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‘ ch Mr. Walker, in preparing yourself to become an art historian, did you rely on visual experienes or wes reading also important? The magazine articles on modern art that appeared when I was young certainly had an influence on me. But J am always urging people to look at works of art rather then read about them. I grew up in Pittsburgh, where the mu- . seum, ihe Carnegie institute, possessed a splendid collection of etchings by Rem- brandt, engravings by Diirer and prints by the great masters of the graphic arts. These I literally devoured with my eyes and ] learned more from them than I did from any books I read. My enthusiasm for these prints made me decide several years before I got to college that I wanted to spend the rest of my life working in a museum. Which art historians had the greatest influence on you? The ones who influenced me most were A. Kingsley Porter and Bernard Beren- son. Forier was a genius who had in- tuitions about the history of art which were often confirmed by documents dis- covered later. His dating of Romanesque churches in Spain startled people and it was discounted for a time. Ldter docu- ments proved that he was right. I stayed ° with hior one summer in Ireland. We ‘Q> i” f 4. $ 1 went around looking at Irish cresses and - we used to talk often. He was a poet and _& playwright and he considered these creations far more important than his contribution to the history of art. How- ever, he was remembered as an art‘his- torian, not as a playwright. ‘5 ™ Da wtee mneweeeed nee shine an abuse a Wa len VV POyeM vik mans Wy ALIS LES had a strong influence in my life, that art history per se was not really as im- portant as the expression of certain ideas about the art of the past in a literary form, After T left Harvard T went to study WL Pan ‘ historian fram the art critic. DoAPTD aTn AR A MIAN af ARE EUSER Biren Rive ww Y PANING Us RUAN . John Walker, Director ‘of | the National Gallery of Art, interviewed by Milton Viorst rag tt Gombrich in England, André Malraux, of course, Roger Fry of an earlier gen- eration, and Alfred Barr when he does write. Some books that come to mind are Clark’s The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form; Malraux’ Museum F ithout Walls and Gombrich’s Meditations on a a Hees Horse, De writers who comment on contem- porary works of art count as art | his- torians? I think you ought to separate the art writer deals with contemporary art and puts it in a historical context as, for ex-. ample, Alfred Barr has sc often done in his catalogues at the Museum of Modern Art and his writings on Matisse and others, then, I think, he is an art his- forian. But if he is simply writing a blances. For example, the way William Burroughs takes sentences out of context and weaves them together can be paral- leled in certajn flat-pattern cubist paint- ings. The stream-of-consciousness tech- nique that appeared first, I suppose, in James Joyce and also in Virginia Woolf, very closely paralleied the abstract ex- preasionists .of the New York school. Whether they were directly influenced by literature, 1 don’t know, The painters . "Ft seems at present to be largely a satire “of our society and I suppose that is social that I know have never been great read- When ae, but I" may not have found the right “ones. : cla a beautiful series sof volames called ~>Pageant of Painting you and Henting- ‘ton Cairus have attempted to relate ‘painting and literatare in a rather ‘unique fashion. Will you tell about shat? rT a came from a letter of Horace Walpole in which he speaks about antiquarians and how learned they often are, but be also says that nome af them know how to write. And, unfortunately, art historians in our day seem to have lost the desire to write beautifully. In a number of sections in our book we quoted Walter Pater, a pure stylist. Among the reviews of our book I was very amused to find that the one thing we were criticized for was men- tioning or using Pater at all. Could art exist without art histo ? Oh, art could certainly exist art historians. In great periods of an _ there have been no art historians, What litle criticism the Grecks wrote about _art, when they were most creative, was of a very naive nature. Even the Renais- sance had very unsophisticated critical standards, in today’s terms. . Does art or art writing have any rele- vance to contemporary problems? Not today. Some writers during the 107%, aoe terested in social problems, had a certain when American artiste were in. -.. effect on contemporary society. We are often diedainful of the Soviet art that is 30 closely relsted to social problems but during the 1930s our artists were doing the same things, with one significpe4, rx- ception —Soviet artists sdulated ciety, while American artista were social critics of theirs. 1 prefer the social critics. But to find any relevance to our society in Op art or Abstract Expressionist paint- “ing is quite difficult. Pop’art, on the other ‘hand, may have some social. connection. ‘ural writers have had a great deal to say about the importance of art in our society. Lewis Mumford, particularly, has had an impact on our social thought, perhaps even on our practices, with his The Brown Decades, Sticks and Stones, ana T, af less nl (itiee ta name o few tar he Winfere OF Ussete, 10 NAS Sw.