John Russell: art critic of The Sunday Times and The New York Times
Hyfler/Rosner
August 25, 2008
John Russell: art critic of The Sunday Times and The New
York Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4601484.ece
John Russell, journalist, art reviewer, art historian,
exhibition organiser, writer and man of letters, wrote more
than 20 books and exhibition catalogues and contributed
essays to several more. He organised five major exhibitions
and wrote many thousands of articles and reviews for
newspapers and magazines, covering literature, music, drama,
architecture, travel and history, besides his main topic,
art - art of whatever sort or period.
He became a regular contributor to The Sunday Times in 1945
(he was recommended by Ian Fleming) embarking in 1949 on a
25-year stint as its art critic, until 1974 - when he
launched with renewed vigour on a career in America (where
there were still art heroes) as an art critic for The New
York Times; becoming the newspaper's chief art critic in
1982, and critic emeritus in 1990. From 1957 he also served
as the London representative for the American magazines Art
News and Art in America.
In another age Russell might well have been a diplomat who
wrote elegant belles lettres in his abundant spare time;
diplomacy was always his strong point publicly, if not
always in his private life. As it was, he was writing in an
era when Europe was re-learning its past and re-establishing
a culture of the present - with Britain needing to catch up
as much as any. It was a time for general mental expansion
and this suited Russell, who was more interested in the mind
behind the art than in evaluating the image. He was an art
critic who seldom criticised. For him, writing about art was
writing about life in its entirety.
It was perhaps his stutter that - as with some other notable
writers - spurred him to that extra touch of elegant
fluency, the choice phrase displayed, the magisterial (one
of his favourite words) diction of the thinking man and
patrician elder statesman of art. A reviewer of his survey
of modern art published in Britain in 1981 commented that
there were for Russell "no failures, no frauds, no heretics".
He would now be designated "Establishment". Rather, he was a
civilised and erudite man, at ease in at least three
European literatures and most of the arts, addressing
himself to the reader as to another equally civilised but
less well-informed person, and assuming that a consensus of
professional admiration indicated that there was something
in an artist worth admiring and elucidating. He would pass
diplomatically over controversy or the dark recesses; one of
his fellow writers christened him "Our Man in Bohemia".
He was not incapable of being acerbic or waspish - for
instance in his assessment of the painter Christopher Wood,
whom he could see only as an immoral careerist. He was
tentative at first in his assessments of young contemporary
artists; but sent a fiercely supportive letter from New York
at the time of the hullaballoo over the Tate Gallery's
purchase of Carl Andre's bricks. He championed early in
their careers a number of artists who have since entered the
modern canon, including David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Howard
Hodgkin and Antony Caro.
On arrival in New York in 1974 the zest and tempo of his
writing accelerated; he felt more inquisitive, more alert,
and vastly more energetic and was encouraged by his
newspaper to cover the widest field. The level of
encouragement and support, he said, was a hundred times
higher than he had previously received.
John Russell was born in 1919 in Fleet, Hampshire, and
educated at St Paul's School and at Magdalen College,
Oxford, where he edited Cherwell magazine. On coming down
from university, he joined the staff of the Tate Gallery in
June 1940 as an unpaid assistant. Two days later the
building was seriously damaged by enemy bombing. Russell was
evacuated with a number of art historical treasures to
Worcestershire. Call-up diverted him into the Ministry of
Information from 1941 to 1943, and then into the Naval
Intelligence Division of the Admiralty from 1943 to 1946.
However, the war did not hinder an early start to his
writing career: by 23 he had already published for the
famous Batsford series of evocative British themes, a
nostalgic and richly ecclesiological Shakespeare's Country
in the emotive and perilous year of 1942, and a lightly
argued British Portrait Painters in 1945.
It was during these years that he began to write art and
drama reviews, becoming a regular contributor to the Times
Literary Supplement, and to the magazines Cornhill, Horizon
(then edited by Cyril Connolly) and The Listener.
When he took up regular art reviewing, he turned his pen, as
a balance to the miniaturisation of press comment, to longer
pieces. His stylish book on the writer Logan Pearsall Smith
appeared in 1950; in the same year, an unenthusiastic travel
book on Switzerland; in 1956, a respectful account of the
conductor Erich Kleiber; and in 1960 he wrote romantically
of Paris (and informatively of its architecture) - a book
that survived to be enlarged and reprinted in 1983.
Then in 1965 Russell reverted to writing substantially on
the visual arts, with his perceptive book on Seurat (the
best received of all his books, and which remains in print).
Then in the same year came the first "coffee table" luxury
tome on the contemporary art scene in Britain, Private View,
in collaboration with the gallery director Bryan Robertson
and with Lord Snowdon's photographs excellently printed.
With his 80 artists written up as a lengthy addendum to its
glimpses of the personalities of the art scene and their
activities, this has become a document of the times,
typically ignoring all the art scene except the West End
oriented; it would be described nowadays as "seriously
fashionable".
This was a busy period for Russell, for he also organised
the Arts Council exhibitions of Modigliani in 1964, Rouault
in 1966, Balthus in 1968 (to the distaste of some) and Pop
Art - in collaboration with his friend Suzi Gablik - in
1969; this was accompanied by their misleadingly titled book
Pop Art Redefined. He continued to write monographs at the
same time, at the rate of one or more a year: a eulogistic
Max Ernst in 1967, a serviceable Henry Moore in 1968, an
extended introduction to Ben Nicholson in 1969, The World of
Matisse in 1970, a respectful Francis Bacon in 1971, and in
the same year a book on Vuillard that accompanied the
exhibition of that artist, which Russell organised and which
was seen in Toronto, Chicago and San Francisco.
In 1970 Russell was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art
in New York and the Book of the Month Club to produce a
survey of modern art, which was published in 1974-75 in 12
monthly parts by mail subscription only. This was reworked
and published in book form in 1981 as The Meanings of Modern
Art; it aimed to be more a history of modern ideas than of
modern art alone, in keeping with its author's belief that
"the history of art, if properly set out, is the history of
everything". The book was praised as the best of its kind by
Sir Kenneth Clark, though sniped at by combative critics of
the day. The College Art Association of America gave Russell
the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism, citing his
enormous erudition and subtle, sprightly prose. In 1989 an
anthology of excerpts from his writings was published under
the title Reading Russell.
The 53 essays in it reflect the vitality and range of
Russell's writing after he left Britain for America. A rich
tapestry of quotation, reference, reading and reminiscence,
by a European who found himself in a land of lively fellow
immigrants and amid an appreciative audience, it is the
summation of a happy life - of a man forever grateful for
the good fortune of being allowed to "conduct his education
in public" as journalists do; and he quotes John Updike as
expressing his own attitude: "Better to praise and share
than blame and ban."
Russell's prolific career included production of
award-winning film and television scripts on art and travel
subjects, all narrated by his wife, Rosamond Bernier, an art
historian. Among these were One Man's England, for the Yale
Centre for British Art; An Everlasting France, for the San
Francisco Museum of the Palace of the Legion of Honour; and
American Light: The Luminist Movement, for the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. His scripts for the
television programmes Living in the Louvre, Beaubourg and
The Pompidou Centre, penned for CBS, won the prestigious
Peabody Award. Other screen writing credits include two
hour-long programmes for WNET/Channel 13 based on The
Meanings of Modern Art.
Russell also wrote for The New Criterion and The New York
Review of Books.
One might quote Browning, as Russell himself did in his
first published book: "Here's my work: does work discover/
What was rest from work - my life?" Russell was appointed
CBE in 1975; awarded the Austrian Grand Medal of Honour in
1972; appointed Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
in 1975; awarded the Federal Republic of Germany's Order of
Merit in 1982; and appointed Chevalier Légion d'Honneur in
1986. In 1996 he was elected to membership of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 2004, along with Bernier, he was named a "National
Treasure" by the Municipal Art Society of New York. In 2008
the couple were also named a "Living Landmark" by the New
York Landmarks Conservancy.
Russell was a member of the Century Association, one of New
York's oldest private clubs, whose members historically
include many authors and artists. From 1981 to 2006 he
edited The Century Bulletin.
In an interview in 1999 in The Art Newspaper, Russell
explained his ambition as a critic: "I wanted to teach, in
an almost subliminal way. But I did not want to preach. That
is still what I try to do."
John Russell married in 1945 Alexandrine Apponyi. This was
dissolved in 1950. In 1956 he married Vera Poliakoff. This
was dissolved in 1971. In 1975 he married Rosamond Bernier
at a ceremony in New Haven, Connecticut, at which Aaron
Copland gave away the bride, Pierre Matisse, son of Henri,
was the best man and Leonard Bernstein composed the wedding
march.
He is survived by his wife and a daughter from his first
marriage.
John Russell, CBE, art critic and author, was born on
January 22, 1919. He died on August 23, 2008, aged 89