Contributed by John Mendelsohn / In 1971, Mike Robinson (as he called himself then) and I were in Adja Yunkers’s drawing class at Barnard College. At the end of the semester, Yunkers asked the class, “Who is going to be an artist?” Walter and I raised our hands, and were invited to Yunkers’s studio.

While still students, Walter told me about the nascent Whitney Program. I applied and got in, but to his chagrin he did not until the following year. 

At Barnard, I was asked to leave Brian O’Dougherty’s seminar, where I had turned up without an invitation. Walter, Edit DeAk, and Joshua Cohen were in the seminar, and there they started Art-Rite Magazine, as an insert in Art in America – what enlightened chutzpah on everyone’s part. Walter asked me to contribute a piece for the magazine, after it became an independent publication.

Early on in his tenure as editor of Artnet, Walter invited me to write for it. I did mostly round-ups of exhibitions in New York. Walter’s only edit the whole time consisted of correcting my misuse of the word, baldicchino.

In 1976, I had an exhibition at Artists Space of psychodramatic paintings, based on magazine versions of telenovelas. A year or two later, word reached me that Walter was intrigued by the work – I was pleased, but by that time I had left that mode behind.

I would see Walter at gallery openings or press previews, and for quite a while he would still introduce me as the star of the art class we had been in. Meanwhile, his star as a writer and painter was rising in the art world firmament. I followed Walter’s paintings from Soho, to the East Village, to Chelsea, to the Whitney Museum and beyond. 

His work always struck me as very American. He deftly depicted pulp fiction – and other addictive attractors – in a kind fictive painting where anachronism was the accepted premise, a sincere flim-flam, that made us suckers for liking what he liked, but should not, but did. Along with memes of the normal world – plaid shirts, pill bottles, hamburgers, and catalogue models – Walter’s painting was a kind of Pop Art of desiring made for an ironic, cynical time, a pursuit in which he could keep camouflaged, but secure, his faith in art.

Even after his years of editing and writing, he continued to cover the art beat in his online postings. As the clown prince of art writing, he was witty and incisive, critical and self-deprecating, always with an effortless turn of phrase, in the same inimitable voice in which he spoke. And he never failed to mention the price of the painting he was writing about.

Walter doubted the efficacy of abstract art – I would counter that abstraction was like a drug that went straight to the brain. He coined the phrase “zombie formalism” for the mode of depleted abstraction he could not help but notice, but somehow he still made room for the abstract painting he could respect.

When I asked for Walter’s help last year in contacting a gallerist on my behalf, Walter did not hesitate. When I let him know that the gambit did not work, he replied, “No one ever takes my advice, especially art dealers.”

Walter wrote about my work two times. First, on Artnet in 1999, after he had visited my studio to see some recent paintings. Then in 2023, when I had a solo exhibition, he sat with me in the gallery, over-lit like a laboratory, and looked at the work, and talked with me about it. He showed me on his phone a photo of his studio, with a wall hung with 150 AI generated canvases, which reminded me of the paintings of exotic beauties that used to be hung in living rooms in the 1950s.\

That was the last time I saw Walter. He posted on Instagram a long comment about my paintings. It began with, “My friend John Mendelsohn …” – I am still warmed by the glow of those words.

About the author: John Mendelsohn has shown his paintings at Artists Space, 57W57 Arts, the Venice Biennale, Nordiska Kompanient, Stockholm, Sweden, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis; Hallwalls, Buffalo; and Wellesley College Museum, Wellesley, MA. He has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and Tree of Life Foundation.