Alexander Nemerov curls up into himself, legs crossed, shoulders bowed, cocooned on his couch. Here in his Palo Alto home, the art historian known for his larger-than-life performances at the lectern is small. His voice doesn’t fill the room. He’s thin, silver haired. Elfin, some might say, as in, having a mysterious or magical power to attract.
“This film is really about a lonely child and the curse of an imagination,” he says. In the glow of his TV, he’s watching a scene from the 1940s thriller The Curse of the Cat People—“one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.” He stares at the little girl, whose father is threatening her with punishment if she continues to insist that she sees a woman, her imaginary friend, in their backyard. Nemerov, who says he speaks with artists (whether dead or alive) rather than about artists, starts a conversation: “Right, right, she’s brave,” he says to the TV, nodding vigorously. He listens to the little girl defy her father, pointing to the woman right in front of her. “See there, she’s honest. There’s no shame.”
Nemerov writes about The Curse of the Cat People in his 2005 book, Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures, which uses the director’s 1942–46 films to illuminate the more melancholy, less war-glorifying side of Americans during World War II. “Curse of the Cat People is really about overcoming loneliness through your power of imagination, and through your faith and love that go into that imagination,” he says. “And how, moreover, the world hates that. And will try to kill that.”
On one level, Nemerov uses art to make sense of America. His first book was about Frederic Remington’s depictions of the West at the turn of the 20th century; his 10th, about abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler in 1950s New York. On another level, he uses art to make sense of the self. During his career as a professor at Stanford, then at Yale, then at Stanford again, he has examined his parents’ marriage, the death of one of his brothers, and the artistic legacies of his father and aunt—the poet Howard Nemerov and the photographer Diane Arbus. In the process, he says, he has transformed from critical scholar into “an artist whose medium is scholarship,” creating things of beauty rather than tearing them down.
THINGS OF BEAUTY: Nemerov keeps Yuchen Ge’s The Bakery on the Border on the wall of his office.
Then he brings both knowledge and self-knowledge into the classroom. Nemerov teaches a survey course each fall, How to Look at Art and Why: An Introduction to the History of Western Painting. It’s known by students as simply Nemerov, as in “Are you going to Nemerov today?” His fans sometimes refer to the course in religious terms, which is fitting since Nemerov considers the lecture hall a sacred space. “His lectures are like these confessional experiences,” says Noah Sveiven, ’23, who admits to having teared up in class a few times. They are “a kind of testimony, an invitation for further thinking with which listeners may do what they wish. The dominant narrative about technology in Silicon Valley—that technology is triumphant—Nemerov pushes back against. He pushes back against easy answers to hard questions.”
On the first day of class this fall, Nemerov paces the stage, seeming to inhabit the images of the paintings he flashes up on the wall behind him. To help discover what he calls the “mysteriousness” in life—that realm of the world that includes wonder and beauty and meaning—he gets close up, sweeping an arm across a ray of sunlight in a Caravaggio or tracing the fingers of God in a Michelangelo. Then he asks his students to find that mystery within themselves. “Make it a force in the world,” he says. “That’s the goal of this course.”
The course has evolved since Nemerov began teaching it at Yale in 2007 from a scholarly endeavor to one with a loftier goal: to feed souls. A lecture once titled “The Italian Renaissance” might now be dubbed “Love” or “Beauty.” His goal isn’t to teach historical names and dates, but to share with students what moves him so they might discover what it is that moves them, whether it’s Raphaelle Peale’s still life titled Blackberries (1813) at the de Young Museum in San Francisco—“Oh my god, wait till you see them! They glisten!”—or Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth, a painting by the 17th-century Spaniard Francisco de Zurbarán, and how the way the Virgin looks at her adolescent son taught Nemerov so much about his own mother.
“The history of art is the merest scaffold,” he says. “I’m talking about moments of truth. Delicate things, scenes in a movie of a little girl, apples, blackberries, the small, the fragile, as being profoundly strong foundational aspects of our lives.”
OLD FRIENDS: Nemerov has been visiting Peale’s Blackberries since 1998. “Each berry has different personalities,” he says. (Raphaelle Peale/Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/Public Domain)
Sadness
About eight years ago, Nemerov received a photograph dated August 12, 1944, from a man in Derbyshire, England, whose uncle served in World War II with Nemerov’s father. It’s a snapshot of the view from inside a Bristol Beaufighter off the coast of France. Long before he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Howard Nemerov was in that plane, the lone American in a British squadron targeting a German minesweeper in the waters below. Inspired by that old black and white photo, Nemerov wrote an essay, “Flying Home,” in which he envisions the world that brought together his English mother, Peggy Russell Nemerov, and his father.
“Flying was a magic dream for my father. Poetry was too, and so was being in love.” The essay, part of Nemerov’s path toward a better understanding of his own childhood, presages his future mother’s “gin-soaked tears of rage” that he would come to know so well as a child. It tells how his mother followed his father back to New York and then to Vermont, where, in 1963, Nemerov, the second of three sons, was born.
FAMILY OF ORIGIN: Peggy (left) and Howard, Jeremy, and Alexander Nemerov (right). (Photos, from left: Courtesy Alexander Nemerov; Margaret Nemerov)
“My parents were loving, but my mother was a pretty serious alcoholic, and my dad was absorbed in his own poetry,” Nemerov says as he sits on the living room couch with the family dog, Juno, a white Chihuahua-terrier mix, curled up beside him. It’s the home where he and his wife, Mary, raised their two daughters, Lucy, ’24, and Anna, and reflects an image of peaceful domesticity far from the one he paints of his own childhood.
“You would come home from school and just not know what you were going to find,” he says. “My mother passed out on the floor, her body displayed in a dramatic fashion for her husband—and her son—to see.” His older brother, David, 13 years his senior, was out of the house by then, but his younger brother, Jeremy, grew up wounded and angry.
“Jeremy wanted to destroy the family in his own way,” Nemerov says. “He was a drug addict starting with cocaine in the ’80s, and then just became the kind of incorrigible person in the way that people addicted to drugs are. I just became, for lack of a better word, sad.” He shares a June 27, 2014, newspaper story from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, headlined “Death of a Poet’s Son.” Jeremy Nemerov was found beaten and unconscious in a Leavenworth, Kan., prison cell. He never regained consciousness.
FAMILY OF REFUGE: Nemerov with his wife, Mary, center, and one of their daughters, Lucy, top.
Through making art, Nemerov finds truths that can lead him to forgiveness—forgiveness of his mother and his brother. He writes that the war years never really left his mother, who died in 2011: “She told me that as a girl she had once been walking on a beach when a lone German airplane spotted her and strafed the sand with bullets. Who knows how being singled out for death from above stayed with her during her whole life.” Recounting this moment at home on his couch, he pauses, remembering his mother when she was young and he was small. She gave him his love of old movies and a love of history, and his sadness, too.
“All this, you know, enters my teaching,” Nemerov says. “I don’t really hold a lot back.” The classroom is a place to search for truth. “My voice is different, and my bearing is more outsized, but it’s really just like we’re talking now. I don’t have time to not be myself.”
Anger
Nemerov first discovered his love for paintings in a high school AP art history class in St. Louis, where his dad was a professor and poet in residence at Washington University from 1969 until his death in 1991. “I was drawn to paintings instinctively as points of stability in my own instability,” he says. He found comfort in their stillness, in the fact that their essence was forever encapsulated within a frame. Then, as an undergraduate at the University of Vermont from 1981 to 1985, where he majored in art history and English, he found another place of peace in the beauty of the campus.
“I’m so glad my daughter is going there,” he says. It’s the end of summer and the sounds of clattering from the kitchen come from Anna, who is preparing for her trip back to his alma mater for her sophomore year. “It’s beautifully situated on a lake with the Adirondack Mountains on the other side. I feel there’s a kind of connection between my loving art and loving that place.”
As a graduate student at Yale, he found a much different world, one that provided him an acceptable space “to be angry and destroy things.” It was a high point for deconstructionism, a method of criticism that involved the breaking down of art into its components, a tearing apart. (Yale is also where he learned how to look closely at art, to build an entire world out of just one painting, or even just a single blackberry.) For his dissertation—which became his first book—Nemerov chose to write about Remington, an artist he didn’t like. He says he hadn’t yet learned enough to know how to write about artists he loves, such as Caravaggio or Peter Paul Rubens, who is the subject of his next book.
“Anybody starting out in academic life, they have a learning curve, and, in my case, it was about myself,” he says. “I’ve since learned that it’s much harder to make something beautiful than to destroy it.”
The book was a critical analysis of Remington, who painted his notion of the Wild West from his home in the East. “I was telling people this is all fabrication,” Nemerov says. “People did not like to be told that their myths were myths. It got a lot of criticism.” Still, his reinterpretation of Western images—particularly as a guest curator of the 1991 Smithsonian exhibit The West as America—got him noticed by Stanford, where he became a visiting assistant professor in 1992 and a tenure-line one in 1995. His flight to California was, he says, both literally and figuratively a means of escape from his family.
“When I was first teaching at Stanford, when I was 29 years old, I went back to St. Louis just to go home for a few days,” he says. “On the plane ride back, the one and only time this has happened to me in my life, I just started crying, weeping, bawling. It was like 29 years of damage was unfolding there, my body telling me I was in crisis. The positive of that was I began to get therapy, to get help.”
Imagination
Nemerov began developing his relationship with Peale’s Blackberries when he visited San Francisco’s de Young Museum as a young Stanford faculty member in 1998. “Each berry has different personalities,” he says. “Some are curious. Each has its own uniqueness. The world comes to life there.” On occasion he still visits the painting, and when he does, he’s surprised that it doesn’t remember him. “I feel like saying to it, like ‘Hey, hi,’” he says. “It treats me as if it doesn’t know me, pretending that it doesn’t. It’s persuasive, but I feel that it’s not telling the total truth.”
Nemerov considers Peale the best of the early American still-life painters, and, despite the artist’s being long dead, one of his most important mentors. “He taught me what a painting is, what it is to paint something.” He leaves the couch to grab his laptop, calling up Peale’s Still Life with Cake.
“I teach this painting, which exemplifies this vibing with Raphaelle Peale, to my students,” he says as he traces the curve of the apple on the screen. “I talk with my students about the edges of the apple. You have to do very tricky things with the edges. You have to imply that the three-dimensional apple is there; it is a leaving off and a letting go. It’s very poignant. In it is embodied the whole gamut of representation, a whole world even, that you can’t see.”
Nemerov’s second book, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824, presents a radical interpretation of Peale’s paintings—of blackberries and pieces of meat and cracked-open watermelons—as about the artist’s fantasies of his own full, sensuous body, running completely afoul of the prevailing ideals of the early 19th century: “virtuous selfhood and being a proper citizen.” Despite its being “a very weird book,” he says, it got him tenure and a return trip to Yale.
“Some people hated it, as with all my work, saying it’s too imaginative, and it’s not true, and it’s crazy. But I’ve always thought that to write about a piece of art you have to meet it with something like its own imagination. You have to make a work of art to write about a work of art. That, to me, is my hope. That’s all I was doing.”
In 2007, Nemerov decided it was time to teach more of what he had learned beyond just art history and launched the introductory course that is now known as How to Look at Art and Why. It became one of Yale’s most popular courses, with upwards of 500 students shopping it each spring. When Nemerov decided to return to Stanford in 2012, he assumed the popularity of the course would follow him. It did not, at least at first.
“It’s been a humbling experience because I came here thinking, ‘OK, I’m going to really move the needle here,’ and yet nothing’s changed really,” he says. “The indifference toward the humanities is so profound at Stanford. You can’t really change the culture of a place; all you can do is do your thing and create some kind of a ripple.” The ripple has grown; in the fall, 113 students enrolled.
“I think some people come into class looking to get a more conventionally structured type of knowledge,” says Grace Carroll, ’23. “Stanford students are primed to harvest information so that they can reinvest it in the future. What do you with a poet with a microphone in Silicon Valley, right? He’s so intentionally against the grain. It really makes some people uncomfortable.”
Which was part of the point of recruiting Nemerov back to Stanford, says Debra Satz, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of philosophy. “I knew he was teaching the largest class in the humanities at Yale, and I thought, ‘We need somebody like that.’ He’s a brilliant scholar in an area where sometimes people might think, ‘This is not necessary; this is a luxury.’ He’s turned so many students on to art and to seeing that this is absolutely necessary for your soul.”
Carroll is one such student. “It changed my sense of purpose,” she says. “I think it saved me 10 years of my life.” In an essay for the Stanford Daily magazine, she wrote that as a frosh, “I had drive, I had prospects, I had start-up ideas.” But rather than chase the dreams of her 18-year-old self, she’s teaching middle school on a Fulbright Scholarship in Taiwan and aims to “build a life around writing and art.” Nemerov’s course “made me feel like living a life around the ideals of beauty, that wasn’t a silly thing to do,” she says. “That I was doing something valuable.”
Nemerov is well aware that not all his students become converts. In 2021, the Stanford Daily asked him and another Stanford professor to read aloud some of their “mean course reviews” for a video. At his wife’s prodding, he obliged.
“All caps with five exclamation points: ‘DON’T TAKE IT!!!!! The professor is extremely elitist and obnoxious. Definitely not worth the hype,’” Nemerov reads, then looks into the camera: “This person astutely offers criticism of the kind that rings in my own head uttered by my own soul after every single lecture.”
Peace
Nemerov never really knew his famous aunt, the photographer Diane Arbus, who died by suicide when he was 8. “She was a secret in our house,” he says, speaking at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2015 about the book he published that year, Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus & Howard Nemerov. The book, a personal exploration of the relationship between his two relatives, grew out of the last lecture he always gave in his American Photography course.
“I think I have my own silent dialogue with them now that they are both long since dead,” he says. “They are vital presences in my life. Above all, what they’ve taught me is their high unapologetic and fearless regard for art. Their belief in what you could call a religion of arts. It does fall to certain people like poets and artists to reveal the world as it really is.”
LIFE IMITATES ART: Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth gave Nemerov insight into his mother. (Francisco de Zurbarán/Cleveland Museum of Art Collection/Public Domain)
If Nemerov believes in a religion of arts, perhaps its key tenet is the preservation and protection of imagination in a world that often discounts it. His imagination has saved him. It’s brought peace and meaning into his life. These are the pillars, he says, upon which education should stand.
Nemerov’s exploration of his inner self, the pain he’s suffered, the beauty he’s found—he now sees all of it as a gift. And it’s one he longs to share. “I’m still learning and still damaged, but I also feel like the life experience was pretty fabulous in seeing how terrible the world can be. And now I’m less surprised by that. It allows me to find places of hope and kindness, instead of, as I think I did for a number of years, mistake my despair and anger as the definitive truths that I had to share with others. I have come out on the other side of that and am more peaceful now.
“Above all, I try to envision each lecture at Stanford as a chance to help my students to create—really more like discover—their own inner life. That’s the key for me, the sole—the only—basis for teaching.” Nemerov continues to feed his own soul through his relationships with paintings—those like Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth. He writes in his essay “Flying Home”:
“The painting shows a mother and her son. They are in a room in a house. Her son does not see that she weeps for him and perhaps for herself. The sweetest and best times I ever spent with my mother—to this day, they shape my sense of goodness in the world—were when she and I watched late-night movies on Sunday evenings in our house in St. Louis, the glow from the television set, the two people apart but together, secure in the shared sadness mother gave to son. How beautifully Zurbarán knew the score, that in such a house even a solid and sane room spun.”
Tracie White is a senior writer at Stanford. Email her at traciew@stanford.edu.
