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[](https://newcriterion.com/) Vol. 44, No. 8 / April 2026 Log In - [Current Issue](https://newcriterion.com/current-issue/) - [Archive](https://newcriterion.com/archive/) - [Dispatch](https://newcriterion.com/posts/dispatch/) - [TNC+](https://newcriterion.com/plus/) - [Events](https://newcriterion.com/events/) - [Subscribe](https://newcriterion.com/subscribe/) - [Donate](https://newcriterion.com/donate/) - [Gala](https://newcriterion.com/gala/) The art of art history *by Michael J. Lewis* *November 2003* - Log In - [Subscribe](https://newcriterion.com/subscribe/) -  - [Current Issue](https://newcriterion.com/current-issue/) - [Archive](https://newcriterion.com/archive/) - [Dispatch](https://newcriterion.com/posts/dispatch/) - [TNC+](https://newcriterion.com/plus/) - [Events](https://newcriterion.com/events/) - [Subscribe](https://newcriterion.com/subscribe/) - [Gift Subscription](https://newcriterion.com/gift/) - [Donate](https://newcriterion.com/donate/) - [Gala](https://newcriterion.com/gala/) - [](https://newcriterion.com/us250/) - [Culture](https://newcriterion.com/topic/culture/) - [Art](https://newcriterion.com/topic/art/) - [Poetry](https://newcriterion.com/topic/poetry/) - [Music](https://newcriterion.com/topic/music/) - [Theater](https://newcriterion.com/topic/theater/) - [Books](https://newcriterion.com/topic/books/) - [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/newcriterion) - [X](https://twitter.com/newcriterion) - [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/newcriterion/) - [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/user/TheNewCriterion) - [Soundcloud](https://soundcloud.com/thenewcriterion) - [About Us](https://newcriterion.com/about/) - [Bookstore](https://newcriterion.com/bookstore/) - [Reader Services](https://www.ezsubscription.com/fcr/store/) - [Newsletters](https://newcriterion.com/newsletters/) - [Subscribe](https://newcriterion.com/subscribe/) - [Advertise](https://newcriterion.com/advertise/) - [Gift Subscription](https://newcriterion.com/gift/) - [Donate](https://newcriterion.com/donate/) - [Join Our Circle](https://newcriterion.com/circle/) - [Become a Friend](https://newcriterion.com/friends/) - [Galliard Society](https://newcriterion.com/galliard-society/) - [Hilton Kramer Fellowship](https://newcriterion.com/hilton-kramer-fellowship/) - [Poetry Submissions](https://newcriterion.com/bookstore/poetry/) - [RSS Feed](https://newcriterion.com/rss-feed/) - [Contact Us](https://newcriterion.com/contact-us/) [](https://newcriterion.com/) COPYRIGHT © 1982-2026 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED A SITE BY BECK\&STONE  ## Sign into your account ## Become a subscriber ### Enjoy unlimited access. [Subscribe](https://newcriterion.com/subscribe/) Current subscribers may [register](https://www.ezsubscription.com/fcr/register) for online access.  [Books](https://newcriterion.com/departments/books/) [November 2003](https://newcriterion.com/issues/november-2003/) ## The art of art history by [Michael J. Lewis](https://newcriterion.com/person/michael-j-lewis/) A review of Art: A New History, by Paul Johnson. ### An education in discernment. Purchase this and other timeless *New Criterion* essays in our hard-copy reprint series.  [Bookstore](https://newcriterion.com/reprint-series/) 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*,[\[1\]](https://newcriterion.com/article/the-art-of-art-history/#fn1) 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** [Go to the top of the document.](https://newcriterion.com/article/the-art-of-art-history/#top) 1. *Art: A New History*, by Paul Johnson; Harper Collins, 777 pages, \$39.95. [Go back to the text.](https://newcriterion.com/article/the-art-of-art-history/#back1) **Michael J. Lewis** teaches American art at Williams College and reviews architecture for *The Wall Street Journal*. This article originally appeared in *The New Criterion*, Volume 22 Number 3, on page 67 Copyright © 2003 The New Criterion \| www.newcriterion.com <https://newcriterion.com/article/the-art-of-art-history/> Subjects [Books](https://newcriterion.com/topic/books/) ## Books in this Article [](https://www.amazon.com/Art-New-History-Paul-Johnson/dp/B00073HH88?SubscriptionId=AKIAIZADKFRNLA7RJZEA&tag=tyuiopasnewcr-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00073HH88) #### Paul Johnson ### [Art: A New History](https://www.amazon.com/Art-New-History-Paul-Johnson/dp/B00073HH88?SubscriptionId=AKIAIZADKFRNLA7RJZEA&tag=tyuiopasnewcr-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00073HH88) Harper Harper, 792 pages, \$39.95 [**ORDER**](https://www.amazon.com/Art-New-History-Paul-Johnson/dp/B00073HH88?SubscriptionId=AKIAIZADKFRNLA7RJZEA&tag=tyuiopasnewcr-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00073HH88) ###### Popular Right Now - [](https://newcriterion.com/article/a-phenomenal-poet/ "A phenomenal poet") [A phenomenal poet](https://newcriterion.com/article/a-phenomenal-poet/ "A phenomenal poet") by Robert Erickson [Spencer A. 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Purchase this and other timeless *New Criterion* essays in our hard-copy reprint series.  [Bookstore](https://newcriterion.com/reprint-series/) There are, Susan Haack says, two opposing schools of thought about science: the New Cynics, as she calls them, who believe science is a shabby social construct of the ruling class, and the Old Deferentialists, who believe science has a uniquely rational method of reaching the truth. Her plan is to steer a middle course between the two. She pursues this plan across a wide field of issues, a much broader spectrum than is found in traditional philosophy of science or sociology of science books—including, for example, expert scientific evidence in law as well as old chestnuts like religion and science. She writes throughout with the verve of her *Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate* (1998), and with attention to well-chosen and short examples of real science. She shares with us many juicy aperçus from her reading. One will not soon forget her recurrent use, as a diagnostic tool for some of the less sane pronouncements of the irrationalists, of J. L. Austin’s dictum, “There’s the part where he says it, and the part where he takes it back.” Haack is convincing on many of the issues. On the sociology of science, she effortlessly exposes the conceptual confusions and internal inconsistencies of those modern enemies of science who think knowledge is “socially constructed” in the sense that it is a power play not subject to any norms of honest inquiry or respect for evidence. But she does not agree with the more hard-headed scientists who think sociology is a swamp from which nothing good can emerge. She shows well how the norms of the scientific community, like peer review, intensive training, and the preservation of scientific research in libraries, lead (fallibly, but by and large) to the weeding out of error and the real improvement of theories. The present controversy over refereeing standards, and whether fabulously wealthy scientific journals can expect a high standard of refereeing without paying scientists anything for it, concerns sociological questions, and it matters for the health and credibility of science. Haack negotiates well the minefield of the differences or otherwise between the natural and the social sciences (well-trodden minefield might be the apt metaphor, except for its suggestion that the mines are no longer there). The requirements of honest and disinterested inquiry are the same in all kinds of science, and for that matter in common sense and in solving crossword puzzles. If some of the evidence in the social sciences concerns human intentions, that is a way in which they differ from the natural sciences, but there is no need to exaggerate the difference that makes. If the social sciences are poor at prediction, meteorology is nothing to write home about either. On law and science, Haack is well-informed and clear-headed on the recent attempts of American courts to deal with problems of expert scientific testimony, where, as Learned Hand put it, we set the jury “to decide, where doctors disagree.” (And we set a scientifically untrained judge to decide what the jury may safely hear.) A rarely discussed but important issue to which Haack directs attention is the relation of scientific language and what C. S. Peirce called “real generals,” the causally important properties of things with which scientific terminology should align itself. Logicians once preferred the example “All swans are white.” At a certain point, difficulties arose from some black birds discovered by Dutch explorers on the way to the Indies and it was necessary to make a quick switch to “All ravens are black.” But perhaps with a better marketing department they could have kept to the original? It only requires a shift in terminology to dismiss the swimming ravens of New Holland as a new kind of bird of no significance for generalizations about *swans*. What is wrong with a ploy of that sort? Haack explains the need for scientific classifications to stay attentive to clusters of characteristics that are found to co-occur. Black swans are very like white swans in nearly all respects except color, which is a property found to be of generally low significance in biological classification. Calling them ravens is dishonest. As Haack writes of the ideal of objectivity in science, it is less a matter of technique than of character. The eirenic or moderate plan of the book is less successful on the more basic issue of what makes science rational. Who are the “extreme” defenders of scientific rationality, and what is wrong with them? For several centuries, the more intransigent friends of science have had a consistent story to tell. It is in terms of probability, conceived as a species of logic. Just as “all ravens are black and this is a raven” makes it logically certain that this is black, so “99 percent of ravens are black and this is a raven” makes it logically highly probable that this is black (in the absence of further relevant evidence). That is why the results of drug trials give users rational confidence in the effects of drugs. Galileo and Kepler used the language of objective probability about the way evidence supported their theories, and in the last hundred years a number of books have filled out the theory of logical probability—Keynes’s *Treatise on Probability* (the great work of his youth, before he went on to easier pickings in economics), D. C. Williams’s *Ground of Induction*, Polya’s *Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning*, and, just published in 2003, E. T. Jaynes’s posthumous masterpiece, *Probability Theory: The Logic of Science*. These works emphasize the continuity between scientific and com- monsense reasoning: the legal standard of “proof beyond reasonable doubt” that a jury of ordinary citizens must evaluate is of the same nature as the relation between a scientific theory and observation. That is, it is a purely logical relation between a body of evidence and a conclusion. Philosophers of science and other commentators of a humanist bent have been very unwilling to notice this tradition. Probability theorists suspect that the reason for this is a simple one—that humanists hate numbers. To alleviate this difficulty, they explained that exact numbers were beside the point, and that “proof beyond reasonable doubt,” for example, is not a precise probability but needs only the imprecise quantity “very high,” which even jurors can understand. Polya explained that the main point of the admittedly somewhat complex Bayes theorem, which has as many as a dozen symbols, is contained in its simple corollary, “A theory is confirmed by its consequences.” (So, if a detective’s theory that the butler did it implies that the knife is behind the sofa, and the knife is found behind the sofa, then the theory is more likely than it was before.) To no avail: however qualitative and wordy the mush was made, humanists were not eating it up. Haack is in this respect on the humanist side. Keynes, Williams, Polya, and Jaynes are not mentioned, and the two members of the school who are, Rudolf Carnap and Mary Hesse, are criticized for idiosyncrasies they do not share with the mainstream. Whenever she wishes to damn the view that the relation of evidence to conclusion is a matter of logic, Haack uses the phrase “syntactically characterizable logic.” The view that logic should all be syntactically characterizable, that is, done by manipulating uninterpreted symbols the way a computer does, is a narrow one. It was popular in the first half of the twentieth century but not otherwise, and it is no part of the probabilists’ theory of logic. It is especially surprising to see such a narrow view of logic here, given that the classic work on the wider field of logic and the difficulties of saying what exactly counts as logic and what not, is Haack’s own *Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic* (1974, second ed. 1996). There is one issue on which Haack is anything but moderate. Religion brings out the extremist in her, and she is keen to revive the theory of Victorian books like Draper’s *History of the Conflict between Science and Religion* that science and religion are incompatible and that science is right. It is not easy to see where the incompatibility of science and religion lies, since on the face of it they are talking about different things. Nor does it become entirely clear what propositions exactly Haack thinks religion asserts and science denies. She does complain, with some reason, about the religious *attitude* to belief, on the grounds that faith is an immoral attribution of certainty to beliefs for which one knows one does not have full evidence. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe certainty is a central part of most believers’ faith—common experience, surely, is that most religious are less certain of their beliefs than most atheists are of theirs. Haack attacks adequately some soft creationist targets, but most believers are not creationists. The heart of the conflict, it seems, concerns matters of value. Does science speak on this matter? According to Haack, it does. She quotes approvingly Stephen Hawking’s view, “We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred thousand million galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us.” There is a “deep tension,” she says “between a scientific picture of a vast and uncaring universe, and the religious idea of a caring and involved God.” One is surprised to see “insignificant” and “uncaring” listed as scientific properties, and wonders which science is devoted to their study. (Geometry, perhaps? Size, vast or minor, seems to be the only property mentioned as relevant to significance.) If the universe is uncaring, religious believers are even worse, Haack thinks. She quotes indignantly the religious philosopher Richard Swinburne’s statement, “I am fortunate if the natural possibility of my suffering if you choose to hurt me is the vehicle that makes the choice really matter” and adds > the same day I read this I also read an article by a woman who had been raped, sodomized, terrorized, beaten, and left for dead by a gang of thugs. Can you accept that she was benefited by having been the vehicle that make her attackers’ choice really matter?—I can’t. I can’t either, but I wonder if Haack is entitled to so much indignation, given her view of human significance. The view, namely, that humans are the same kind of things as galaxies, whose destruction is a mere firework. If science shows humans are too insignificant for a God to care about, why all the anger at God’s failure to prevent injury to them? Haack leaves us with a useful picture of scientific inquiry as like a crossword puzzle. Some clues are as yet lightly pencilled in, a few conflict, some are firm and well-supported by a matrix of others. Solvers have guesses that often agree, but sometimes their differing bodies of prior knowledge pull them towards different hypotheses. It is a model that emphasizes the continuity between scientific and ordinary reasoning. The continuity was confirmed dramatically when researchers on infant cognition rushed to labor wards to film newborns, and on analysis of the tapes found the babies were studying them back—with, indeed, less background knowledge, but with much the same methodology. That methodology, including, for example, the confirmation of theory by consequence, is only intelligible if it is itself independent of the way the world is, that is, it is logic. **James Franklin**’s book *Corrupting the Youth* (Macleay Press) is a history of Australian philosophy. This article originally appeared in *The New Criterion*, Volume 22 Number 3, on page 70 Copyright © 2003 The New Criterion \| www.newcriterion.com <https://newcriterion.com/article/reasonable-science/> Subjects [Books](https://newcriterion.com/topic/books/) ## Books in this Article [](https://www.amazon.com/Defending-Science-Within-Reason-Scientism-Cynicism/dp/1591021170?SubscriptionId=AKIAIZADKFRNLA7RJZEA&tag=tyuiopasnewcr-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1591021170) #### Susan Haack ### [Defending Science-Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism](https://www.amazon.com/Defending-Science-Within-Reason-Scientism-Cynicism/dp/1591021170?SubscriptionId=AKIAIZADKFRNLA7RJZEA&tag=tyuiopasnewcr-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1591021170) Prometheus Books Prometheus Books, 411 pages, \$28.99 [**ORDER**](https://www.amazon.com/Defending-Science-Within-Reason-Scientism-Cynicism/dp/1591021170?SubscriptionId=AKIAIZADKFRNLA7RJZEA&tag=tyuiopasnewcr-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1591021170) ###### Popular Right Now - [](https://newcriterion.com/article/savage-wars-of-peace/ "Savage wars of peace") [Savage wars of peace](https://newcriterion.com/article/savage-wars-of-peace/ "Savage wars of peace") by Robert Erickson [Peter W. 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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*,[\[1\]](https://newcriterion.com/article/the-art-of-art-history/#fn1) 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** [Go to the top of the document.](https://newcriterion.com/article/the-art-of-art-history/#top) 1. *Art: A New History*, by Paul Johnson; Harper Collins, 777 pages, \$39.95. [Go back to the text.](https://newcriterion.com/article/the-art-of-art-history/#back1)