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PDF FormatOther anomalies include Johnson’s tendency to discuss works at length that are not illustrated in his text, and to leave out of the illustrations some of the most important works of art, such as Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, van Eyck’s Betrothal of the Arnolfini, and Velazquez’s Las Meninas. Perhaps this is because Johnson assumes that these works are already well known, and wishes to illustrate other works by these artists. But the same cannot be said of several lesser-known nineteenth-century French artists, including Jules Bastien-Lepage and Leon Lhermitte, whose works are not illustrated at all, even though he includes them among the true artists of their century. In other instances, a tangible gap exists between the works illustrated and their descriptions, as is the case with Bruegel. No matter how hard one tries, it is difficult to see the men and dogs hurrying down the slope in Hunters in the Snow (if anything the dogs seem to lag behind), or to agree with Johnson that “no artist ever rendered human movement more convincingly.” (Italics mine.)
These are perhaps minor com-plaints in a book that encompasses so much art. On the other hand, it is more difficult to forgive Johnson when he is faced with works that he admires, but which nevertheless do not meet his strict criteria for truly fine art. Take, for example, Paolo Uccello, whose paintings, in particular The Battle of San Romano, are frequently cited by art historians as rigorous examples of the application of linear perspective in Italian painting of the fifteenth century. Johnson equally notes Uccello’s devotion to perspective, but states that he lacks the technical skills to make things “look right.” Rather than actual horses and knights in battle, Uccello’s San Romano seems rather to comprise “toy soldiers riding rocking-horses.” This in fact is true, but is it indicative of a lack of artistic talent, or does it necessarily imply that Uccello did not achieve a pictorially tangible battlefield within the system of representation to which he devoted his art? Ernst Gombrich, in The Story of Art (1950), also noted Uccello’s toy-like figures, and in many ways Johnson’s History resembles Gombrich’s similarly flawed, but superior project, from which he draws heavily. Johnson lacks Gombrich’s self-critical awareness and deep understanding of the conventions of artistic representation. Whereas Gombrich notes that Jan van Eyck and Uccello shifted representation in different ways (van Eyck through attention to the surfaces of objects and the rendering of minute details, Uccello through attention to the solidity of forms in space), Johnson sees only Uccello’s failure to make paintings as convincingly “real” as those of van Eyck. He nevertheless calls Uccello’s work “art,” because it delights the viewer, and is “a reminder of one of the great lessons of art—a painting is an image, an imaginative personality: It can work magic.”
This somewhat obtuse maxim certainly holds true for many works of art, and is an opinion shared by many viewers. At times, one senses a generosity of spirit in Johnson’s criticism, especially in his noteworthy sections on Titian, Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, and Georges de la Tour. Like many people, Johnson appreciates beauty, and many of the artists he discusses, even when they fall outside the framework of his highly idiosyncratic history, nevertheless fulfill his requirements of creating “memorable images that stick in the mind.”
Among the many difficulties with such a viewpoint, however, is that it leaves no room for diverse notions of taste or beauty; it does not accommodate the fact that different people find different images memorable, nor does it provide a historical or theoretical framework that explains why this art is notable to begin with. Consequently, Johnson’s generosity is often undercut by the fact that as a general rule he allows for individualism only when artists create works of “realism.” But what exactly does Johnson mean by this?
In its most superficial use in relation to art, the term realism connotes an approximation of what we see with our own eyes in nature. In other words, an art object is said to be realistic when what is depicted by the artist looks like what we see in the real world. Although he never offers a single, precise definition, this rather prosaic understanding of “realism” seems to be what Johnson means when he refers, for example, to the “lifelike” art of the Greeks, which “was increasingly based on observation.”
The problem with this view is that realism becomes a static and lifeless concept, as opposed to, say, Michael Fried’s more organic notion that places realism in relation to the psychological impulses of the artist, as both the creator and viewer of his or her work. Johnson, however, does not distinguish between the methods of the different artists whose works he denotes as realistic. Nor does he appreciate the fact that the norms of realistic representation (how nature is understood and reproduced, and what people expect to see in works that reproduce it) have radically shifted over time. It matters little to Johnson that Raphael, who relied more on compositional sketches than on the observation of nature, cared more about the balance and harmony of his works, rather than their lifelike quality, whereas Caravaggio painted directly from live models; nor does it matter that Turner aimed at expressive and emotional effects, whereas Constable confined himself to representing only what he saw directly before him. Johnson constantly reminds the reader that “realism meant stressing individuality,” yet his concept of individual vision is ultimately restricted to his own personal taste.
How else can we account for his praise of the turn-of-the-century English painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, whose art, he writes, “constitutes… humanity’s efforts to understand light,” and his dismissal of the Impressionists, who also attempted to render the effects of light and atmosphere? How do we rationalize the absence of photography in Johnson’s book? How to justify his denigration of Courbet, who built an entire artistic philosophy on realism, stating that “painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing objects…”? Moreover, Courbet would seem an ideal candidate for Johnson’s praise, given the former’s partiality for an art of the individual. (“I simply wanted to draw from a complete knowledge of tradition, a reasoned and independent sense of my own individuality,” he wrote.) The fact that he is not has nothing to do with whether Courbet’s art is realistic, but is rather a result of the fact that he deliberately challenged the long tradition of Western art that Johnson cherishes. Likewise the Impressionists, who shunned the institutional framework of the Salon to create works directly for the market.
The same goes for Picasso. Forget that Cubism was a conscious and willful attempt to play with artistic conventions of realistic representation. For Johnson, Picasso, more than any other artist, is responsible for the rise of fashion art, which, as he finally tells us, occurs “when the ratio of novelty and skill is changed radically in favor of novelty.” Impressionism and Cubism were responsible, in Johnson’s opinion, for setting off a chain of “labeled movements, each generating the next,” which inevitably led to the current cultural climate in which monetary value, rather than skill, determines the merit of art.
As a consequence, Johnson finds basically no art of true merit after the beginning of the twentieth century, and most of the art produced since that time does not appear in his book. Such giants as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jackson Pollock scarcely merit mention, whereas Frida Kahlo, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, and many others simply do not exist. He makes an exception only for what he calls “pure abstract art,” among whose practitioners he includes Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and, somewhat strangely, Henry Moore. Pure abstract art comprises “not abstractions from objects in nature, but absolute geometrical forms,” and Johnson appreciates it as long as its effect is to delight the viewer. This may seem like a troubling claim, after all that Johnson has said about realism and nature. And yet it makes sense within the scope of his criticism, for it is the same reason that he was able to appreciate the work of Uccello. In short, Johnson appreciates not only those works of art that remind him of how he sees the real world, but also those that allow him to maintain his own sense of mastery over it. He is unable to do so when the “objective standards of skill and merit,” which seemed to determine the value of art throughout so much of its history, are no longer apparent to him. Instead, value is now determined by a small group of individuals, the “art establishment,” identified by Johnson as dealers, critics, patrons, and museum directors who are directly responsible for creating and sustaining the tyranny of fashion art.
Certainly, this art establishment exists, and Johnson is surely justified in some of his complaints. Many fine contemporary artists remain overlooked, and many more seem to rise to the top of the art world because of cultural trends that seemingly have more to do with fashion than with traditional notions of skill and talent. It does not follow, however, that most of the art produced in the last century, and in our own, is a vacuous enterprise.
The great art historian Meyer Schapiro understood this when he attempted in 1957 to justify one of the labeled movements that Johnson dislikes, abstract expressionism: “The object of art is, therefore, more passionately than ever before, the occasion of spontaneity or intense feeling. The painting symbolizes an individual who realizes freedom and deep engagement of the self within his work.”
Rather than recognizing new kinds of individual expression, however, Johnson seems to prefer to revert to a time when artists knew their place and, as he exaggeratingly writes of Donatello, had “no social pretensions, no aesthetic pride, no swagger.” He prefers a world in which artists are guided by their patrons (“all artists, not least architects, are usually all the better for a bit of guidance from those who pay”), as long as those patrons, as they were in the Renaissance, are “a ruling elite of discernment, taste and imagination.” His notion of an ideal society is one in which the notion of progress spreads from commerce to art, not one in which the artist, as a true individual, works in collusion with the arbiters of taste.
There is much to find fault with in the current system, not least of which is the way in which art history tries to explain and account for contemporary art. At a time when many art historians are searching for increasingly novel methods to accommodate the rise of new media and the globalization of culture, Paul Johnson indeed does offer something new in Art: A New History. He fearlessly goes against the grain of much current thought in order to make art more accessible. Unfortunately, his radically retrograde vision will ultimately leave many readers feeling that the art of modern times is less accessible than ever and hoping, along with Johnson, that “The story of art has only just begun.”
Stephen C. Pinson is Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He has served as a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and has published widely on the history of photography and the graphic arts.
