Students of a popular art instructor who passed away last year will soon have an opportunity to view her work once again.
An open house for the “Leny Wacht Memorial Wing” of Dr. Anita Batman’s house will be held at 117 W. Jefferson Ave. on Sept. 19 from 2 to 4 p.m. Batman said the wing is intended to be a place where former students of Wacht, Batman’s mother, can view her art.
She said her goal was to provide “an oasis in the Delta” for Wacht’s former students to be able to come by and escape from life and re-enter the past. The wing includes a library, gallery, climate controlled storage and a “tea-drinking balcony.” She said she hoped to have the building open for visits on Sunday afternoons.
Construction of the wing, which cost about $48,000, began in June. Batman said she has been saving to build onto her house so that she can have a place to safely store her mother’s paintings.
Paintings on display include some works by her mother’s students and other artists as well.
Batman said her mother was a very creative woman who was liberated before her time. Born in Mannheim Baden, Germany, in 1912, she came to Chicago when she was 17 years old.
She came to Greenwood in 1949 and opened the Delta School of Art Studio in her home on West Adams Avenue.
“She believed in getting the kids’ blood sugar running after school,” Batman said. “She would play classical music and talk to them about philosophy.”
She would also sneak a nip of apricot brandy, or “honey,” if their parents asked, in order to inspire creativity, Batman said.
When Batman looks through the paintings, she describes each of them and often can give intimate details about the meaning, circumstances and creation of the work.
Of the hundreds of paintings, Wacht dramatically shifted her artistic style over time.
Batman said her mother loved her art students and provided them with an alternative choice for students who weren’t football players or Southern belles.
“She showed them their creativity and intellect was something of value,” Batman said. “It wasn’t as common for people to focus on something other than beauty and strength. It gave them another scale to measure themselves against.”
Wacht retired from teaching in 1998 at the age of 86.
Great care was taken in the design of the wing. In the library, Batman displays a few of her favorites from her collection of over 3,000 books.
“Now if you key me on something, instead of thinking, ‘There’s a poem about that,’ I can run over and find it,” Batman said.
Batman said her mother was a “character” even until her death, when she gave pages of information on the process to follow for her funeral.
“She had a closed casket surrounded by portraits of herself,” Batman said. “She predicted what each of her students were going to say at different movements (of a Chopin piece).”
