Norton Dodge, 84, Economics Professor and Art Collector, Dies - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/arts/norton-dodge-84-economics-professor-and-art-collector-dies.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Norton%20Dodge&st=cse

Norton Dodge Dies at 84; Stored Soviet Dissident Art

Norton Dodge, a genially rumpled economics professor who in the course  
of research trips to study arcana like tractors and workforce  
demographics managed quietly to amass the world’s largest collection  
of nonconformist Soviet art, died on Nov. 5 in Washington. He was 84.

The cause was multiple organ failure, his wife, Nancy, said. The  
couple had lived for many years at Cremona, a 978-acre estate in  
Mechanicsville, Md., whose 40-odd buildings long groaned with  
paintings, prints and other work made covertly from the 1950s to the  
1980s.

That trove now forms the core of the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection  
of Nonconformist Art From the Soviet Union, part of the Jane Voorhees  
Zimmerli Art Museum of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

For “nonconformist” read “dissident,” and for “dissident” read  
“dangerous”: the term describes any art, including political,  
religious and Surrealist work, that did not hew to the narrow, state- 
sanctioned confines of Socialist Realism. During the Soviet era, the  
making of such art could result in the artist’s being ostracized,  
exiled, imprisoned or worse.

The Dodge Collection, which opened to the public in 1995, now  
comprises about 20,000 works. Artists represented there include some  
who are well known in the West today, among them the conceptual  
artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid.

Professor Dodge and the underground artists whose work he helped save  
are the subjects of a book, “The Ransom of Russian Art” (1994), by  
John McPhee.

In his academic life, Professor Dodge was a scholar of Soviet  
economics who taught for many years at the University of Maryland. At  
his death he was emeritus professor of economics at St. Mary’s College  
of Maryland.

Norton Townshend Dodge was born on June 15, 1927, in Oklahoma City;  
his father, Homer Levi Dodge, a physicist, was a dean of the graduate  
school at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

As a boy, Norton displayed a passion for art. He also had an early  
curatorial bent, collecting, as he told The Weekend Australian  
newspaper in 1995, “whiskey bottles from the trash cans of the leading  
residents of Norman.”

After studying at Deep Springs College in California, Norton Dodge  
earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Cornell, followed by a  
master’s from Harvard in Russian regional studies. In the mid-1950s,  
while researching his Harvard doctoral dissertation, “Trends in Labor  
Productivity in the Soviet Tractor Industry,” he first visited the  
Soviet Union.

Professor Dodge received his doctorate in 1960, and soon afterward  
returned to the Soviet Union to study the role of women in the labor  
force. He had long known about the dissident writers who worked there  
in secret and began to wonder if there existed a comparable visual-art  
underground.

He made discreet inquiries. Before long he heard from someone who knew  
someone who knew someone else ... and little by little Professor Dodge  
found his way onto the clandestine circuit of dissident-art  
“exhibitions” held in artists’ apartments.

He resolved to support these artists, and by a professor’s standards  
he had ample means. Years before, he explained in interviews, his  
father had placed a family nest egg in the hands of a young investment  
adviser named Warren E. Buffett. The arrangement had paid off  
resoundingly, and Norton Dodge subsequently became a highly successful  
investor himself.

Ultimately, according to Mr. McPhee’s book, Professor Dodge spent more  
than $3 million of his own money on Soviet underground art.

Over the next two decades, he made many trips to the Soviet Union,  
often under authentic cover of scholarly research. Each time, though,  
he discreetly forsook the library to navigate dark alleys and dimly  
lighted stairways, clutching a flashlight and slips of paper bearing  
little more than vague, scribbled addresses.

Getting the art out of the country was sometimes tortuous, sometimes  
remarkably straightforward, Nancy Dodge said in an interview on  
Thursday. Professor Dodge might roll small works inside Soviet  
propaganda posters. Larger works could be rolled inside carpets. He  
also depended on a carefully cultivated network of associates that  
included, he told Mr. McPhee, diplomats at non-United States embassies.

At one point, with the inscrutable logic that was a hallmark of the  
era, the Soviet government named an official dealer to handle the  
export of some of Professor Dodge’s gingerly procured dissident art,  
and for a time it flowed tidily out of the country through official  
channels.

In 1977, Professor Dodge organized a show of the artwork in  
Washington, which brought his Soviet travels to an end.

“When I put that exhibit on I knew that my cover, so to speak, would  
be blown, because people from the Soviet embassy came and no doubt  
took note of everything,” he told The Baltimore Sun in 1994. “I could  
see they were zeroing in on me in a way, developing a fatter and  
fatter dossier.”

Though he chose not to return, his connections let him continue  
collecting from afar until the twilight of the Soviet Union.

Professor Dodge’s first marriage ended in divorce. Besides his wife,  
Nancy Ruyle Dodge, whom he married in 1980, he is survived by a  
sister, Alice Dodge Wallace.

His books include “Women in the Soviet Economy” (1966) and “From Gulag  
to Glasnost: Nonconformist Art in the Soviet Union” (1995), which he  
edited with Alla Rosenfield.

Professor Dodge passed the post-Soviet years awash in many  
enthusiasms, including conservation (rivers, wetlands, woodlands) and  
accumulation (practically everything). Objects of desire included  
books, which besides filling nearly every cranny of Cremona also  
populated a smallish satellite “library” there.

The library had previously been Professor Dodge’s Mercedes, which, on  
its demise, he left in its tracks and happily stocked with volumes on  
Soviet economics.

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