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2 Mr. Walker, in prepitring yourself to become an art historian, did you rely on visual experience or was reading aiso important? The magazine articles on modern art that appeared when I was young certainly had an influence on me. But I am always urging people to look at works of art rather than read about them. I grew up in Pittsburgh, where the mu- . seum, the Carnegie Institute, possessed a splendid collection of etchings by Rem- brandt, engravings by Direr and prints by the great masters of the graphic arts. These I literally devoured with my eyes and I learned more from them than I did from any books I read. My enthusiasm for these prints made me decide several years before ! 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. Porter was « 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. Later docu- ‘ ments proved that he was right. I stayed _~§) with him one summer in Ireland. We went around looking at Irish crosses and we used to talk often. He was a poet and a 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. Porter conveyed one thing to me that 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 | are) ¢ , Bohn Walker, Director of the. National Gallery of Art, , inerviowed by Milton Viorst Aeaerset : Gombrich in England, André Makaux, blances. For example, the way William of course, Roger Fry of an earlier gen- Burroughs takes sentences out of context eration, and Alfred Barr when he does and weaves them together can be paral- write. Some books that come to mind are _leled in certain flat-pattern cubist paint- Clark’s The Nude: A Study in Ideal ings. The stream-of-consciousness tech- Form; Malraux’ Museum Without Walls nique that appeared first, 1 suppose, in and Gombrich’s M editations ona Hobby James Joyce and also in Virginia Woolf, Horse. ide very closely paralleled the abstract ex- pressionists .of the New York school, wo unt as art Whether they were directly influenced by taal wrt Mle” Vterature, I don’t know. The painters I think you ought to separate the. art that I'know have never been great read- Do writers who comment on contem- ‘historian from the art critic. When aera, but may not have found the right Apne wasn writer deals with contemporary art and — x puts it in a historical context as, for ex-. ilu a beautifal series of volumes called ample, Alfred Barr has so often done in -Pageant of Painting you and Hunting- his catalogues at the Museum of Modern Art and his writings on Matisse and painting and literature in = rather ——t_. fashian, Will you tell about ton Cairns have attempted to relate © + came from a letter of Horace Walpole in which he speaks about antiquarians and how learnedthap often are, but he also says that none of 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 st all. Conid art exist without art histor” Oh, art could certainly exist w.. out art historians. In great periods of art there have been no art historians. What little criticism the Greeks wrote about art, when they were moat 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 probleme? Not today. Some writers during the 1930s, when American artists were in- terested tn aerial nenhleme. had a fertain terested in social problems, had effect on contemporary society. We are often disdainful of the Soviet art that is 20 closely related to social probleme but during the 1930s our artists the same things, with one signi ception Soviet artiste adulated teat #0- ciety, while American artists were social critics of theirs. I prefer the sociai critics. But to find any relevance to our society in Op art or Abstract Expressionist paint- ~ jing is quite difficult. Popart, on the other M8 ae ee oe arecty a cate It seems at present to a satire _,of our society and I suppose that is social Comment, too. Of course,-the architect ural writers have had s great deal to sa about the importance art in ow has had an impact on our social though’ perhaps even on our practices, with hi J.- Oxiabe and Stane