Walter William (Wilhelm) Barker, painter, printmaker, professor and writer, was born in Koblenz, Germany, on August 8, 1921. His family emigrated to the United States while he was a child and he was raised in Webster Groves, Missouri. Barker served in the Second World War as a sergeant in the Corps of Military Police in Britain, Normandy, and Northern France, earning three battle stars. Upon his discharge, he returned to the U.S. and enrolled in art classes at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri under the G.I. Bill. He studied with Max Beckmann, Horst Janson, and Philip Guston and earned his BFA in 1948. Barker continued his studies under Alton Pickens and Henry Hope at the University of Indiana and earned his MFA in 1950. He also studied with Mauricio Lasansky at the University of Iowa.

Barker began his teaching career at Salem College in North Carolina in 1949. In 1950, he became an instructor of painting at Washington University until he was hired in 1962 as art instructor at the Brooklyn Museum School. In 1966, he began his career at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where he became Professor Emeritus in 1992, before retiring in 1999. Additionally, he was a special correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch between 1962 and 1978. Barker was a champion of the work and life of Max Beckmann, writing several papers and books on his former mentor throughout his life. 

Barker won the New Talent USA Award in 1956 and his work was included in the exhibitions Portraits (1960) and Recent Acquisitions: Painting and Sculpture (1965) at the Museum of Modern Art New York. He was also included in Painting and Sculpture Today (1967) at the Herron Art Institute (now the Indianapolis Museum of Art). He was among the stable of artists represented by the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York.

The work of Walter William Barker is represented in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois; the Kemper Art Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; the Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

Walter William Barker died in Greensboro, North Carolina on May 13, 2004.