Szaja Kadoc (1956-57)
He was not so bright, not unusually talented and I must say for reasons that stay unclear, he remained during the term, obscure in my minds eye as opposed to his classmates who came forward from time to time and into focus. I must have passed him since he showed up for the second term. Right off he seemed more buoyant and eager, lets say earnest. He seemed to have brought himself round to comprehend the language.
I was a bit surprised with his request for a moment with me after class wherein he asked for (his word) ‘homework’. I replied, as I had from time to time from similar requests, by stating that: when I was a student at the Arts Student League, my teacher, Eugene Berman, told me to copy from the masters two hours each night. Raphael, Michelangelo, Del Sarto, preferably since they were clear in both underlying structure and grace.
It soon became clear to me that Garbo attended to these suggestions with zeal and enthusiasm, bringing to class a dozen carefully rendered studies every week. Then one day while peeking around behind the student’s drawing board, I beheld a real ‘breakthrough’ and as I told him later: its like boring a hole through a wall, you hear the drill so you know it is making headway but you don’t know how thick is the wall or the density of the material. I held his drawing up for the class to see and praised the effort.
Well… after Garbo’s ‘breakthrough’ a new confidence could be seen in both his demeanor and capability. And by the end of the term I saw him, as one of the more promising underclassmen.
And so it was that after the summer vacation I saw his name on the roll in my upper division painting class. You must understand that this was a class of 6 students who had been working with me for three years in both painting and drawing. I wondered how he managed to obtain permission from the registrar to be admitted to a class without passing its pre-requisites. If there were room for another I would let him in.
