From the WSJ Opinion Archives
BOOKSHELF
Bold Strokes, Strong Opinions
Paul Johnson's new history of art is excellent--except the part on "modern times."
Anyone picking up Paul Johnson's "Art: A New History" may be forgiven for doing a double take. In the past, Mr. Johnson's interests--in "Modern Times," say, or in the best-selling "Intellectuals"--have run more toward history and politics than culture.
Yet "Art: A New History" turns out to be the real thing. Mr. Johnson's father was an artist who cautioned his son against a similar career: "I can see bad times coming for art. Frauds like Picasso will rule the roost for the next half-century. Do something else for a living." He did, becoming a political journalist at the New Statesman and, later, the Spectator and many other publications, both British and American. Yet all the time he continued to sketch and paint, and to visit museums. It is this store of experience that he draws upon for "Art: A New History."
The book is really an extended and engaging work of art criticism rather than a strict history, with many fresh points of view and many eccentric ones. In places, it is deeply flawed. But it always has the virtue of a strong and opinionated intelligence guiding its arguments and prose.
More often than not, the standard art-history textbooks present, in Arnold Toynbee's phrase, one damned thing after another. They primarily concern the study of style--why things took the form they did (the Parthenon, a Rembrandt self-portrait, a Cubist painting), what ideas lie behind particular forms and how one kind of art shapes another. Usually a chronological narrative marches through each period, stopping to note works of influence or mastery.
Mr. Johnson adopts a freer approach. He singles out the works he considers important and ignores those he doesn't. And his historical narrative is interspersed with thematic chapters--e.g. "The Apotheosis of the Statue" or "The Watercolor and Its Global Spread." Where he departs most noticeably is in his willingness to make judgments. Objectivity is a cardinal rule in the discipline of art history. Mr. Johnson's book, by contrast, abounds in strong opinions.
Thus Mr. Johnson tells us that "the medieval cathedrals of Europe... are the greatest accomplishments of humanity in the whole theatre of art." He notes that "we all accept Giotto as a great artist" but that "we all feel, though most of us are reluctant to admit it, that his work still looks wooden." As for two prominent American artists: "If [Winslow] Homer became a great painter without any training at all, Thomas Eakins . . . became great despite being, if anything, overtrained."
These are not just clever lines; they are indispensable to the education a book like this is designed to provide, taking you beyond the facts of artist, period and movement to a deeper understanding of value and accomplishment. It has long been a criticism of art-history textbooks that they teach you everything except how to tell the difference between good and bad art. No such problem here.
Beyond discussing individual works, Mr. Johnson shows an interest in what might be called the ways of creativity--the forces that bring works of art into being. Chief among these is the personality of the artist. This may seem obvious, but a passage about Auguste Rodin sharpens the point: "He has been variously classified as a Romantic, a Symbolist and 'the first of the moderns.' In fact he belongs in the ranks of those who form the largest category of great artists--the Individualists." For Mr. Johnson, it is the individual who moves history forward, not abstractions like "style." Some of the finest passages of "Art: A New History" are the personality portraits of titans like Michelangelo and Rembrandt.
And, unusual for a book of this kind, Mr. Johnson repeatedly draws our attention to the economic aspects of art. We learn that in the Byzantine era, "every square foot of mosaic cost four times as much, on average, as fresco" shortly would; that the Renaissance sculptor Andrea Verrocchio "was a capitalist. He undertook important projects, borrowing money to finance the work, and taking on experts whom he paid." The contemporary art market comes in for analysis, too.
Which brings us to the book's major problem: Mr. Johnson remembers all too clearly what his father said. He loathes modern art and regards Picasso as its chief criminal. He coins the term "fashion art" to describe the work of nearly all artists from Picasso to the present. It is his theory that they created their art not out of some inner impulse but out of the cynical desire to secure commercial advantage by propagating a trendy style. Such reasoning leads Mr. Johnson to observations both philistine and inaccurate. Thus Matisse, in many ways a reluctant revolutionary and certainly a man of high aesthetic ideals, was merely "anxious to push himself forward by novelty."
The problem isn't just that Mr. Johnson doesn't like modern art. One can hardly hold that against him in a book brimming with appealingly strong opinions. The problem is that he cannot understand what the modern movement was all about. He thinks artists should always replicate visual reality, that anything else is fraudulent. But beginning in the late 19th century, artists abandoned that centuries-old tradition because, among other things, they felt that it could no longer capture their experience--the modern experience.
Instead, they sought to articulate a subjective reaction to the world. That idea cuts no ice with Mr. Johnson, so he gives summary treatment to Cézanne, Matisse and other great artists while singling out for praise the likes of Grant Wood, Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth--all moderately talented realists with banal or sentimental approaches to their subjects. It is strange that the author of "Modern Times" should have a blind spot for modernism in art, but such seems to be the case.
Which is a pity, because "Art: A New History" is a valuable book--if it can reach its audience. It is too unconventional to find favor with college professors, although their students could derive great benefit from reading it. But there is a whole legion of museum-goers who are eager to learn more about art but who now have only the specialized catalogs of particular exhibitions or, at the other extreme, to the short entries in dictionaries to turn to. They would do better to pick up Mr. Johnson's book and discover there the ideal general introduction to the subject of art and the practice of looking. They should just be sure to look askance at the part on "modern times."
Mr. Gibson is The Wall Street Journal's Journal's Leisure & Arts editor.
