When the humorist Arthur Kramer published these lines under the title ‘Homily for Art Students’ in the New Yorker in 1946, he mixed up a potent brew of historical beliefs about art and drinking. The dry Martinis, whiskey sours and double scotches belong to the 20th-century booze-hound, particular about his drinks and able to afford quality liquor. The reader is invited to imagine Dürer and Rubens taking a booth in an uptown cocktail bar. The anachronism implies a continuity between the myths of hard-drinking artists from different eras: as if the beer-swilling painters of the Dutch Golden Age, the absinthe-addled wretches of 19th-century Paris, the tough guys of the New York School, liquored-up and rowdy at the Cedar Tavern, and several generations of British artists, stumbling out drunk in the late afternoon from Soho’s Colony Room Club, could all be imagined in some timeless bar- room. In disavowing the link between artistic inspiration, heightened creative powers, and the use of alcohol, the poem attests to how firmly the myth was established in the popular mind. By the time Kramer wrote his poem, the myth had become self-fulfilling. -