eve harrison memorial service remembrances

Renowned art historian Evelyn Byrd (Eve) Harrison, who passed away peacefully in her New York City apartment on November 3, was remembered by family and former students and colleagues at a memorial service held in the city on November 15. Their recollections and insights shared at the service are recounted here.

From nephew Randolph Harrison:

I would like to talk about the beginning and the end of Eve’s life and maybe tell you some things about her that you might not know.

She was born in Charlottesville, VA in 1920. Her parents were also teachers. They both taught at a boarding school outside of Charlottesville called the Miller School. Eve’s father took a job at an engineering company in Richmond and she graduated from high school there, where she was valedictorian of her class.

She had a sister and a brother, and three nieces and two nephews. Two of her nieces, who are also my sisters, are here this evening—Denise Miller and Margie Barton. I should also note that Denise is named after Eve—her full name is Evelyn Denise Harrison.

Because she never had a high level of comfort with mechanical things, she never seemed to want to learn to drive in high school. So she came to NYC to attend college and never needed to drive.
Although all of you know her as Eve, Eve’s family all knew her as Ewee. When she and her sister Bobbie were little her parents called her “Evie.” However, when Bobbie tried to call her Evie it came out as Ewee and Evie became known as Ewee ever since.

Although she suffered from dementia in the final years of her life, there was an immutable graciousness that she maintained at all times. She was never demanding and she was unfailingly polite to everyone with whom she came in contact.

From former student Elizabeth Milleker:

We’ve all had extraordinary teachers who were mentors, models, or simply an unforgettable presence. Eve Harrison was all of these. She taught for over 50 years, at the University of Cincinnati, Columbia, Princeton, and the Institute of Fine Arts, touching the lives of hundreds of students, whether they spent a decade getting a doctorate, took one class, or encountered her only once, at the School in Athens, perhaps on a tour to the National Museum.

What did she teach? She taught a way to work. It was not based on abstractions or theories. It rested on two foundations: one, her profound knowledge of the language, history, literature, and mythology of the ancient world; the second, close examination of individual works of art, a skill honed in her many years with the Agora marbles. She would then attempt to meld the two and find how the individual work relates to others and its possible meaning.

Her lectures gave us her findings, but it was primarily in the museum that she taught us to see. Armed with a flashlight, she gathered us close around each marble statue. She seemed to approach each work as though for the first time. No detail was too small or insignificant—the size of crystals, tool marks and style of carving, the stance, the drapery, the hair, the attributes. She worked like an Athenian painter, who always drew the body first and then dressed it.

Betsy Pemberton, who was her student at Columbia, put it well: “Above all she taught me how to see, not just to look at a pot or statue, but to really see it, slowly, carefully, patiently analyzing the characteristics and thinking before coming up with a hasty interpretation.” In Greek the verb “I know,” oida, is the perfect of the verb “I see,” eido. And this is what Eve taught her students. Seeing leads to knowing, or at least to a supportable interpretation.

Eve’s interpretations were sometimes worked out with her students. She gave seminars on the problems at hand and quietly took notes while each student gave a report. One day I found her moving around her office with a large pole, trying to recall exactly how she had poled a raft through shallow waters, in her youth. She explained she was toying with the idea that the arm position of one of the wounded Amazons meant that she had been poling through the swamps to safety at Ephesus. We poled around the room for quite a while.

The results of her work appeared in the dozens of articles we know. They were models of academic prose that couched lucid description, analysis, and rich supporting evidence in an unassuming, almost conversational style.

That style was like Eve herself. Charles Edwards, so dearly missed, once told us about an incident in the Agora: In the early 80s the growing numbers of Japanese tourists became obvious. At morning tea in the Agora someone remarked on them and jokingly said “I wonder what the Japanese word is for ...” and mentioned some archaeological term, like Doric temple or votive relief. And Eve quietly gave the answer. Most of the people at the table were not aware of her work during the war in Japanese codes. Eve was self-effacing, never putting herself forward. She was a private person. And it took a long time to really know her. But this was part of her focus on her work. She did not publicize herself; it was not about her, it was about her scholarship and her students.

Nevertheless, Eve knew who she was. One day she was with Professor von Blanckenhagen and Dietrich von Bothmer, who began talking about their backgrounds. While the two men went on about their European forebears, Eve said nothing, but then, at a pause in the conversation, she quietly interjected, “I’m descended from Pocahontas,” and put an end to the whole discussion.

Her presence around the Institute was powerful. Stephanie Dickey, a student of Baroque art, wrote recently: “Although I am not a classicist, Evelyn Harrison had a profound influence on my conception of what it means to be an art historian and a serious female scholar in what was then still largely a man’s world. I will never forget her lectures on classical Greek sculpture, especially when this dignified southern lady wrapped herself in a white sheet to demonstrate the draping of a peplos, or her quiet presence in the neighborhood, lunching at the local deli in her sensible suit with her handbag on her arm.”

Make no mistake, Eve could be terrifying. Who amongst us has not approached her office with trepidation, sure we were going to say something foolish. And Eve did not suffer fools gladly. Her zinging remarks are famous and remembered to this day when former students gather.

But she was always in her office when you came. If you had a question she might start quoting Homer in Greek, then pull down books, lend you off-prints, and discuss the matter, with no attention to the clock. She fulfilled her responsibilities as an adviser in an exemplary way, something very important to nervous graduate students. Papers were returned on time, she had advice about scholarships and jobs, and letters of recommendation went out promptly. In one case she even went to a necessary face-to-face interview for a student who was overseas, and when the all-male committee said it would be silly to give the girl a scholarship as she would surely marry, Eve simply sat there and looked at them until the penny dropped and they gave the fellowship.

How we all admired and loved her. The parties for her were famous. One in the mid-seventies followed a seminar. Everyone gathered at Eve’s apartment; one girl brought a pasta machine and took over the kitchen; Charles Edwards delivered a mock seminar report that had been written and illustrated with slides by several students. But the piece de resistance was the Marzipan Shield. Eve’s reconstruction of the Shield of Athena Parthenos was produced in marzipan by Marjorie Venit as topping for the cake and a gift for Eve. Eve loved it and kept it for years. At first she worried that roaches would attack, but they never dared touch it.

And in June 2000, her 80th birthday was celebrated for an entire week in Athens, first with a group of students who brought a gift, to which many others had contributed, and then with a party for 150 organized by Professor McCredie. It included the singing if a Homeric Hymn to Pallas Evelyna, “glorious teacher, grey-eyed and ethically true.”

Evelyn Harrison was certainly favored by the gods. I like to think that right now she is having ouzo and pistachio nuts with Athena on Mt. Olympus. And you may be sure, her peplos is perfectly pinned.

From former student Jenifer Neils:

As many in this audience can attest, it is challenging for us art historians to speak publicly without a screen and some slides. So let us imagine an illustrated lecture about Eve Harrison and her many contributions to classical art and archaeology. The images that come to my mind are her famous reconstructions of lost Athenian monuments that can now find their rightful places in our textbooks: the west and east pediments of the Parthenon, the cult statues of Athena and Hephaistos in the Hephaisteion (wherever that was), and most famous of all, the shield of the Athena Parthenos, now recreated at full scale in the Parthenon of Nashville (her lasting contribution to the Confederacy). Without her careful and perceptive studies of these major monuments we would still be in the dark about much of the classical past—and you may have noticed that after Eve passed away the lights went out in the tri-state area.

I was one of many students who beat a path to Princeton when Eve took up her position there—as the first female full professor of art history—and I well remember my first visit to her office. She asked me if I knew the difference between and Attic and Corinthian helmet—and I hadn’t a clue, so she patiently explained. It was then that I realized that we would not be studying the drapery folds of Greek sculpture—even though she was famous for her ability to date a chunk of marble from 50 meters away—but rather iconography. And to this day many of us still turn to our notes form her seminars, filled as they are with her brilliant insights—many, alas, not published. Those of us in her Princeton seminars, and this is undoubtedly true for IFA students as well, owe our dissertation topics to the subjects she assigned in those very first classes.

And even after graduating and landing our first jobs thanks to her letters of recommendation, we still beat a path to her door. I will indulge in one personal story. In my first position as a young museum curator, I was confronted with a dilemma. The museum was in the process of purchasing a stunning basalt portrait of a Roman emperor, a tetrarch. I had my suspicions about its authenticity and had come up with what I thought was clear proof that it was a fake. So during a visit to New York, I laid all the evidence out before Miss Harrison, who looked at the photos, and if I may say, in a Blink moment, pronounced it a fake. But not for any of the reasons that I had so carefully outlined. Rather, she simply said “it looks like Michelangelo carved it”—meaning that it had such psychological intensity that it could never have been made in antiquity. And to this day when I think if it I am reminded more of Walter Mondale than Emperor Maxentius.

Eve’s generosity to her students and colleagues extended way beyond the classroom. In the summer of 1977 when I was taking the course at the Numismatics Society, she kindly offered me the use of her apartment on East 85th. Of course I was impressed by her ancestral portraits, and even more so by what must have been the largest IBM Selectric typewriter in a domestic setting; but what perhaps surprised me the most was the bottle of vodka in the freezer—which I dutifully replaced.

In the past weeks many have remarked to me that Eve’s passing represents the end of an era. As a student of William Dinsmoor and Margarite Bieber in the 1940s, she learned from the best of that generation about Greek architecture and sculpture, and she in turn passed along to us, her legion of students, her great erudition, her keen eye, and her love of Greece, past and present. She was a fixture nearly every summer at the American School in Athens, where our summer sessions would have been incomplete if she had not taken our students to the old Acropolis and/or National Museum. Eve’s stature was in no way diminished—even by the Sounion kouros, whose primary place in archaic Greek chronology she helped to establish.

Eve’s first work in Athens resulted in a seminal study of ancient portraiture, which she summed up in her characteristic way as follows: “the excavations of the Agora have yielded many fine portraits: original marble heads, herms and busts of men and women whose names are rarely known to us but whose faces, expressive, individual, and sometimes even beautiful, give us a vivid sense of nearness to the ancient world.” And this sums up Eve’s extraordinary gift to us—a vivid sense of nearness to the ancient world.

From former colleague James R. McCredie:

I have had the privilege of knowing Evelyn Harrison for more than a half century, in Athens, in New York, and even in Samothrace; of counting her as a friend; and of benefiting from her kindnesses and insights. At the American School of Classical Studies at Athens she shared her keen observations in the Agora and shared ouzo on the roof of the School. In New York at Columbia University, she was an always generous colleague to a new arrival at the Institute of Fine Arts; and on several visits to Samothrace, she contributed both expertise and her particular good humor. I am grateful for all of them.

Columbia was initially her academic home, first as a student of Margarite Bieber and William Bell Dinsmoor, then as a member of its golden age of ancient Mediterranean studies, with her colleagues Edith Porada and Otto Brendel. They trained a remarkable group of students, including Jerome Pollitt of Yale, William Childs at Princeton, Prudence Oliver Harper at the Metropolitan Museum. We have heard of her influence subsequently on students at Princeton and at the Institute. When she asked me if she should accept the Institute’s offer of the Edith Kitzmiller Professorship of the History of Fine Arts, I had no hesitation, and she, with Peter von Blanckenhagen, Dietrich von Bothmer, Donald Hansen, and Bernard Bothmer, formed at the Institute the strongest program in the United States, possibly in the world. In Athens she taught generations of students in excavations and museums. No one, bar none, was more inspiring in front of ancient sculpture.

Her publications, both her books (Portrait Sculpture and Archaic and Archaistic Sculpture in The Athenian Agora: Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens) and articles on major subjects and on details—all based on close observation of the objects themselves and on an astonishingly rich grasp of attendant scholarship—brought fundamental advances to their subjects.

Her distinction, long recognized by her students and colleagues, was publicly marked by the Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement and by election to the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the German Archaeological Institute and by an honorary degree from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She bore these honors, and others, lightly, with the same southern courtliness from her family history in Virginia that partly masked her incisive intellect.

As a scholar and as a human being, Evelyn Harrison was unique. We shall not see her like again, and we shall miss her.