The modern sensibility recoils against the “great man” model of history: history as the account of decisive events, shaped by the autonomous actions of kings, princes, and generals. This is history as Shakespeare viewed it, where the great constants of legitimacy and succession perennially give rise to conflict, ever changing as the infinite permutations of duty, honor, and ambition act differently upon different men. In place of this, history has come to be taught “from below,” as the record of inexorable and implacable social and economic forces, act ing collectively and impersonally. Its high drama is less likely to be that of a decisive cavalry charge as a notable leap in crop yield, or the slow contraction of the perimeter of a dying language.

The field of art history has followed suit. In 1951 Arnold Hauser’s Social History of Art looked at art in terms of its patronage, shifting the focus from the supply side, as it were, to the demand. Hauser was deeply shaped by Marxist historiography, and he came to the unsurprising conclusion that the history of art, like everything else, was the story of class conflict. This insight, shorn of its explicit Marxism, has become the conventional wisdom and a generation has been taught to look at works of art in their social context first and in their aesthetic dimension secondarily—if at all.

At a dinner party recently, a graduate student upbraided a distinguished colleague of mine for using the word masterpiece: “We no longer call a painting a masterpiece; we call it a success.” This substitution reflects more than mere prudery over sexist language. The former term belongs to a mental world in which works of art are the product of intelligent artists, working at the highest level of skill, while the latter term suggests something fortunate but inadvertent, like the winning of a lottery.

But it has proven easier to dislodge George Washington than Michelangelo. Art stubbornly remains the province of “great men,” for the making of a painting or statue is an individual act in which the most personal of qualities are at play: visual imagination, dexterity and control, the ineffable and inimitable quality of “touch.” Vast social and economic forces may help disseminate a new movement in art—or prepare a society to receive it—but they cannot bring it into being. If this were the case, Nazi Germany would have produced art of enduring value. Ultimately, it is the artist of personal talent who devises a new visual sensibility, like Michelangelo’s terribilità or Caravaggio’s play of light and gloom, which at first stupefies and then conquers an entire generation of followers. In the end it comes down to those quintessentially Shakespearean concerns: lineage, succession, and authority.

Here is the value of Paul Johnson’s Art: A New History,[1] a spacious survey of art that restores the creative artist to the epicenter of art history. Johnson is the English journalist and popular historian whose works include Modern Times and A History of the Jews. He is no art historian—indeed, this book could not have been written by an art historian—but something better, a historian who is also a painter (who was taught by his father, an artist and director of an art school). In other words, he has faced the same aesthetic and technical challenges as the artists he treats, which gives his thoughts on the nature of artistic creativity a rare and bracing urgency.

At first glance Art: A New History resembles such standard textbooks as Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art or H. W. Janson’s History of Art, first published in 1962 and now in a sixth, massively expanded edition. Like these books, Johnson too begins with Paleolithic cave painting, proceeding in turn through ancient Egypt, classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and so forth right into the contemporary world. He likewise identifies the key works, giving capsule biographies of the decisive figures and sketching the religious, cultural, and economic backdrop against which they worked. What differs is the voice, which for Johnson is everything. Instead of the cool impersonal tone of the survey, he writes with a distinctive personal voice that is by turns cranky, charming, and inspiring. He also has an impish love of provoking. After all, this is a man who once wrote in his Spectator column that he hung an oversized, luridly violent Spanish crucifixion in the vestibule of his house because he liked to “terrify his protestant visitors.” The result is a general survey that can be read, cover to cover, for pleasure (if tempered with occasional exasperation).

Johnson is unafraid of “great man” history. In his view, art history is a story of alternation between “intervals of canonical calm” and occasional “climactic moments” in which radically creative innovators are thrust to the forefront. The account of these innovators—“gifted, obstinate, willful”—forms the heart of this book. It is a model peculiarly suited to Johnson’s discursive style, love of the telling anecdote, and chatty biographical asides. Having no official consensus to defend, Johnson ranges freely across the span of art, contemplating and pondering at will. He lavishes time on artists who intrigue him (such as the little-known Swedish realist Anders Zorn) and utterly ignores art that bores him (such as the wall art of Roman Pompeii, which he writes off as “dull and commonplace”).

Nor does he shy away from pronouncements of the most magisterial sort. After a thoughtful and subtle appreciation of Egyptian art, whose intellectual rigor he admires, he turns to the art of the Ancient Near East, with its ziggurats and arrogant palaces. These he dismisses for their bombast and monotonous swagger, artistic overcompensation of insecure and precarious kingdoms. From this he extracts a moral that is one of the leitmotifs of the book: “a serious artistic weakness is often the external, visible sign of political, economic, and social weakness.”

For all his critical bludgeoning, Johnson has an unaffected and almost naïve curiosity about the great questions: the essential nature of art, its ultimate origins, its psychological function. He speculates that art reflects the “ordering instinct which makes society possible, and [is] essential to human happiness.” It is not a luxury nor the product of civilization at all, but a primal human activity, perhaps even the first profession, as he speculates in his fascinating first chapter on Paleolithic cave painting. This was an art system of continental scope, with 277 documented sites across Europe, and daunting technical complexity, requiring massive scaffolding like that once notched into the walls of the caves at Lascaux.

Johnson makes great claims for this art, arguing that it preceded not only writing but perhaps speech as well, its images providing visual aids to articulate sound: “The evolving genetic coding which made humans rationalise themselves into art was the same force which produced rational speech noises, so that the two processes were intimately connected from the start.”

Speculative, to be sure, but what subject is more deserving of intelligent speculation than the dawn of art? And unlike most art historians, Johnson has actually seen most of the art that he writes about. He is exceptionally well traveled, better by far than virtually any art historian, and has seen much inaccessible art. When he writes about the startling multi-colored masonry of the remote churches of Armenia or the architectural sculpture of the Mayans, it is the palpable aesthetic encounter that is paramount. Here Johnson is at his best, and here he differs most from standard surveys of art.

But Johnson’s heart lies in painting, and it is when discussing the achievements of the great oil painters, from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, that he finds his mark. He has a particular affinity for landscape artists, those who tackle the perennial challenges of light, atmospherics, and space. For this reason he devotes much attention to painters of the American landscape and the West, such as Cole, Church, and Bierstadt. His chapter on the watercolor, that minor English art that had a major effect on nineteenth-century painting, is particularly valuable. Johnson shows how the watercolor spread, arousing global interest in landscape, permitting a “more subtle and accurate study” of nature—which had a great liberating affect on the further course of nineteenth-century art. He shows that important figures such as Delacroix and Géricault were decisively affected by their encounter with the English watercolor tradition. And he also calls attention to neglected watercolor masters, such as the tragic Thomas Girtin, about whom Turner said, “If Tom Girtin had lived, I would have starved.”

In such a wide-ranging account, there are the inevitable errors: Eakins taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, not the Philadelphia Academy; the completion of Cologne Cathedral began in 1840, not 1823, when the existing choir was restored. And the photographs here are not always well coordinated with the text. Works of art are discussed in depth but not shown; others are illustrated but not discussed. As a skilled journalist, Johnson has thought his book through in narrative terms and not as a visual sequence.

Yet his book achieves a wonderful visual freshness. He was not hobbled by the fear of leaving something important out, and he makes room for less well-known works, such as the Russian painter Ilya Repin’s haunting They Did Not Expect Him (1884). Here a gaunt and hesitant figure, just returned from years of Siberian exile, moves haltingly into the circle of his stunned family. Johnson pronounces it as one of the great paintings of the nineteenth century, and the case he makes is not bad.

Most readers will find Johnson’s account of modern art, the art of the past seventy years or so, perplexing. Here he has less to say about individual artists than the changed circumstances under which art is produced. In fact, for the second half of the twentieth century, works by only four painters are illustrated (although many more are discussed): Jackson Pollock, Andrew Wyeth, Magritte, and a Soviet propagandist named Korzhev! Johnson justifies this perversity by making a distinction between fine art—art concerned with the creation of beauty—from fashion art—art “concerned with conformity to social rule.” For him, most of twentieth-century art can be explained as fashion art, which serves a certain consumer function but is emphatically not connected to that primal search for order.

His account of twentieth-century professional events is vivid, as might be expected from one who grew up within that world. He points out that the abolition of art academies in the late nineteenth century did not produce freedom for the artist, for most artists live a life of hardscrabble penury. In fact, these academies worked to help sell artist’s paintings, for which they claimed a tiny commission. Without these academies acting as intermediaries, the modern artist is at the mercy of the dealer, whose commission is likely to be sixty percent or more.

Fascinating thoughts, but it still does not add up to a history of twentieth-century art. For this reason alone, Art: A New History will not be embraced by art historians. Already Publisher’s Weekly has assailed it for its “pure New Criterion-style cultural conservatism,” belittling Johnson as a “conservative gadfly and Sunday painter.” But his book deserves a wide popular audience, and it will find it. For all its quirky pronouncements and eccentric digressions, Johnson has produced that rarest of objects, a contemporary book about art whose most striking quality is that it is humane.

Notes
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1. Art: A New History, by Paul Johnson; Harper Collins, 777 pages, $39.95. Go back to the text.