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Audio "These lectures are my art" Vincent Scully in conversation March 6, 2008
Yale art history professor emeritus Vincent Scully talked with writer Richard Conniff about how he learned to interpret art, and about a 1965 trip to the USSR with architect Louis Kahn.
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This 20:15 minute file includes excerpts from Scully's remarks, plus discussion by Conniff and Yale Alumni Magazine editor Kathrin Day Lassila.
. . . OR JUST HEAR THE EXCERPTS
These interviews were taped on a cassette recorder in Scully's living room. There's background noise, and Scully can be difficult to hear. But they give listeners the experience of sitting and conversing with him about his work and how he approaches it.
We've supplied some text to help guide you in places that may be less audible.
First excerpt:
Conniff had asked Scully about how he learned to interpret
art. Scully starts by talking about museums he visited and
how he applied an essentially modernist approach to seeing
art. He moves on to the importance of reading, and finally
to perceiving art at "a subcultural level." Along the way,
he mentions Marshall McLuhan, Jungian archetypes,
Freud's concept of auf klaren, and an English writer named Maude Bodkin.
3:37 min Click on arrow to play.
Second excerpt:
Scully says his way of looking at art and architecture became "central" to him; interpretation is something that happens instantly. He talks about how students learn to interpret.
0:47 min
Third excerpt:
Scully says he started out by seeing buildings as individual works of art. Later—during the urban redevelopment period of the 1950s and 1960s—he started seeing buildings in relation to each other. He began to criticize the modernist approach, which leveled many old buildings and small-scale neighborhoods and replaced them with expanses of concrete.
Scully credits several people with changing his mind, including one of the children of the developer James Rouse; the critic Lewis Mumford, who reviewed Scully's book The Shingle Style; and Norman Mailer. Mailer wrote an article criticizing modern architecture and its "empty landscapes of psychosis." Scully wrote a rebuttal—but later he came around to Mailer's opinion.
3:11 min
Fourth excerpt:
Scully talks about how we come to our interpretations of art, and how we begin to change them. He mentions the lecture he had just delivered that day, on the fifteenth-century artist Massacio. Massacio, he says, changed after studying the "tough," "tragic" work of another Florentine artist, the 14th-century Giotto.
1:48 min
Fifth excerpt:
Conniff had asked Scully how he had come to focus on architecture, and Scully starts off talking about his early days in grad school in art history.
0:43 min
Sixth excerpt:
Scully begins by talking about the architect Louis Kahn, who struggled to move out of the Beaux Arts tradition and then took a very different, Modernist approach. Scully also tells some stories from a trip he took with Kahn to the Soviet Union, for a U.S. government-sponsored exhibition on American architecture, including a Unitarian church Kahn had designed in Rochester, New York.
In the last section, Scully mentions Perspecta, the student journal of the Yale School of Architecture. The editor, Bob Stern, had just brought out a new issue about the work of architects like Kahn and Robert Venturi, who were to become very eminent. (Stern is now dean of the School of Architecture.)
Scully ends with two Russian students and their own response to seeing the Vanna Venturi house, a seminal work Robert Venturi designed for his mother.
