8Mar/100
Robert Lowell: On painting and poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2)
Robert Lowell
Formative reading figures often as a topic of inquiry in The Paris Review Interviews. Poet Robert Lowell's formative reading at St. Mark's (his high school) was art history.
[M]y school had been given a Carnegie set of art books, and I had a friend, Frank Parker, who had great talent as a painter but who'd never done it systematically. We began reading the books and histories of art, looking at reproductions, tracing the Last Supper on tracing paper, studying dynamic symmetry, learning about Cézanne, and so on. I had no practical interest in painting, but that study seemed rather close to poetry. And from there I began.
Paul Cézanne, Self Portrait
