A Fresh Look

Johnson may be a heretic, but he’s no curmudgeon–and this is the most surprising and welcome feature of his book. He didn’t surrender to conservative grumpiness to produce a volume of moans and snarls. “Art” celebrates the entire realm of man-made beauty with an inclusiveness and zest that are contagious. Undoubtedly some critical noses are deliberately tweaked, as when Johnson rhapsodizes over Norman Rockwell and Jean-François Millet, those bastions of sentimental philistinism, but the merits he recognizes in both artists are hard to deny, while the faults he points out in a range of artists from Botticelli to Monet are there to be seen, visible as warts.

The overall tone of the book, however, is generous, even joyful. Johnson writes for those late-modern souls whose regard for high achievement in art is an absolute. And within the purview of high art he includes cosmetics, gardening, dressmaking, bridge and highway construction, and other forms of mega-engineering. Here he is, toward the end of his book, in a moment of giddy hyperbole: “As is shown repeatedly in the cities of America, which has always built the best skyscrapers and grouped them profusely, a grove of varied tall buildings is one of the most exciting sights on earth. These airy and glittering city centers are perhaps the greatest achievements of twentieth-century art.”

Try to imagine a similar paean to the glory of modern cities in Gombrick or Janson, authors of the standard single-volume histories of art heretofore. It would have been beneath their dignity to praise work that had not been certified by “experts.” Indeed, H.W. Janson is forthright in the matter: “The one qualification they [art’s primary audience of experts] all have in common is an informed love,” he writes in the introduction to his “History of Art,” “at once discriminating and enthusiastic that lends particular weight to their judgements.” This is a recipe for the fossilization of received wisdom–and that, indeed, was Janson’s accomplishment and why his great tome is at once authoritative and stultifying. As to Ernst Gombrich’s “Story of Art,” it is no longer a work of art history so much as a part of it, like Vasari or Ruskin: the Baltimore Catechism of modernist aesthetics.

The same fate is unlikely to befall Johnson, who is simply too lively, too prolix, and too off-the-wall to be cordially received as the new Gombrich by the academic and curatorial elite in charge of our canons. His audience is rather those autodidacts who once would have read Oswald Spengler or Will Durant, people with time to take in the whole Modern Library or invest a year or two in becoming acquainted with some of the actual statues, basilicas, triptychs, and megaliths Johnson writes about. This is a large undertaking, for which “Art” will serve primarily as a kind of travel advertisement. Three hundred small reproductions (although in color, blessedly) can’t substitute for the fieldwork required. Surely the day will soon be upon us when such a book will be accompanied by a CD-ROM appendix as a matter of course. Till such time, Johnson’s readers will have to bring to bear the power of their own memory banks.

But imagine the job of an artist before the era of photography, before even etchings, when one’s only knowledge of art derived from communal availability, travel, and hearsay. Johnson shares the knack of recalibrating his own optics to the mindsets of past eras and seeing their art through their eyes. Like an inspired historical novelist, Johnson imparts a human warmth to each artifact his research discovers. Accordingly, as the light of history becomes brighter and steadier and we can begin to discern the features of the individual artists, Johnson comes into his own as a historian of real artistry, much as he did in his bestselling multi-biographical “Intellectuals” (1999), a debunking of twelve of the Left’s most sacred cows that can stand beside Lytton Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians.”

“Art” is not a similar exercise in exposing clay feet, but it never omits reference to the human flaws of five-star geniuses. Thus he praises William Morris as “perhaps the most important designer who ever lived, in the sense that his patterns, in carpets, curtains, textiles generally, pottery and furniture, have penetrated all over the world and are still in vogue, more than a century after his death. . . . No other designer, working on such a broad range, achieved such a consistently high level of production.” But Johnson scruples to note that Morris achieved his success through inherited wealth, bullying ways, and a blindness to those around him that led to his being cuckolded by so mediocre a painter as Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Johnson’s page and a half on Morris offers a truer estimate of the whole man than many of Morris’s book-length biographies.

Johnson’s knack for miniature portraiture makes “Art” excellent for browsing in, and I will confess that I did not begin at its beginning until I’d assured myself I would enjoy it by searching for plums. Invariably they were quickly found. His chapters on landscape, on watercolor, and on what he terms “ideological art” (Gropius, Le Corbusier, fascist Italy) could each be republished on its own, with a sufficiency of color plates, as a tasteful monograph. That said, the acid test of a history of art is its ability to impart an immense amount of information, balancing narrative interest with aesthetic taxonomy, all the while remaining interesting and avoiding the drone of the lecture hall. All this Johnson does, and more: He writes at a lively pace, with flair, intelligence, and good humor. If his text does not abound in purple patches to rival Ruskin’s or Gibbon’s, it certainly bears comparison to those of “readable” historians like Simon Schama or James McPherson.

Notwithstanding the trunkless statue of Ozymandias that Shelley made famous, monumental and high-priced art tends to endure best, so the art of the first centuries that art history chiefly treats are pyramids, temples, and things tucked away in tombs or hidey-holes. In the fullness of time archaeologists may yet make finds to compensate for the Eurocentrism of art history, but for now its shape is the same simple parabola we’ve known since Vasari: a classical Golden Age, a Dark Ages of Ostrogoth belt buckles and crude icons, curving upwards and exfoliating in the sum of all things bright and beautiful.

Johnson is an excellent explicator of the dark abysms of the past, its shards and ruined temples. He also sifts through the leavings of the Gothic era, explaining the merits of Carolingian minuscule and suchlike.

But it is with his eighth chapter that the book kicks into high gear, as Johnson declares unequivocally: “The medieval cathedrals of Europe–there are over a hundred of them–are the greatest accomplishments of humanity in the whole theater of art.”

The case he proceeds to make for this is reasoned and persuasive, but its impact lies in its grandiose and unequivocal affirmation. How rare is the pedagogue who dares to declare his preferences with forthright enthusiasm. I remember, in my undergraduate days, asking the teaching assistant of Professor Janson if she actually liked the works of Giotto in the same way she liked more evolved paintings, for the Italian primitives seemed to me as crude as comic books. She refused any answer, on the grounds that Giotto transcended individual preference.

Johnson never pussyfoots that way. No member of the canon is too august for a polite demur. Of the Italian trecento he writes: “The artist was still chained to his tools. We have to weep at the poverty of materials and techniques available to great artists of the quality of Duccio and Giotto.”

He then gives an account of the difficulties and limitations of fresco painting, and concludes, “The early Italian paintings, then, were much less appealing than they might have been because they were using an inferior medium.” Surely that is an example of what oft was thought but seldom expressly stated, for implicit in that judgment is a demur as to the greatest painters of the high Renaissance, Michelangelo included. “The fact is,” he concludes, “the Italian painters would have been more productive, and produced better work, if they had used oil from the start [like the painters north of the Alps], or even if they had not been quite so conservative in adopting it.”

Johnson’s credibility as a critic is further enhanced by the fact that he is a painter himself, as he lets slip in a passage explaining the advantages of painting on canvas rather than wood panels. Poets have an undeniable edge in writing criticism of poetry (their own works stand bail), as does someone with hands-on experience at the easel in writing about art. There is an unstated assumption that in Johnson’s ideal commonwealth we would all be artists. He praises the Victorian conviction that watercolor was an essential accomplishment of a civilized person (noting that not only were all of Queen Victoria’s offspring taught to paint, but four of the present-day royal family are watercolorists).

Johnson’s can-do attitude, in conjunction with a promiscuous enthusiasm for merit, makes him an ideal cicerone through the centuries. No culture is so alien that he cannot make friends quickly with its best artists and act as their interpreter. All those painters one might not give a second glance to in one’s first transit of a large museum are shown at their best with his mediation.

As he approaches the twentieth century Johnson’s seemingly promiscuous appetite slackens. He will nibble a Manet, but he finds him, at root, an artist of “limited resources.” He is much keener on Lautrec (who provides some great anecdotage) and Degas, but has major reservations about the Impressionists, Pissarro, Renoir, and Monet. He is even more dismissive of Cubism, and his portrait of Picasso is very cruel. My reaction was a little standoffish. I have spent too many years revering the paintings Johnson deprecates to consign them to history’s scrapheap as cavalierly as he does. To him they are “fashion art,” a term he glosses by giving a short history of Charles Worth, France’s greatest couturier.

In the sense that “fashion art” may be a reflection of the ephemeral nature of much contemporary painting, Johnson has a point. The lesser Cubists belong in museums’ attics along with the lesser marine watercolorists, the lesser Dutch flower painters, et al. Many of the -isms of the twentieth century may prove insolvent, just as entire species become extinct: dodos, dinosaurs, and minimalism. But the greater wonder is that the warehouses and auction blocks of the world abound with so much beauty. Watch “Antiques Roadshow” on television. Or browse eBay on the Internet. Or read Paul Johnson’s “Art: A New History.” Especially do that.

Thomas M. Disch is a poet, novelist, and art critic.