Art Is Where You Find It

One day about four years ago, Harry Bober, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts, noticed bits of curious-looking paper blowing about a Manhattan street. A naturally inquisitive man, Bober chased them, crawling under automobiles and peering into garbage cans until he had retrieved most of the pieces. After sponging off as much mud as he could, he found he had recovered 200 pages of a rare and valuable Islamic prayer book.

Harry Bober has always been as interested in creating art as teaching it. Youthful in appearance despite a balding head, Bober is an exuberant, effusive man who easily communicates his interest in the history of art to anyone he engages in conversation. Last term he gave birth to a new course, "Great Original Works of Art," and this year he is the Head Tutor of the Fine Arts Department.

In his lifetime, Bober has shifted from a struggling New York artist to a professor and respected art scholar. But he has not confined his research to libraries. Through a series of fellowships and grants, he has gone abroad over seven times, visiting continental universities and wandering through uncatalogued streets in search of art objects.

Near the end of his 1938 study trip, Bober journeyed into Italy and almost into the hands of the Gestapo. Misunderstanding the Italian order to declare all the money he had, he declared his Italian currency only. He could have been accused of leaving the country with more money than he had declared on entering. But, stuffing the extra cash into his shoes, Bober slipped by the Italian officials. When he reached down to remove the money from his shoes, however, a group of Nazis stalked into his compartment. The Nazis started a severe cross-examination of the frightened and surprised Bober which a friendly Czech train-acquaintance halted by remarking, "What are you bothering him for? Can't you see he's an American and doesn't know anything, anyway?"

Most people buy their houses and get art objects to fill them, but Bober did it the other way around. He picked out his present home after forty-five minutes of house-hunting. "For me it was easy," he says. "I had only two qualifications for my home . . . it had to be close to the students, and it had to have a living room big enough to hold a favorite Italian painting of mine." Bober and his wife, Phyllis, live in a small white house behind Dunster, where he is a non-resident tutor.

Although he is enthusiastic about classical art, Bober's home is filled with art of all kinds. He feels that any natural material molded into a new form by human effort is a work of art worth considering. In teaching, he tries to portray art as an emotional expression. "The trouble with most art courses today is that they teach you too much about lantern slides and not enough about painting and sculpture."