For more than thirty-five years, Union art students have had two remarkable teachers-Walter Hatke and Arnold Bittleman.
Hatke, a Kansas native with master's degrees from the University of Iowa, joined the Union faculty in 1987 and is now the May I. Baker Professor of Fine Arts.
Bittleman, a native of the Bronx, started to draw at age five, copying drawings in books. After beginning college at the Rhode Island School of Design, he earned his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Yale. After teaching at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, the Parsons School of Design, the Minneapolis School of Art, and Skidmore, he joined the Union faculty in 1966. He was artist-in-residence and lecturer in the arts when he died in 1985, at the age of fifty-one. This spring a show of his work will open at Gallery 100 in Saratoga Springs; the show will come to the Mandeville Gallery in the Nott Memorial in the fall.The show's catalogue is being designed by Jill Korostoff '77, with financial support from Andy '71 and Abby '74 Crisses and Harris Suzuki '77.
Bittleman was a nationally-known artist, and his works were in the collections of such major museums as the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn and Whitney Museums in New York City, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. After a one-man show in New York City, The New York Times called his work “remarkable, disquieting, and many-layered.”
Jim Lowe '69, one of the owners of Gallery 100, says he got the idea for the show in a dream. “I was back at Union, and Arnie was leading the charge against the Vietnam War. Although I wasn't an art major, Arnie and I connected on this issue and many others. He was an exceptional teacher, a true friend to his students, and a brilliant artist.”
Bittleman once said that drawing is “a celebration of human seeing, of the sensuous joy of sight itself. It enables me to experience my most personal thoughts, visions, my hopes, dreams, fears, my humanity and my kinship to generations past and future.”
In December 1983, Alexander F. Milliken, of the Alexander F. Milliken Gallery in New York City, visited Bittleman's studio in Cambridge, N.Y., to pick up work for an exhibition. He later wrote about the thrill of discovering some new Bittleman work:
“…I didn't really know what I was looking for. I think I hoped something would just hit me. It didn't for more than four hours and probably over 300 drawings.
“They were in the fourth drawer of a cabinet-folded. Arnie does lots of drawings of thickets and underbrush. They are all quite wonderful and intense, and I thought that I was looking at another one, when a face emerged from the center of a thicket. My heart skipped a beat when I saw the crown of thorns and recognized the head of Jesus. I unfolded another and saw numerous faces, not obvious ones, but clear. Arnie said there were a group of them he'd done some years ago during a 'demonic' period when he'd been actively upset about the Vietnam War. He'd been thinking about putting them in book form-thus the folds….
“I didn't realize until I was on [my train] that my adrenalin was still pumping and that the thrill of discovering what I had was the cause. I now had in my possession a collection of drawings, unified in theme, and originally intended to be together. They not only evidenced extraordinary draughtsmanship, but were packed with meaning. And I wanted to exhibit them immediately.”
