings, so different than the beige order of the rest of the house. My mother liked muted tones, and lived well in them, though it’s clear to me now that she was as locked away as I was. When, for some occasion, she borrowed a dress from a friend, my sister and I were stunned—not by the act of our mother borrowing a dress, something we had never witnessed, we were stunned because the dress was fuschia—fuschia chiffon. I can’t imagine where she was to wear it. We were scandalized.
Erlbacher’s wife was the painter Martha Mayer. Both achieved a kind of greatness, and the kind of fame that an artist achieved in the art world of the sixties, with its many, many layers beyond the Museum of Modern Art, though both their work would, in time, find its way to museums. The truth was, Erlebacher was the real thing, and I was too young to know anything about that. One of our projects was about entropy. Entropy! I still barely understand the concept, except like this: as things break down into chaos, even then, even breaking down, things follow an internal order. We spent weeks, maybe six weeks, gluing those sticks into a series of constructions to depict entropy. I remember my work, sloppy with the glue, though I didn’t know what I was doing. I see that I was grappling with the concept. Entropy.
We worked in plaster of Paris, terrible dusty stuff we poured into molds we’d made out of milk cartons and anything else we could improvise, then shaped into forms on spinning sanding wheels, unmasked, our skin and clothing coated in plaster dust. Sticks, slow-drying Duco cement, inhaling its fumes and enduring headaches. I experienced the materials of 3-D class as hostile.
I think three-dimensionally but can’t express myself in three dimensions. I move through space as if I were unsighted, blind. A kind of dyslexia, a reversal of space. Not like my sister, Jolene. She was a born navigator. She could have, I imagine, oriented herself by the stars, or had some magnetic match with the earth’s poles. She was incapable of getting lost, in woods, in a maze of tunnels under our cousin, in Rene’s Manhattan apartment building looking for the parking garage when my sister was sick with cancer. She was the one who found the way to my car, while I panicked. I felt detached from my classmates. I was two years, and more, younger than any of them. Walter Ehrlbacher’s class defeated me. I eventually dropped out of Pratt three quarters of the way through Foundation year. But I’d come back.
To get to school I took the F train from Queens, and the GG to Brooklyn. My stick constructions broke in the press of rush hour. Once I was goosed, my hands and arms protecting a stick-structure I’d been up half the night gluing into some kind of formation that didn’t make any visual sense. Goosed, with my hands tied up, me the camera. I couldn’t believe it had happened. I’d heard about being goosed in the rush hour. I was amazed, but it hurt my feelings. Some man in an overcoat and suit, going nicely to his office job. What a disconnect.
I was out of my league that first year at Pratt. Just too young. My head was filled with Ted, my life was calling to me.
Three-Dimensional Design, part 2
I took Three-Dimensional Design again, three years later. Then, I was older than my classmates, and I knew why I was there. I knew I had to become an artist and a teacher, or I would be a secretary, an impossibility. I was incompetent at anything else but art, and I had an instinct for teaching. My father was a teacher and must have known I would find myself in teaching as he had. I wouldn’t have majored in Art Ed but for his plea that would. Hard-headed as I was, he got through to me.
The second time, I had another teacher for 3-D, one I can’t recall; other than that he was another man, he is a blank. And I can’t recall any of my work for that class. It’s only now that I realize the stature of Walter Erlebacher. I was shocked into consciousness by his presence. The consciousness of a camera.
There are two sharp memories I have of him, of Erlebacher. The first is his introduction that first day in class—saying the word “balls,” which was the shock he meant it to be. The other is more tender. One evening, after classes, I was sitting in a booth at a restaurant I can’t remember the name of, on Myrtle Avenue, a few blocks from Pratt. The El, the elevated subway tracks, ran above Myrtle. It strikes me now that the restaurant was known for its steak dinners—it was a place with some fame, at least at Pratt, and I recall now that it had a genteel history and had been there a long time—years, maybe back, or almost, to when Pratt was founded. I was waiting for Ted. Erlebacher came in with Murray Israel, who was my Art History teacher. The two were dressed in overcoats, so it must have been the end of that winter, because I’d drop out in spring. Mr. Erlebacher greeted me—that surprised me; I felt so small as to be invisible. I never spoke in his class. Erlebacher greeting was genuine, warm, a side of him I would not have imagined. Mr. Israel was a far less formidable figure than Erlebacher, and I can’t remember if he greeted me or not. If he did, it must have been a perfunctory thing.
Erlebacher was intimidating and he was, I realize now, a big person. He wasn’t arrogant, but strong, and, in that way a good teacher has, his students meant something to him. Israel was something else, absent, as far as I was concerned. They sat down in the next booth, closer to the door. That must have given me a turn. Why would I have been at that restaurant? Maybe it was someplace Ted would be able to find me, inside, out of the cold. Waiting somewhere on campus would have been complicated; what would it have taken to describe the buildings to him? Where could we have met but outdoors, and it was too cold. I don’t recall Ted ever being on campus. Pratt was my territory. Of course, we’d need a landmark place to meet that night, but that restaurant seems too sophisticated a place for me to have suggested. I was still sixteen. But Ted was seven years older. Maybe he knew the place, if it was famous.
I’m sure now that we didn’t stay for a meal, but it’s just too blank to fill in. And where we went next doesn’t show up either. Our haunts were Chinese restaurants in Brooklyn. But I do remember that Ted would ride me home on the subway from Brooklyn to Queens, no matter what the hour, and we’d take the Jewel Avenue Bus, and Ted would pay my fare, still in coins, and walk me to the Apartment building on Gravett Road—the name the building corporation gave our street when they built the four six-floor buildings that were our co-op—College View Apartments, Queens College, where my father taught and where I would teach writing later, in the same building—what was the name of it? The buildings of Queens rambled around the cemetery. Gravett Road, for the graves—in Kew Garden Hills, where I still lived with my parents, in Apartment 2C, right to the door. Only on a weekend would he come in for a cup of tea. But this was a weekday, a school day, a day of work. He’d get to bed at two or three in the morning back in Brooklyn, Flatbush, 446 Rugby Road, where his parents were sleeping, where Ted still lived. The house on Rugby and East 16th Street, where no one yet knew that I would become a permanent part of life. Such a long time ago.
But here is what I remember about Walter Erlebacher that night. The glass door of the restaurant swung open, letting in cold air, and it was Ted. Meal or no meal, I’m sure now that he sat down. He took off his overcoat—every man wore one then, and a muffler, and leather gloves. I wore them, too, and must have had my Harris Tweed that night. And we must have had something, a drink, a cup of tea, Ted was a tea drinker, and the years with Ted were probably the only years I drank tea, to join him, in our on-and-off, on-and-off life together. We had to have been there long enough for Erlebacher to overhear us in that next door booth, to have gotten an impression of Ted, for Erlebacher to say what he said.
After our tea, if it was tea, we stood up, Ted took our coats from the hook that was fastened to the old wood frame of the leather seats of that booth and held it while I slid my arms into the satin-lined sleeves of that classic Harris Tweed. No doubt I wrapped my muffler around my neck while Ted put on his coat.
I introduced Ted to Mr. Erlebacher and to Murray Israel. I can see Erlebacher’s face, warm, interested, really interested. Israel, well, I can’t see him. But I can imagine that he was polite, but not really taking notice, though maybe I’m wrong. No one knows what goes on in another person’s mind, and I’d probably be surprised if I could ever know if that was a moment for Israel, too. Erlebacher, he was smiling. Really smiling. It was an expression I simply had never seen on his face.
“Well, I am glad we are leaving her in good hands,” he said to Ted, and looked at me, still so warm. No, I have never forgotten that moment. I took that picture, developed it deep in the darkroom of my being.
And, in spite of Ted’s and my on-off relationship, in spite of the pain the years would bring, and the familiarity, the laughter and the family that would do its best to adopt me, so different from them was I—the family with the mother-in-law who would be so important to me, who I would love so much, and whose heart I surely broke. Erlebacher was right. Ted’s hands were beautiful, graceful hands. And I was in them. Good hands. Ted, and who he was, determined the course of the rest of life.
What is a snippet of a conversation you had with a person from your past that you’ve never forgotten, and have you written about it? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
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