Learning to Look

In this cultivated, extroverted yet dry autobiography, art historian Pope-Hennessy espouses his passions for Italian sculpture, Elizabethan miniatures, Raphael, bronzes and Picasso. An Oxford graduate in history, he is largely self-taught in art criticism. How this distinguished colleague of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark honed his analytical skills and rose to eminent positions at the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art should make for a fascinating story, but this genteel self-portrait does not live up to its title. Son of a formidable, dynamic mother and a soldier father who painted watercolors, Pope-Hennessy offers sporadic, tantalizing glimpses of such notables as Margaret Thatcher and connoisseur/spy Anthony Blunt. (Mar.)