Behind her insightful analyses of art and its dance with history lies a keen and passionate intellect informed by an eye for beauty and a pilgrim soul.
Mira Pajes Merriman looks at the world through kaleidoscope eyes, reveling in the ever-shifting patterns of man's artistic interpretations of reality — of what is past, or passing, or to come.
"I love looking through the eyes of an artist," says Merriman, who founded the art history department in WSU's School of Art and Design. The internationally recognized scholar retired from Wichita State this year, after 32 years of teaching.
When she was growing up, it was Matisse and Van Gogh, she loved. Her gaze fell on the Bolognese Baroque artist Giuseppe Maria Crespi (1665-1747) when she began looking for a dissertation topic at Columbia University in the late 1960s. Crespi's dark, emotion-laden paintings of ordinary scenes from contemporary Italian life captured her scholarly attention for a quarter-century. Now, she is analyzing the enigmatically unfinished works of Michelangelo.
Since the visual arts are, like onions, multi-layered and redolent with meaning. Merriman studies far more than the elementary frameworks of shape, light, line and color.
"Art deals with the fundamentals of life," she says, adding that art is ineluctably linked to every aspect of cultural reality.
To understand a particular artwork, she delves into the conomic and intellectual backgrounds as well as the social, political and religious attitudes prevalent when the work was created. The resulting breadth of knowledge has given her a glimpse of art's intricate dance with history and has rewarded her with passage down art history's long-echoing street, which meanders through the maze of contemporary artistic expression, winds past signposts that read Moderism, Post-Impressionism, Impressionism, Romanticism, Baroque, Renaissance, Gothic — and leads all the way back to the hauntingly beautiful cave paintings of Paleolithic man.
"Mira has great insights into painting," says Larry Webb '71/75, an abstract painter working in New York City. "Some art historians seem to get lost in the past and find it hard to keep up with new art trends and living artists. Not Mira. She is exceptional at linking the past with the present."
A passionate patron of the contemporary arts, Merriman has filled her Wichita home with the works of WSU-educated artists, many of whom are alumni of her classroom.
One of her more recent acquisitions is "Crooked Cross," a calligraphic work on copper by Sonja Wagner '72/75, who, like Webb, now lives and works in NYC. Wagner gives her former teacher the highest praise possible: "She opened my mind."
Another former student, now a colleague and friend, is Diane Thomas Lincoln '76. An artist and Roman Catholic social activist, Lincoln says of Merriman, "She's my teacher, my mentor, my intellectual guide. She's all those things, and more. She taught me to see, to see the world as a whole and to explore its history and cultures. I think she was, and is, on a pilgrimage to a clearer understanding of human suffering. She gave me that task, too."
Mira Pajes was born in Poland, which fell to the Soviet Union and Germany when she was 7. During the Nazi occupation of the western and central part of the coutry, Poland was brutalized. The elite of the Polish educated class and more than 3 million Jews were killed in gas chambers and burned in furnaces. Until the German attack on the U.S.S.R., the Russians also persecuted people in the eastern section of the country and deported some 1.5 million inhabitants to distant parts of Russia.
Eluding the horrific fate that was befalling so many of their fellow countrymen, Mira's Jewish family spent two years in Russia, before emigrating to the United States. About that period of her life, Merriman simply says, "You can't imagine."
The young Mira, her mother, who was an actress and ballet dancer, and her father, physicist, settled in New York City.
Her father had in mind that Mira would lean to his scientific bent and was pleased she showed a talent in mathematics. But at age 11, the fledgling mathematician decided to become a painter.
"One Sunday I was bothering my parents about playing Monopoly or something," Merriman recalls. It was her dad who gave her a dime and suggested she visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see what she could see. She was delighted to discover she could tell the difference between Rembrandt and Frans Hals, whose works look similar.
She began drawing and painting and later graduated from the first music-and-art magnate school in the United States. She became enthralled with the romanticism of art and dreamed of accomplishing great things as an artist.
After a brief first marriage, she was inspired by a Life photograph of olive trees and the red earth of Spain. She packed her bags and painted for four and a half years, "being Van Gogh," she says. But it was in Spain she gave up painting. "I found I didn't really like mucking around in paints. I liked thinking about it."
Back home, she experienced a religious upheaval and became part of The Grail, an art community founded on an intellectual movement within the Catholic Church. The Grail's mission was to educate lay women in the arts and culture, "helping them learn to see," as Lincoln explains it.
Merriman spen two years with The Grail in Ohio, living the liturgical cycle of the church and working hard on the community farm. "I milked six cows every morning," she remembers with a smile. "I loved it: the hard work, singing Gregorian chants, everything." Yet when the time came, she was ready to head home to New York.
She enrolled at Columbia University, from which she earned her undergraduate degree in 1960, her master's in 1964 and her doctorate in 1968. She also met James Merriman there, where she was his student. Together they had two children and adopted a third.
The entire Merriman family accompanied her to Italy as she researched her dissertation on Crespi. While there, Mira and Jim, an English professor, kept getting telegrams from WSU, urging them both to accept teaching positions. Mira was less than enthusiastic, but she agreed to make the move, and the Merrimans relocated to Kansas.
Hired to establish an art history department, she assembled its library of art books and collected more than 100,000 slides of art images. "She certainly built a trmendous slide library, a tremendous art history department, which in turn I think educated and brought people's awareness of Western civilization to a high in this state," Lincoln reports.
"I fell in love with the art school," Merriman says. "This place has turned out real artists, people who found, not imitations, but their true voices."
In the classroom, merriman developed a reputation as a tough, but stellar instructor. Students who'd had her in one course and couldn't get enrolled in another were known to sit in on the class anyway, without credit, for the pure pleasure of it.
"I hold the attitude that schools are not the same as businesses," Merriman says. "And a university professor knows the subject matter better than the students. In the classroom, I am the master. But my students didn't complain. They knew I meant for them to know, to experience the pleasure of learning."
For Merriman the best part of teaching is seeing the light go on in her students' minds when they grasp some concept, some piece of knowledge. The saddest part is the overall decline in scholarship.
"Students know less and less," she says. "They have no historical sense; they don't know religious characters or parables and proverbs. They don't seem to understand spirituality — and that's nine-tenths of the art. They only know gossip and pop culture. Our society has no delight in beauty, ony excitement. Dinosaurs. Art has become only sensation, and our spirituality is so shallow we don't know whom to fight, whom to serve or whom to love."
Yet even in the grand scheme of things, it's not a small thing that many of her students love her, that they are grateful for her example as a scholar and a teacher.
"Mira made me look at the whole of society and art's position within that," Wagner says. "She and the other art instructors at WSU at the time were widely excited about art. They educated me and gave me something better to aspire to as an artist."
Before Wagner left Wichita for NYC armed with talent and a master's degree in art, she asked Merriman to save an afternoon for her. It was pay-back time. "I took her to the Flint Hills," Wagner explains. "It was my gift to Mira for all she'd given me." Merriman remembers, "We went deep into the hills, by a stream. I fell in love with the land, with the silent space."
Now that she's retired, merriman plans to take advantage of the land and cabin she owns in the Flint Hills. Yet it is a bittersweet time for her, a time for reflection. Her husband died in 1995, while they were on sabbatical, and that loss is still great.
She is using some of her newfound time to write, in her rich and graceful style, her memoirs. And she'll travel. Most spectacularly, she wants to sail to South America on a freighter, and she has many trips scheduled with family and friends.
"We bought her an easel," Lincoln says. "And Mira and I love to run around finding rivers. We're going to the Chama River in the San Juan Mountains this summer, and we're going to look real hard at ourselves, each other and the world."
Seeing, they know, is the hardest thing on earth to do, and the most necessary.
