Yale Class of '52
Artists & Authors

Images of Knowing (1983) is a fifteen-minute poetic essay on ways in which we can see our own mental processes reflected in the world of nature. The text and excellent photography are so closely coordinated they give the effect of a guided meditation. The narration was by Ann Baxter. It won the Gabriel Award in 1983 as the best film of the year for national distribution in the field of religion.

Heaven and Hell by Emanuel Swedenborg, translated by George F. Dole, is the first of a twenty-five-volume set of Swedenborg's theological works undertaken by a team of four translators and numerous consultants. Previous attempts have adhered as closely as possible to the vocabulary and grammar of Swedenborg's Neo-Latin resulting in ponderous prose, which is a far cry from the original. The design of this volume represents a major effort to reflect in contemporary terms the spaciousness and elegance of the first edition.

Freedom and Evil: A Pilgrim's Guide to Hell (Swedenborg Foundation 2001). Traditional images of hell are often so simplistic as to be childish, and the very notion of hell as a place of punishment for evil betrays a hidden belief that evil would be really good if we could only get away with it. One central theme is that evil is both attractive and harmful, but that it increasingly distorts our perceptions, cuts us off from human community, and ultimately imprisons us in illusory worlds-hells-of our own making.

Richard K. Thompson
Yale 1952

“My first recognition as an artist came from Mrs. Elliot, my grammar school art teacher. Her praise of my Santa Claus drawing at the sixth grade open house that Christmas thrilled my parents and embarrassed me. I shall never forget Mrs. Elliot, my first love.

During my spare time at The Hill School, when I wasn't involved with athletics, I spent my spare time drawing in the arts building. I impressed my mechanical drawing instructor enough to win the graduation “Award of Excellence “ in that category.

At Yale I took a freshman course in art. Although frequently praised for my attention to detail, I was encouraged to “loosen up” and “spread the paint around”, a technique to this day I have not mastered. My credo has always been: “Paint or draw what you see, not what others see.”

In February 1992, after thirty-nine years of nuclear engineering design related activities, I retired to pursue my interests in art, writing, and music. As a member of the Colored Pencil Society of America, I exhibited my work in local, as well as national competition, and received a number of awards in contests sponsored by such publications as The Artists Magazine and American Artists. Most proudly my technique for combining colored pencils with marker pens has been included in five art instruction books published by renowned colored pencil artist, Sandra McCall Angelo.

In the ten years since my retirement, I have completed more than thirty-one major works of art, most of which have been commissioned by private individuals.”

Martin Duberman
Yale 1952
Ph.D. Harvard 1957

From 1957 - 1972 Martin, was a Professor of History at Yale and Princeton. Since 1972 he has been the Distinguished Professor of History Lehman/The Graduate Center, C.U.N.Y. In the fall of 1992, he was the Visiting Randolph Distinguished Professor at Vassar. Martin is the Founder and Director (1986-1996) of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the C.U.N.Y. Graduate School. He has received numerous awards including six for Paul Robeson alone, and appears frequently on national radio and television.

Five of the twenty-one books, Professor Duberman has published are on display:

Charles Francis Adams 1807-1896 (Houghton Mifflin 1960)
James Russell Lowell (Houghton Mifflin 1966)
Paul Robeson (Knopf 1989, second edition New Press 1996)
Mother Earth: An Epic Play on the Life of Emma Goldman (St. Martins 1991)
Stonewall (Dutton 1993)

Colin T. Eisler
Yale 1952
Ph.D. Harvard

Colin is the Robert Lehman Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York City. Sterling Library contains seventeen of his books. Four of these are in this exhibit.

The Genius of Jacopo Bellini (Harry Abrams Inc. 1989) “My favorite book. Unavailable since their splendid, costly two volume facsimile, a lavish labor of love by Prince Victor Goloubew (Brussels and Paris 1902), this was given to me by my wife shortly after we were married in 1960. I had long hoped to issue an affordable one volume edition of all the drawings by Jacopo Bellini along with his other drawings and paintings. Most of the drawings are in two great notebooks in the British Library and the Louvre.

By using infra-red reflectography for the British Museum drawings, that recent device led to many important discoveries, first published in my book. Instead of reproducing the Venetian's hundreds of pages once again as they appear in the Notebooks, which is what Goloubew had done with such care, I made narratives of their contents in word and image, integrating the Paris and London books' contents, organizing these 'filmed chapters' into such subjects as the Old and New Testaments, lives of saints, knightly life, genre, and 'Venice observed'.

Graduate students at the Institute of Fine Arts (where I have taught since 1958), helped with the research, and it is the first book I did using a computer, with Cindy Deith's assistance. Paul Gottlieb, director of Harry Abrams Inc, was a most sympathetic, patient publisher, and Patricia Egan (editor) and Barbara Lyons (picture editor) were as generous as they were expert. That the result is a very beautiful book is of course due to its artist and to the truly superb designer, Carol Ann Robson.

I remain very happy with this publication whose preparation was a pleasure I shall never forget. It was also a privilege to dedicate the book to my dearest friend, M. Roy Fisher, who died all too soon thereafter. Suddenly spying the Italian edition of the The Genius of Jacopo Bellini for sale in a Venetian bookshop window near the Piazza di Marco- the artist's favorite space- left me 'surprised by joy'.”