The conservative connoisseur

For newcomers to the voluminous and highly popular writings of Paul Johnson, the English historian, journalist and polymath, the first thing to be said about his latest outsize production is: Don’t be dismayed by the immense length of “Art: A New History.” Johnson is one of the most accomplished writers of nonfiction English prose on the current transatlantic literary scene, and art is a subject he knows and cares deeply about.

“This book,” he writes in his preface, “is something I have wanted to write all my life, for I write books to educate myself, and my thirst for knowledge about art and artists has been growing since my earliest consciousness. My father was an artist and head of an art school, and I remember, as a small child, trying to overhear his conversations with his friend [painter] L.S. Lowry. This meant hiding in a piece of Jacobean furniture, called the Court Cupboard, in my father’s Art Room (he never used the word ‘studio’). But all they talked about was cricket.”

Then, as a cautionary preview of the very personal perspective that Johnson brings to the inordinate task of producing a one-volume world history of art, he writes that “[m]y father did not want me to become a painter, though he admitted I drew well, and he took me with him when he went out to draw churches. When I was six, in the mid-thirties, he said to me: ‘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.’ So I became a writer.... But I have continued to draw and paint, and have even held one-man exhibitions in London in the last decade.”

That unembarrassed reference to Picasso as a “fraud,” by the way, may be taken as a warning that Johnson’s new history does not refrain from sporting some distinctly reactionary opinions. It has to be understood, too, that he is uncowed by the received judgments of the art bureaucracies in the academy, the museums, the commercial galleries and the news media. Johnson’s talents and outlook are of a very different order. He is a master of narrative history, and his gift for vivid storytelling is matched by an astounding command of large, complex subjects and an unflagging capacity for rendering them intelligible and compelling. We are never in any danger of confronting a dry or boring page in even the longest of Johnson’s books, and very long books -- among them “A History of the American People,” “A History of the English People,” “A History of Christianity” and “Modern Times” -- are his forte.

As for his reactionary opinions, especially in regard to Modernist art, they need not dismay the reader either. Reactionary artists and the views of their critical champions also belong to the history of art, and Johnson is by no means alone in his disobliging censure of Modernism. In this country, in the 1930s, Thomas Craven’s “Men of Art,” a runaway bestseller in its day, vigorously upheld the notion that the Regionalist school of the period -- Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood et al. -- was a far greater achievement than anything to be found in the art of Cezanne and the Modernists influenced by him. And for an even longer period, Royal Cortissoz, the immensely influential art critic of the old New York Herald-Tribune, denounced the work of American Modernists as “Ellis Island Art” -- “promoted by types not yet fitted for their first papers in aesthetic naturalization.” Yet the reactionary Cortissoz could write beautifully about the Old Masters, and so does Johnson -- as, for example, in this account of Peter Paul Rubens’ “Descent From the Cross” (1612) in Antwerp Cathedral:

“Once Rubens had thought a project through, and proved to himself that it would work by drawings and oil sketches, he created the finished painting at impressive speed. He drew on the canvas with a special brush as though it were a piece of chalk, putting in the lines with total accuracy without hesitation or pause. When he applied the paint, the brushstrokes were fluent and long -- sometimes 3 feet -- but firm or delicate at will. These great, sweeping strokes, marvelous to watch, and filling up the canvas with almost miraculous speed, involved a meticulous manufacture and choice of brushes, careful preparation of a huge palette, and a skill in measuring the quantity of paint, and placing it on the brush, which was a personal technology in itself. When the master was going at full stretch, clambering up and down his stepladder, striding from one corner of the canvas to another, shouting for more, and yet more, paint while the fit was on him -- or rather while he could feel the power radiating from his hand, for he was always calm and in control -- he must have been an amazing sight, one which a young artist would retain to the end of his life.”

As this and a great many other passages in this book suggest, Johnson’s is what might be called a You-Are-There method of writing art history, for the reader is repeatedly taken straight to the scene of the action where the art was created and made witness to its likely effect on viewers seeing it for the first time. Thus, about the earliest pictorial art known to mankind, the cave paintings of prehistoric Europe, Johnson writes:

“The sheer scale of the art is daunting. The big cave vault at Lascaux, known as the Picture Gallery, is over 100 feet long and 35 feet wide. Caves were specially chosen for their size as well as for their security. Niaux in the Pyrenees is over half a mile in length, and this is by no means unusual.... If we take into account the freshness of the pigments when the work was just done, and the impact of the lines and colors under the flickering light of primitive oil lamps, or flambeaux, we can imagine the force of the impact which this first artistic experience had on primitive humans, whose innocent eyes were unaccustomed to visual forms outside nature itself. That helps to explain why these societies were prepared to devote such a high proportion of their scarce surplus resources to the creation of these art galleries.”

It isn’t only on the well-known monuments and masters that Johnson concentrates his attention in this “New History.” One of the book’s happiest surprises for me is Johnson’s admiring account of the 19th century Russian landscape painter Isaak Levitan (1860-1900), whom many Russian connoisseurs regard as their finest painter but whose work remains utterly unknown in this country. (I fell in love with Levitan’s pictures when I first encountered them on a visit to the Soviet Union many years ago.) I am obliged to point out, however, that Johnson fails to mention that Levitan was greatly influenced by 19th century French landscapists -- among them Camille Corot, the Barbizon painters and the Impressionists -- whose work he studied on a visit to the International Exhibition in Paris in 1889. It was a significant part of Levitan’s genius that he was so adept in his later work at assimilating the techniques of these southern masters to the less forgiving northern climate of the Russian countryside.

Johnson’s even greater enthusiasm for another Russian painter, Ilya Repin (1844-1930), I find simply baffling, however. The picture he praises as “one of the greatest paintings produced in the nineteenth century -- perhaps the greatest” is a sentimental genre scene called “They Did Not Expect Him” (1884), a painting rich in melodrama but devoid of aesthetic interest. This is Johnson’s description of it:

“It is the drawing-room of a comfortable middle-class house. The servants have just admitted a ragged, emaciated, unshaven figure who advances into the centre of the room. His wife, facing us, looks up in astonishment. His children, doing their homework, are amazed, awed, beginning to shine with delight. In the centre is his elderly mother -- is it, perhaps, the personification of Mother Russia? -- who rises from her chair and fixes her gaze on her son. He has returned from Siberian exile. Characteristically the chaotic, hopeless and grotesquely inefficient state has given his family no warning and they, having had no news of him for years, had given up hope. So here he is, raised from the dead like Lazarus; but there is no Christ to thank, and there is shock, surprise, bafflement, almost dread in the reactions -- gratitude and happiness will come later.”

I daresay Johnson’s reading of this unremarkable picture is a good deal more compelling than the picture itself, and he then really goes over the top by suggesting that “They Did Not Expect Him” is “as resonant in its own way as Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie Pathetique or Dostoevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’ ” This is gross hyperbole in the service of an aesthetic ideology resolutely determined to turn back the tide of Modernist innovation.

When, in the next chapter, Johnson goes on to belittle the achievements of Monet, Pissarro, Seurat, Cezanne and other modern masters, it is made unmistakably clear to the reader that, with the emergence of Impressionism, Johnson is seldom prepared to give any manifestation of Modernism the benefit of a doubt. For on this great subject he has no doubts. His eyes are closed to its beauties, and his mind is closed to the immense feat of imagination, invention and intellectual adventure that Modernism has brought to the arts, painting included. As a historian, Johnson knows very well that the past can be neither repeated nor repealed, but as an art lover his yearning to return to the certainties of his father persuades him otherwise.

Monet’s late “Waterlily” paintings are thus indicted on charges of “mass production” and commercialization, while Seurat’s pointillisme is characterized as “an old idea which painters had played with at times since the sixteenth century (at least) and dropped as ultimately destructive of art.” Cezanne, too, is categorically disparaged. Of his great series of “Women Bathers” paintings in the Barnes Foundation, the Petit Palais and London’s National Gallery, Johnson writes: “They are stiff and awkward, anatomically incorrect, virtually without faces and grotesquely posed, but as Cezanne’s reputation has risen, theirs has surged upwards too -- such is art, or commerce.”

“Commerce,” which is inevitably linked to “fashion” in Johnson’s thinking about the art of the modern era, emerges in the book’s later chapters -- “The Beginnings of Fashion Art” and “The Dangers and Opportunities of Twenty-First Century Art” -- as one of the principal perils that this book is dedicated to exposing and resisting. Another is what Johnson describes as “the decline, and in some cases the disappearance, of effective training in art skills.... What is lacking are opportunities for would-be painters and sculptors to acquire first-class training.”

I think Johnson exaggerates the extent of this “decline” in the teaching of art skills. In New York, anyway, there has been an energetic revival in the teaching of such skills since the 1960s, when a group of artists founded the New York Studio School in what had been the original building for the Whitney Museum in Greenwich Village. Under the leadership of its current dean -- Graham Nickson, himself a figurative painter and draftsman of high accomplishment -- training in life drawing is the priority. Nickson’s teaching program, especially a crash course called the Drawing Marathon, has proved to be so successful that it is now emulated in art schools from Italy to Australia. (On this subject, however, I have to declare my own interest, for I have served on the Studio School’s board of trustees for many years.)

Johnson is remarkably cavalier, too, in consigning some of Modernism’s greatest achievements to the lowly realm of “fashion,” writing, for example, that “Cubism can fairly be classified as the first major instance of fashion art, as opposed to fine art.” Suffice to say that on Cubism, he exhibits something approaching total incomprehension, and the very thought of collage and constructed sculpture is taken as a sign of a decline in civilization.

Fortunately, Johnson is anything but consistent in his distastes. About the abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock he writes with, if not enthusiasm, at least a certain sympathy for the man himself, and the earlier masters of abstraction -- Vassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian -- are similarly treated with respect, with Johnson conceding that “Abstract art is thus fine, rather than fashion, art, and among the abstractionists there have been a number of major, even great, artists.”

Yet, predictably, Johnson’s highest praise among 20th century American artists is reserved for Edward Hopper -- “perhaps the greatest representational artist of the first half of the twentieth century” -- as well as for Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth. Indeed, Wyeth is said to be the “only narrative artist of genius during the second half of the twentieth century.”

It is not for Johnson’s animadversions on the art of the modern era, however, that “Art: A New History” is likely to enjoy a large and enthusiastic readership. About many of the greatest painters in the history of Western art he writes with such an engaging combination of passion and instruction that the reader longs to hurry off to the nearest museum to renew his acquaintance with the works under discussion. About how many writers on art can that nowadays be said?