Former university professor Norton Dodge was never afraid to go for what he wanted. Whether it was amassing the world’s largest collection of Soviet nonconformist art or getting Andy Warhol’s autograph, he always had a way of making it happen.
Dodge, who taught at this university from 1956 to 1980, often attended parties at the home of then-university President John Toll and his wife, Debbie Toll. On one occasion, Warhol was another guest. As an art fanatic, nothing was going to stop Dodge from meeting the famed artist.
“Norton ran into Debbie’s kitchen, grabbed a can of soup from her shelves and went back to Andy and said, ‘I want you to sign this,’ and he did. He wasn’t asking Debbie or anything,” said Nancy Dodge, his wife of 31 years, laughing. “Especially when it had to do with art or artists, he knew exactly what he wanted and just got it. I’d say that was very typical of Norton.”
Dodge died Nov. 5 at Washington Hospital Center of congestive heart failure at the age of 84. He is best known for spending years and $3 million of his own money accumulating his extensive collection of Soviet dissident art, which he donated to the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in 1991.
Born in Oklahoma City on June 15, 1927, Dodge had a passion for art since he was a young boy. He first visited the Soviet Union in 1955. After teaching at this university for more than 20 years, he took a job at St. Mary’s College until he retired in 1989.
Over the course of his life, Dodge visited the Soviet Union 10 times and collected 20,000 pieces of art. He was dedicated to preserving dissident voices in the face of censorship, as well as investing in underground Soviet artists’ talents when there was no other market for them, said Julia Tulovsky, an assistant curator at the Zimmerli Museum.
“He did a fantastic thing, and he did it just out of passion and out of idea to preserve forbidden art, art that was not allowed to officially exist,” Tulovsky said. “He was an amazing person to be around.”
Dodge was an involved member of the university community, and professors who knew him said he was always warm, pleasant and good-humored. Nancy Dodge said he taught packed classrooms about Soviet economics, since it was such a hot topic at the time.
“He did not enjoy the large lectures; frankly, I think it was boring to him,” she said. “What he loved were the seminars and smaller groups, Honors students and people he could work with on smaller projects.”
“I’ve heard from a lot of people who really say he helped guide them into their careers,” she added.
Dodge also had a love of the environment, and a “primary concern” in his life was preserving Cremona Farm in St. Mary’s County, where he owned a mansion property that he used to hold conferences and entertain students and faculty from this university.
In the 1970s, he rallied support to fight against a petroleum company building a distribution point in the area, which would have “just ruined the environment,” Nancy Dodge said.
Today, the state protects Cremona Farm from development, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation features educational programs there. This was just the kind of person Norton Dodge was, Nancy Dodge said — the kind of person who saw something through until the end. The week before he died, she said he was weak but insisted on attending scheduled meetings and dinners.
“He kept moving along. He was going down the road with clippers in his pocket, cutting vines, when I was worried to death,” she said. “But he was determined. That was Norton.”
Norton Dodge is survived by his wife Nancy Dodge, and his sister Alice Dodge Wallace of Boulder, Colo.; niece Margaret Wallace of Oley, Pa., and nephew William Wallace of Boulder.
lurye@umdbk.com
