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seme na PED Sa iin St ime a | ark misiuty pes — portant as the expression of certain ideas =, about the art of the ‘past in a literary “form.” os “iddter T left Harvard 1 went to study with Berenson in Florence. Mrs. Beren- .son was the sister of the writer Logan Pearsall Smith. The whole atmosphere of I Tatti was one not only of expertise in painting, which was Berenson's great contribution, but also in good writing. We used to read aloud at night and the whole atmosphere was closely related to books. I was always a voracious reader, but Berenson stimulated me to read even more outside the field of the history of art. ' I remember reading Browning's The Rin» and the Rank oa aderfal poom, auerty ree oo EPL, WORGEIT and a great deal of Proust. Edith Whar- ‘ton was a great friend of the Berensons and we read her The Age of Innocence A wri. and The House oj Mirih. Berenson also _ knew Henry James and I remember read- ing The Ambassadors. We also spent a great deal of time on the Russians — Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky and Chek- hov. One of the sorrows I’ve had in my profeasion is that I've had to read so rouch straight art historical writing and the level of quality, from a literary point Py a of view, has become lower and lower, There are only a few outstanding writers in the bistory of art that I admire as stylists — Kenneth M. Clark and Ernst Page2 Gilpin, vasae his catalogues at the Museum oi Moder Art and his writings on Matisse and others, then, I think, he is an art his- aorian. But if he is simply COM tater. 4 painting and ‘literature in a rainer “unique fashion. Will you tell shout a esha? i , straight critical work I wouldn't consider “se Huntington and 1 decided we wanted him an art historian. i Do you think that writing about art contributes in any way to the quality, = the nature, the trends of the art that is actually produced? Indirectly, yes. For example, it’s be- cause of art historians that artists began to look at primitive art as an art form, - Before that it had been put in the ethno- ' logical museums and people didn’t really consider, let’s say, African sculpture. But before artists began ts Tae in Aen ned 4 by African sculpture | there was a kind of discussion by art historians of ethno- Jogical art as an art form. I's very difficult to teil which comes first, the literary discovery or the artistic discovery. There are, very definitely, re- lationships between painters and writers.- Obviously Virginia Woolf's descriptions would not have taken the forms they took if she had not been looking at paint- ings by Duncan Grant, if she had not been discussing art with a writer and critic like Clive Bell. Can you see a parallel between move- ments in art and changes in literary atyle? Yes, I think there are definite resem- eto do something unusual. I believe it was “Yunusual at that time, though subsequently s#other. people have done it too. We decided io take a series of paintings in the col- ion of the National Gallery of Art and try to find writers who were not art v historians, whenever possible, but who “conveyed the essence of the paintings. “There are obvious connections between ‘painting and literature. An artist like ‘Claude Lorrain, who lived in the 17th “ture, The parallel between Virgil’s writ- ing and Lorrain’s landscapes seemed evi- ‘dent to us and we took a quotation from Virgil to show how closely related the two ¥ _were. Sometimes we found that a writer had an insight into the style of a :painter which art critics lacked, or at ‘least because of his literary gift he con- veyed it more vividly. So, for example, “we discovered that D. H. Lawrence, who _was himself # painter, had certain in- sights into Cézanne which we thought were more beautifully expressed and perhaps more perceptively felt than any other writer that we could find o Cézanne. 7-7 think an inspiration for our book century, was steeped in classical litera- — ada fe perhape « even on our practic.3, war ~The Brown Decades, Sticks aad St and The Culture of Cities, to name a ‘Tell me about Malraux, this ver teresting man who is both Fra: * Minister of State for Caitoral Ai . and an art historiam T think his books on the history « ~ have made people look at works of -@ Dew way. He has a very wide an .cyclopedic knowledge of art and hi brought together fascinating com tions and revealed new facets of a his juxtapositions of works of a one of the greatest art histori I understand that the Nath lery has had a happy relationship Inalraux. Yes. The National Gallery owes t great deal. It was thanks to him thi were able to show the exhibitio French contemporary painting ¥ just ended. He has also announced he hopes to arrange a comparable ex tion of contemporary American pain at one of the large slate museun Paris. He feels the Freneh should | more about what is being done in York, and this, for a Frenchman, very , remarkable, cosmopolitan poi view.