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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Art: A New History, by Paul Johnson; Harper Collins, 777 pages,
$39.95.
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