Old Whine

New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art recently closed its Biennial, the premier event dedicated to contemporary American works. Much of the buzz surrounding the event highlighted the accessibility of many of the exhibited works, notably in the reappearance of painting after its oft-declared death, and the re-emergence of the human figure as a valid subject for serious art. Such works provided relief for a culture-hungry public frustrated with the anything-goes attitude that characterizes so much of contemporary art. Many people today are left bewildered and unmoved by the art shown in museums and private galleries, even if the anxiety of betraying a lack of culture conspires to keep everyone quiet. Rare is the critic or historian who gives voice to this anxiety by questioning the quality of this art as well as the motivations of the institutions that support it. Paul Johnson, who has built a solid, if controversial, reputation by offering strong opinions in broadly drawn histories for a popular audience, has characteristically broken the conspiracy of silence.

A journalist and historian best known for his revival of general ethnological studies (on the British, Americans, and Jews) and especially for his unapologetic promotion of Western capitalist society in books like Modern Times (1983), Johnson has now set for himself the admirable task of delivering a popular survey of art. In and of itself this is a daunting project. Johnson raises the stakes in Art: A New History by also attempting to write a book that stands as a corrective to everything that he sees wrong with the discipline of art history, and indeed art in general. If he succeeds in building a synthesizing critical narrative based upon provocative personal judgment, interpretation, and evaluation, this is despite the fact that what he ultimately delivers is a deeply flawed historical overview. Even those readers sympathetic to Johnson’s diagnosis of what is wrong with current artistic practice and criticism may have a hard time swallowing his cure. For what Johnson prescribes is a kind of impossible return to art before the advent of Modernism. This is already a strangely reactionary move for someone who has devoted so much energy to the advantages of the creativity and dynamism of modern capitalist society. Johnson further entrenches himself in a regressive path, however, by employing an outdated methodological model insufficient to his task.

In essence, Johnson sees art as a self-contained system evolving, albeit with stops and starts, toward an inevitable goal, which in his opinion is the realistic depiction of the world. By itself, this kind of teleological history is problematic. One of its main disadvantages is that it proposes art as one long movement, so that individual creativity (which Johnson claims to rescue from the impersonal art historical “taxonomy” of stylistic movements) is inevitably overlooked in cases where it does not meet the predefined goal of realistic depiction. Johnson compounds the problem by never clearly defining what he means by “realism.” To complicate matters, he infuses his criticism with a further ideology that dismisses almost all of the art produced from Picasso on as mere “fashion,” so that his survey does not include many of the most impressive artistic achievements of the last century.

To his credit, Johnson does warn the reader in his introduction about what is to follow, by laying down the principles of art as he understands it. First and foremost he insists that art is a “process of ordering, and so understanding and mastering, the wild world of nature.” This “ordering instinct,” to Johnson’s mind, is what makes society possible and has “therefore always been essential to human happiness.” It follows that we must always “beware of the enemies of order, and particularly mere fashion.…” But on the question of what exactly “fashion” art is, we are told early on only that it is “concerned with conformity to social rules.” Unfortunately, Johnson waits until the end of his book to teach us the true nature of fashion art. In the meantime, he concentrates on the art of order, of which cave art is the first major extant example of humanity’s desire “to make sense of a chaotic universe.” From the first stirrings of human art in caves Johnson ascends to the art of ancient Egypt and the Near East.

The Egyptians, we are told, produced objects of great technical skill, but never with any individual expression. The Mesopotamians were monotonous and the Persians, although occasionally building a sublime palace like Persepolis, were nevertheless sterile and repetitive. The obvious explanation for this, Johnson says, is the too-powerful role of the monarch in producing an art of propaganda. Bad society breeds bad art: “a serious artistic weakness is often the external, visible sign of political, economic and social weaknesses.” According to Johnson, the end of these palace civilizations resulted in a “Dark Age” that was rescued only by the Greeks and the foundation of a “fine art tradition which survives to this day.”

Art: A New History begins to pick up steam in the chapter devoted to Greek art, because this is a society that Johnson admires. Defiantly ignoring easy objections about the exclusion of women and slaves from citizenship, Johnson praises the social organization of the classical Greek city-states, which he claims is based on “universality of access to and participation in culture,” thus making them “the ideal social environment for art.” More important to Johnson’s theory, however, is that the art developed by the Greeks was derived from the study of man and nature. As long as this new canonical tradition was respected, artists were allowed to express individual innovation. This individualism is the main factor that distinguishes Greek society from those that preceded it, and according to Johnson it is the result of the artist’s direct confrontation with the exterior world: “Once the artist creates what he sees, rather than what he is told he ought to see, his individualism inevitably asserts itself.” This becomes the leitmotif of Johnson’s book, and the history of art is seen as a struggle to achieve realism, or mastery over nature, within the classical tradition inherited from the ancient Greeks.

Much of what follows is fairly standard, and can be found in many general histories written through the 1960s, when the revered classical tradition appeared irrevocably out of reach. A reversion to “primitive” art followed the Greco-Roman period, because of the political and religious absolutism that accompanied the founding of monotheistic religions. There is a new efflorescence with the rise of cathedrals (the greatest accomplishment of humanity in art, because they reflect a “profound system of order”) and in the “realist” art of the Middle Ages as exemplified by Jan van Eyck and Albrecht Durer. A cultural climax is of course attained during the Italian Renaissance. With few exceptions (late Botticelli, El Greco, Poussin, Watteau), Johnson finds much to admire in art until the middle of the nineteenth century. Things begin to go wrong, however, with the French painter Gustave Courbet, and the system of order breaks down completely, according to Johnson, with the triumph of Impressionism.

Up until the nineteenth century, then, a good deal of serviceable, and often quite fine, material is found in Johnson’s book, as long as one remains vigilant to his predilections. Johnson is particularly adept at explaining the tools and materials of art, and this is a welcome contribution that is often overlooked in surveys. He includes a nice, brief history of vellum and parchment in his section on Albrecht Durer, and there are welcome chapters devoted to the rise of landscape painting and the spread of watercolor in the nineteenth century (although the absence of Paul Huet and Georges Michel, practitioners in both fields, is unfortunate). He does his best to revive the work of many neglected artists, and devotes a chapter to nineteenth-century Russia.

Johnson, moreover, has an obvious affinity for architecture, and he gives this realm of artistic production more attention than normal for a survey. His apparent justification of this focus, namely, that it is easier for sculpture and architecture to achieve effects of realism than it is for painting, is puzzling. Apparently this facility is due to the fact that sculpture and architecture are themselves actual, real objects, whereas painting must resort to a “series of tricks to create the illusion of reality.” This assertion involves Johnson’s narrow and muddled view of realism, which we will come to shortly. But while he goes into detail on architecture, he does not similarly dwell on sculpture, which seems shortchanged as a result.

Other 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.”

Azure no. 18, Autumn 5765 / 2004