BOOK REVIEW : LEARNING TO LOOK My Life in Art<i> by John Pope-Hennessy</i> Doubleday $27.50, 336 pages : A Museum Director Examines a Life of Images and Art

In the last chapter of his memoirs, Sir John Pope-Hennessy, an art historian who successively directed two of Britain’s major museums, tells of his retirement in Florence. He describes his apartment, with a loggia and a view over the Arno. He takes us through the rooms, pointing out furniture and paintings collected over a lifetime.

The effect is strange, both loving and static. It is as if Sir John, at 77, had settled into one of the Bolognese portraits he bought once for 40 and sold much later for several hundred thousand. It is as if his life were a still life.

Sir John, who served and eventually directed the richly quirky and utterly unclassifiable Victoria and Albert Museum for 35 happy years; who left it to run the dour and recalcitrant British Museum for three unhappy years; who ran, reformed and expanded the Metropolitan’s Department of European Paintings for 10 giddy years; who served as indispensable artistic eminence on opera boards, art councils and international commissions--as well as writing scholarly books on Italian art--always preferred objects to humans, he tells us.

“His planets absolutely prevent his having emotions about people or even liking them,” an astrologer once said. The report was delivered to Sir John’s brother, James, a writer who loved all kinds of people, mostly male, and loved them so unsuitably as to end up bludgeoned to death in his own apartment. It was a tabloid scandal, cut short when Sir John had a quiet English word with the chairman of the Newspaper Council.

The refined and correct Sir John had a lifelong relation of love, guilt and pain to his younger brother. He comes closer to expressing pure emotion in writing of James’ death than he does anywhere else in this book. “A part of me had been cut away,” he writes. He experienced--and still does, sometimes--”a sense of failure and of isolation I had never known before.”

Yet, after visiting the body in the morgue, he can write: “I was appalled at the dissolute, almost evil expression on his face. It is as though one were participating in some unwritten Jacobean tragedy.” After a life spent with images--Sir John did not marry and is silent about any romantic attachments--he turns his brother into a painting.

It is odd, and oddly touching. He fled to Italy for a week and took comfort in an exhibit of medieval German church artifacts. “The awful present shriveled into insignificance,” he tells us.

Memoirs, of course, are the purposeful unshriveling of successive presents, awful and otherwise. As a memoir, Sir John’s is decidedly peculiar. It is a tower with tiny windows. Most of himself he immures. A cry is occasionally heard, like his recollection of being vetted, as a young man, by the formidable Mary Berenson, wife of Bernard.

“A monolith in gray satin,” he recalls; and the conversation flagged. Only as he was on his way out did she rouse herself. “Follow your star,” she called after him. “I shall,” he replied politely over his shoulder.

Much of this memoir is unleavened lists: of paintings, trips and people. A page and a half names the concerts he attended as a college student. At an international museum directors’ conference, he names 15 of the participants and comments: “The report was anodyne but the formal discussions were stimulating.” One had waited until now to know.

He can be acid about those he despises--Sir Roy Strong, his successor at the Victoria and Albert, for example--but those whom he admires are wraiths. Here he evokes one of his favorite Oxford classmates, “Jasper Ridley, who had some of the highest standards of conduct and judgment I have ever known.” And here is a zinger from Sir Kenneth Clark after a bad performance of Gluck’s “Iphigenia”: “It only shows that one can’t kill a work of art.”

We get some notion of his mother, a strong-minded writer who seemed to know everybody. “Mummy Tiger,” he called her, and he was clearly much under her spell. His father, a major general, is depicted vaguely as a disappointed man, weak and ineffective. He “was not allowed to handle money or to carve.” An animus is there; we don’t know why; we are not entirely sure toward whom.

There are enough occasional cries from the tower to keep a reader turning the pages, though sometimes rather fast. The stiffness and reticence are a kind of communication. And once in a while comes a page that makes us realize what a passion for art runs in this stiff writer. There are, for example, several nightmarish pages on the damage done by the 1966 floods in Florence.

We feel his stunned shock. As he describes the wreckage of paintings and murals, we suddenly realize how little separates art from the primal muck, and--as the words of this muck-detesting man sometimes make clear--how much.

Next: Judith Freeman reviews “Bones of Coral” by James W. Hall (Alfred A. Knopf).