Though Irwin now began visiting the museums, for a long while his curiosity remained at best perfunctory. Mainly he walked around the cities aimlessly. "I walked in the daytime for a long, long time, but then I got into the habit in the evening of buying myself a couple bottles of beer, sticking them in my pocket, and then just walking, for example, in Paris, all night long in Paris until it became dawn, and then returning to my hotel room, sleeping till evening, having dinner, and starting out again. Just walking by myself. At certain times of night I'd be the only one out in the whole city. I mean, whole areas were just dead silent. And it was an incredibly romantic, very beautiful city, especially late at night like that."
It was a strange way to see Europe. "After I'd been over about six or eight times during that decade," Bob recalls, "having spent maybe two or more years there al-together, I remember once having a conversation with some people who'd just come back from a two-week tour and being unable to convince them that I'd been there at all. They'd talk Étoile and Élysées and Opéra and all those names, and I couldn't remember any of that stuff. I'd probably seen more of Paris than all of those people combined, but I couldn't tell them anywhere I'd been in terms of the name of the street or the café or whatever. I just wasn't interested in that. In fact, I maybe saw all the churches in Paris, but I never went to see any of the churches in Paris. In my wanderings there would be this building and I'd walk into it just like I walked into every building, but I didn't care whether it was built in the Whatever or who did it. I mean, even to this day, I couldn't care less. On the other hand, I retained a very real sense of the differing textures of each of those places..." With each new trip Irwin began spending more and more time in the muse-ums. As his own involvement in art grew, his interest in the masters expanded— but only to a point. "After going through the Louvre twenty times and the National Museum and the Prado and whatever—I can't remember the names of the ones in Amsterdam and Florence—well, after a while it got to the point where Id enter a room and just twirl around and go to the next one and twirl and then the next one.... I mean, it got to the point where if I ever saw another fucking brown painting ... I was so fucking tired of brown paintings. I mean, they all looked exactly the same! After a while my whole relationship to the history of art got cleared out to a matter of trusting my own eye. I mean, I could enter a room and go like. that, zap, and pick out the one or two paintings that were at all interesting in terms of technique, like some Davids that were technically really incredible; and there were some that really just jumped out at you, like some Vermeers which were just spectacular. Now and then a piece of Egyptian art or something would really bang you. And if you ever saw an impressionist painting in that atmosphere-which I did once, saw a Gauguin through a haze of brown—it just summoned you back to your senses. But as for the Renaissance and the high tradition, I just came to see that—man, are you kidding? I wasn't interested in any of that stuff. And I'm still not. I look at Da Vincis and Piero della Francescas, and I'm not interested at all. I look at them with the same kind of interest I'd have turning the pages of a magazine.