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eS am | es Mr. Walker, in preparing yourself to become an art historian, did you rely vin I experienes or wes reading 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 than read about them. I grew up i in Pittsburgh, where the mu- i seum, ihe Carnegie Institute, possessed : a splendid colléction 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 i 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 I got to college that I wanted to spend the rest of my life working in a A museum. Which art historians hed the greatest influence on you? ‘The ones who influenced me most were A. Kingsley Porter and Bernard Beren- son. Porter 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 hinr 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 OL contribution to the history of art. How- “ ever, he was remembered as an art-his- torian, not as a playwright. {T)} Porter cox Porter conveyed one thing to me "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 I went to study : or won 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 Without Walls and Gombrich’s Meditations on a Hobby Horse. Do writers who comment on contem- porary works of art count as art his- torians? I think you ought to separate the art from the with puts it in a historical context as, for ex- ample, Alfred Barr has so 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- Yorian. 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 certain 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 paralleled the abstract ex- pressionists .of the New York school. Whether they were directly influenced by © literature, 1 don’t know, The painters _ that I know have never been great read- ra, but I'may not hava found the right ‘ones, ' : . «An a beautiful series of volumes called -:Pageant of Painting you and Hunting- ‘ton Cairns have attempted to relate painting and literature in a rather unique fashion. Will you tell about that? Ven nd T Aantded we came from a letter of Horace Walpole in which he speaks about sntiquarians snd how learned they often are, but be aiso says that nome of them know how to write. ‘And, unfortunately, art historians in our day seem to have lost the desire to write beautifally. In a number of sections in our book we quoted Walter Pater, a pure stylist. Among the reviews of our book 1 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 ? Oh, art could certainly exist art historians. In great periods of ai there have been no art historians. What litle criticism the Greeks 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, __ Doce art or art writing have any rele- 1930. when American artists were in 1930s, when Ameri terested in social problems, had a certain effect on contemporary society. We are often disdainful of the Soviet art that is 20 closely related to social problems but during the 1930s our artists were doing ception—Soviet artists adulated ciety, while American artists were social critics of theirs. I 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. Ht seems at present to be largely a satire “of our society and I suppose that is social comment, too. Of course, the architect- ural writers have had a greet deal to say about the importance art our has had an impact on our social thought, perhaps even on our practices, with his The Brown Decades, Sucks and Stones, and The Culture