THE WIZARD OF AMAM
Some of Tod's most vivid recollections of Oberlin centered about art professor Clarence Ward, the legendary director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, who "gloried in the Cass Gilbert building," which "he dressed up with all of the latest equipment. He was so technologically minded, trying to get the history of art methodology well organized according to the latest sort of procedures, he used to drive people crazy, because it was so complicated, it couldn't be operated." Ward was celebrated for his "important innovations in the presentation of the history of art through slide projection; his classes were notorious for their technical perfection and their advanced ways of presenting works of art." He had outfitted "a lectern with about forty buttons on it, for fading out and enlargements, and all the rest of it, and it was really very ingenious, but visiting lecturers had a very hard time understanding this... and they complained bitterly of his mechanical innovations they did not understand ten minutes before the lecture... So there was a lot of gossip in the profession about Clarence Ward: not just his genius, but his wizardry."
Part of Ward's technological innovation, Tod said, was "an intercom system. He had microphones in every classroom. He would brag to visiting scholars, 'I can tell you what is being lectured about in room so-and-so.' He'd switch on the microphone, and the lecture that was going on in ancient sculpture would come on. This was really considered a terrible invasion of privacy, but he was very proud of it and never had any compunction about doing it. I know that my particular mentor later on in life, [first director of the Museum of Modern Art] Alfred Barr, could not stand the idea that he would be able to do this."
Tod had the highest regard for Ward, whom he called "an absolute zealot on the discipline of art history" and "the leading educator and documenter of the least-known aspects of early forms of Romanesque and Gothic architecture" whose work "led to the development of a whole series of scholars that undergirded the knowledge of the field."
PRAGUE AND THE NAZI OCCUPATION
After graduation, Tod spent two years as an exchange fellow at the Prague Academy of Arts, studying painting, drawing, and art history; in the summers he was a pupil of the Hungarian painters Tibor Gergely and Anna Lesznai. He also began a survey of Central and Western European museums and private collections of modern art, documenting with photographs some collections that were later confiscated by the Nazis. His roommate was violinist/conductor Joseph Wincenc '37, who remembered that Tod and he had visited Vienna in early March 1938 and were advised by the U.S. Embassy to leave Austria as soon as possible; the Nazi Anschluss took place on March 12. Both Tod and Wincenc had been "adopted" in Prague by Jewish
arts patroness Lilly Morawetz, who saw to
it that both young men made important connections there; later both Lilly and her daughter Margit, trapped in Nazi-occupied France, were saved by Varian Fry and escaped to America.
Following the Nazi takeover of the Sudetenland, on October 1, 1938, Tod re-called that "I left the country to deliver messages to personal and professional friends in Paris and then came back to Prague to help some of the Jewish refugees who were very close friends. I wrote an article on what the cultural changes were, and sent it to The New York Times by airmail the night of March 14. The very next day the Nazis crossed the borders, and the whole process of incorporating Czechoslovakia into the German Reich had taken place." Tod had held back nothing in the article, speaking of "the complete subjugation of the robust creative expression of a free and gifted people before relentless terror and intolerance." The Times held onto his article and published it five months later, less than two weeks before the start of World War II.
It took three days for Tod, who spoke German, to get out of Czechoslovakia, fearing all the while that the Nazis might have intercepted his Times article and would seek some form of reprisal. After the German military took him off the Paris-bound train and sent him back to Prague to "get per- mission" from the American embassy to leave the country, he boarded the train back to the border, only to be met by other Germans who "just didn't know what to do. This was pretty early in the game." Finally, the Germans said, "Okay, get on the train.: "I think they just thought that I was an 'Ausland Deutscher.' After that, I had to talk my way through the French border, and that was the end of my German adventure."
Another reason that Tod was apprehensive during his departure from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 was that, "I did another article, published in The New Yorker, on the 1938 fight between Max Schmeling and Joe Louis, titled 'Maxie, For God's Sake!' from the German phrase, 'Um Gottes Willen.' Louis knocked Schmeling out in the first round -- it was rather dramatic. The article was a translation of what was broadcast from ringside by the German announcer who was sent over especially for the fight. The Nazis thought it was going to be a walkover, and the announcer made a lot of foolish remarks. It was an embarrassment of considerable proportions." Tod translated the broadcast from the original German report published in the Prager Mittag and sent it to The New Yorker. The German announcer is quoted as saying, "Ha-ha -- the conceited Neger! He wears a shrill-colored sleeping suit and over that a blue silk dressing gown... Probably because he knows he will soon be lulled into sleep." After the stunned announcer witnesses the knockout, he says, chillingly, "Maxie, you can come home calmly. We will not put you in prison, or in a concentration camp, either." This article, Tod said, "went to other papers as far away as Australia."
In the summer of 1939 Tod was named the first Harvard University Fogg Museum Fellow in Modern Art so that he could complete the survey of modern art in European collections he had begun in 1937, but World War II intervened. He was reassigned to do research for one year in Mexico on the origins and development of mural painting, and other aspects of contemporary art in that nation. In Mexico, he collaborated with the staff of the Museum of Modern Art in preparing its landmark "20 Centuries of Mexican Art exhibition of 1940. Appointed secretary to the Committee on Art of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in the Roosevelt Administration in 1940, Tod assisted in arrangements for a series of ex-hibitions of contemporary United States painting circulated by the Museum of Modern Art in ten South and Central American capitals in 1941. The next year he was called to the University of Chile, ostensibly to teach the first course there on the history of U.S. art, but primarily to engage in top-secret intelligence work for the U.S. government, his first wife, Mimi Gratzinger Levitt, told me recently.
Later during the war, he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and as an editor
for the Army Service Forces Language Unit. He was then sent to Munich and Heidelberg in 1945 to 46 to serve in the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, Dis-placed Persons. Dorothy Olson remembers meeting Tod in Munich in late 1945 and attending a Beethoven symphony concert
he had arranged as part of his official duties there. Married at the end of 1941, Tod and Mimi, a Viennese cousin of the Morawetzes who became Alfred Barr's secretary and a trans-lator at the Nuremburg Trials, were kept apart by the war and ended up divorcing early in 1947, though they remained friends. Following his stint in Europe, Tod was executive director of the American Institute of Graphic Arts and took graduate studies in the history of art at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, where he eventually earned the MA degree. After his years at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, he was assistant director of the Yale University Art Gallery and then, before his 1974 faculty appointment at Syracuse University, was
the first director of the Art Gallery of the Center for Inter-American Relations in
New York City.
CATLIN'S OWN WORDS TO LIVE BY
After Tod's death, his son William [Bill] Catlin '81 said of his father in the Syracuse Post-Standard, "His mind was capable of synthesizing information from many different fields and producing new ideas and new meanings. Dad had an intense appreciation of life. One of the things he gave to me and my sister Katharine was a sense of how im-portant it is to be open to new experiences and to have an appreciation for beauty." In his eulogy for Tod, Bill quoted from a slip of paper with Tod's scribbled notes that Tod's wife of 40 years, Ruth, had only recently discovered at home:
" Enjoy everything.
Every minute counts.
Embrace the world.
Observe, enjoy, remember."
John Harvith,executive director of national media relations at Syracuse University, was director of news services at Oberlin College from 1980 to 1989. He and Susan Edwards Harvith co-curated art exhibitions and presented film series in Oberlin through Firelands Asso-ciation for the Visual Arts, which Susan directed.