Dr. Sabine Gova

Dr. Sabine Gova
Christopher Bogart

Dr. Sabine Gova was an Assistant Professor at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, New Jersey and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Fordham University in New York. She was Vice-Chairman of the Speakers Research Committee for the United Nations and its representative to the United States Mission to the United Nations. And our Art History professor at St. Peter’s College.

Yet, we didn’t even know her real name. We had heard that she had been in the French Resistance during World War II. She was from Alsace-Lorraine, and was a quarter Jewish. She had twice been captured and interred in one of Hitler’s concentration camps. She had one time told us that when she had entered a New York hospital for minor surgery, she was plagued by nightmares, night after night. She had been unable to identify the trigger for these nightmares, until one day she noticed the design of the curtains in her hospital room. The design was linear with short breaks, very similar to the pattern of barbed wire.

We had heard she had chosen the name we knew her by for her work in the Resistance. Her favorite painting was “The Rape of the Sabine Women” by Nicholas Poussin. Her last name was a combination of the English word “go” and its French equivalent.

There was a certain fascination we young men of the Sixties had with this petite mature woman with an unfamiliar French accent. She wore an air of bookish gentility with the same grace that she wore her chalk-dusted black academic gown.

It was the Sixties, and many professors scrambled to “relate” to their students. Dr. Gova carried a European air of distance without disdain. She taught art history, a subject that seemed to have little relevance in a period of time that was boiling the college campuses with loud music, free love, drugs, and protest against a war that was taking our fellow students out of the classrooms and transporting them to the jungles of Viet-Nam. Yet her courses, “Survey of Western Art” and “The Great Masters”, became more popular with each passing year.

She demanded of us what she would have demanded of any of the students in a comparable course at the Sorbonne. And if we failed to produce that which we could barely recognize, we were told with an iron fist in a velvet glove. Entering class one particular day, she began the lesson as she always had, thoroughly researched and on time. When she began by asking us questions about the readings she had indicated we must complete by this time, she quickly realized that none of us were able to enter into this discussion. We were not prepared. She stated, gently but firmly, that that she was prepared, and that when we were, to notify her. And she left the room. At first, we were elated. Wow. A free hour. But, on the following day, when we returned to the classroom and found that the day’s assignments were there, we also found out that she was not. And it appeared that she had no intention of returning soon. We discussed this dilemma and finally decided to send a delegation to speak to her and find out what it would take to get our teacher back. I was the delegation. I found her in her office that afternoon, and timidly I asked her if she considered returning to class in the near future. She asked me to sit, and with a kindness I will never forget, explained to me that my fellow students and I had not kept the unwritten contract between ourselves and our mentor. We were not prepared to learn. I apologized for that, and said that I thought that we had learned our lesson. We had been keeping up with the assignments she had been sending into class daily. Now we wanted her back. With a gentle smile she told me that she would return tomorrow. And when tomorrow came, there she was. She began the class, and nothing more was ever said about the first walk out we had ever seen a professor pull.

On one particularly memorable class, while studying Pablo Picasso’s famous work Guernica, we were treated to what to her was an ordinary lesson, but to us was one of the most memorable in our lives. The first slide showed an unfinished painting, with Picasso sitting in front of it, painting away. The next slide had more finished. Wow. She had acquired slides of one of the world’s most famous artists in the process of finishing a great work. However the third slide was something we were not prepared for. It was a picture of Picasso still painting Guernica, but with Dr. Gova talking to him about the composition. We walked out of that class with a renewed respect for our petite French mentor.

Saturdays were optional classes, and took place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Every Saturday, she would meet with anyone who wanted just “a little more” to tour the museum and talk about works of art we had only seen in books and on slides. Once, on one of these Saturday outings, she spied a new Metropolitan acquisition. It was a marble satyr with the pertinent historical information on a plaque underneath. “Oh no.” she said, “This is not right.” When we asked why, she informed us quite definitely that it was a fake. We smiled. Maybe she was good, but was she that good? Before we could think of an answer, she asked to be excused. She had to talk to the curator. In disbelief, we followed her up to Thomas Hoving’s office, and waited to see whether she would gain admission. After a few minutes, his door opened, and she entered. A few minutes later, she came out, as Mr. Hoving thanked her for her concern. The following Saturday, the satyr had been removed.

Dr. Gova was an educator in the truest and most complete sense of the word. In fact, she would go to great lengths to educate, and never missed an opportunity to teach, to instill and to broaden our knowledge and love of art. Whether it was in her Great Masters course, where she took her students once each year to the house or apartment of a great artist to discuss his art, or in much more modest yet intense ways, she created “the teachable moment.” One day I had found a fragment of old blue and white china in my backyard when digging out a garden for my parents. I washed the fragment and brought it in to show her. She looked it over very carefully, then told me to hold on to it. I thought her response to be polite if not distant. At the end of the next class, she called me to her desk. She told me to meet her in New York the following Saturday and gave me the address and time. She had made an appointment with a renowned china specialist. To tell me more about the little piece of china I had found in the backyard. She was amazing.

She was a master teacher in the best sense of that title. She prepared thoroughly for each class. She expected her students to do the same. She developed an interest in great art in each of the students she taught, and fed that interest in every class. Among her former students are art curators, art historians and art teachers. And dedicated teachers of every subject. Because of her influence on me all those years ago, I have tried for all my career to be one of those teachers. Just as she was.