is MODERN(ist) ART is ROTTEN through ? -- NEW BOOK by P.Johnson
Noumenon
surprisingly sharp and uncompromising book
on ART HISTORY was published last month ...
It mercilessly criticizes Picasso, Cezanne (and others alike);
It prizes classic and academic achievements;
It sneers at quality of education in art schools;
etc...
(see Review Below...)
--- BOOK:
"ART -- A New History"
By Paul Johnson
Harper Collins: 778 pp., $39.95
ISBN: 0060530758
@ "Barnes and Noble"
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=2TYKOGPLE8&isbn=0060530758&itm=1
--- BOOK REVIEW:
"The conservative connoisseur"
Review By HILTON KRAMER
[Hilton Kramer is the editor of the New Criterion and the author of
numerous books, including "The Age of the Avant-Garde" and "The Twilight
of the Intellectuals."]
FOR newcomers to the voluminous and highly popular writings of Paul
Johnson, the English historian, journalist and polymath, the first thing
to be said about his latest outsize production is: Don't be dismayed by
the immense length of "Art: A New History." Johnson is one of the most
accomplished writers of nonfiction English prose on the current
transatlantic literary scene, and art is a subject he knows and cares
deeply about.
"This book," he writes in his preface, "is something I have wanted to
write all my life, for I write books to educate myself, and my thirst
for knowledge about art and artists has been growing since my earliest
consciousness. My father was an artist and head of an art school, and I
remember, as a small child, trying to overhear his conversations with
his friend [painter] L.S. Lowry. This meant hiding in a piece of
Jacobean furniture, called the Court- Cupboard, in my father's Art Room
(he never used the word 'studio'). But all they talked about was
cricket."
Then, as a cautionary preview of the very personal perspective that
Johnson brings to the inordinate task of producing a one-volume world
history of art, he writes that "[m]y father did not want me to become a
painter, though he admitted I drew well, and he took me with him when he
went out to draw churches. When I was six, in the mid-thirties, he said
to me: 'I can see bad times coming for art. Frauds like Picasso will
rule the roost for the next half-century. Do something else for a
living.' So I became a writer.... But I have continued to draw and
paint, and have even held one-man exhibitions in London in the last
decade."
That unembarrassed reference to Picasso as a "fraud," by the way, may
be taken as a warning that Johnson's new history does not refrain from
sporting some distinctly reactionary opinions. It has to be understood,
too, that he is uncowed by the received judgements of the art
bureaucracies in the academy, the museums, the commercial galleries and
the news media. Johnson's talents and outlook are of a very different
order. He is a master of narrative history, and his gift for vivid
storytelling is matched by an astounding command of large, complex
subjects and an unflagging capacity for rendering them intelligible and
compelling. We are never in any danger of confronting a dry or boring
page in even the longest of Johnson's books, and very long books - among
them "A History of the American People," "A History of the English
People," "A History of Christianity" and "Modem Times" - are his forte.
As for his reactionary opinions, especially in regard to Modernist art,
they need not dismay the reader either. Reactionary artists and the
views of their critical champions also belong to the history of art, and
Johnson is by no means alone in his disobliging censure of Modernism. In
this country, in the 1930s, Thomas Craven's "Men of Art," a runaway
bestseller in its day, vigorously upheld the notion that the Regionalist
school of the period - Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood et al. -- was a
far greater achievement than anything to be found in the art of Cezanne
and the Modernists influenced by him. And for an even longer period,
Royal Cortissoz, the immensely influential art critic of the old New
York Herald-Tribune, denounced the work of American Modernists as "Ellis
Island Art" -- "promoted by types not yet fitted for their first papers
in aesthetic naturalization." Yet the reactionary Cortissoz could write
beautifully about the Old Masters, and so does Johnson - as, for
example, in this account of Peter Paul Rubens' "Descent From the Cross"
(1612) in Antwerp Cathedral:
"Once Rubens had thought a project through, and proved to himself that
it would work by drawings and oil sketches, he created the finished
painting at impressive speed. He drew on the canvas with a special brush
as though it were a piece of chalk, putting in the lines with total
accuracy without hesitation or pause. When he applied the paint, the
brushstrokes were fluent and long -sometimes 3 feet -- but firm or
delicate at will. These great, sweeping strokes, marvellous to watch,
and filling up the canvas with almost miraculous speed, involved a
meticulous manufacture and choice of brushes, careful preparation of a
huge palette, and a skill in measuring the quantity of paint, and
placing it on the brush, which was a personal technology in itself. When
the master was going at full stretch, clambering up and down his
stepladder, striding from one corner of the canvas to another, shouting
for more, and yet more, paint while the fit was on him - or rather while
he could feel the power radiating from his hand, for he was always calm
and in control -- he must have been an amazing sight, one which a young
artist would retain to the end of his life."
As this and a great many other passages in this book suggest, Johnson's
is what might be called a You-Are-There method of writing art history,
for the reader is repeatedly taken straight to the scene of the action
where the art was created and made witness to its likely effect on
viewers seeing it for the first time. Thus, about the earliest pictorial
art known to mankind, the cave paintings of prehistoric Europe, Johnson
writes:
"The sheer scale of the art is daunting. The big cave vault at Lascaux,
known as the Picture Gallery, is over 100 feet long and 35 feet wide.
Caves were specially chosen for their size as well as for their
security. Niaux in the Pyrenees is over half a mile in length, and this
is by no means unusual.... If we take into account the freshness of the
pigments when the work was just done, and the impact of the lines and
colors under the flickering light of primitive oil lamps, or flambeaux,
we can imagine the force of the impact which this first artistic
experience had on primitive humans, whose innocent eyes were
unaccustomed to visual forms outside nature itself. That helps to
explain why these societies were prepared to devote such a high
proportion of their scarce surplus resources to the creation of these
art galleries."
It isn't only on the well-known monuments and masters that Johnson
concentrates his attention in this "New History." One of the book's
happiest surprises for me is Johnson's admiring account of the 19th
century Russian landscape painter Isaak Levitan (1860-1900), whom many
Russian connoisseurs regard as their finest painter but whose work
remains utterly unknown in this country. (I fell in love with Levitan's
pictures when I first encountered them on a visit to the Soviet Union
many years ago.) I am obliged to point out, however, that Johnson fails
to mention that Levitan was greatly influenced by 19th century French
landscapists - among them Camille Corot, the Barbizon painters and the
Impressionists - whose work he studied on a visit to the International
Exhibition in Paris in 1889. It was a significant part -of Levitan's
genius that he was so adept in his later work at assimilating the
techniques of these southern masters to the less forgiving northern
climate of the Russian countryside.
Johnson's even greater enthusiasm for another Russian painter, Ilya
Repin (1844-1930), I find simply baffling, however. The picture he
praises as "one of the greatest paintings produced in the nineteenth
century - perhaps the greatest" is a sentimental genre scene called
"They Did Not Expect Him" (1884), a painting rich in melodrama but
devoid of aesthetic interest. This is Johnson's description of it:
"It is the drawing-room of a comfortable middle-class house. The
servants have just admitted a ragged, emaciated, unshaven figure who
advances into the centre of the room. His wife, facing us, looks up in
astonishment. His children, doing their homework, are amazed, awed,
beginning to shine with delight. In the centre is his elderly mother --
is it, perhaps, the personification of Mother Russia? -- who rises from
her chair and fixes her gaze on her son. He has returned from Siberian
exile. Characteristically the chaotic, hopeless and grotesquely
inefficient state has given his family no warning and they, having had
no news of him for years, had given up hope. So here he is, raised from
the dead like Lazarus; but there is no Christ to thank, and there is
shock, surprise, bafflement, almost dread in the reactions -- gratitude
and happiness will come later."
I daresay Johnson's reading of this unremarkable picture is a good deal
more compelling than the picture itself, and he then really goes over
the top by suggesting that "They Did not Expect Him" is "as resonant in
its own way as Tchaikovsky's Symphonie Pathetique or Dostoevsky's "The
Brothers Karamazov."" This is gross hyperbole in the service of an
aesthetic ideology resolutely determined to turn back the tide of
Modernist innovation.
When, in the next chapter, Johnson goes on to belittle the achievements
of Monet, Pissarro, Seurat, Cezanne and other modem masters, it is made
unmistakably clear to the reader that, with the emergence of
Impressionism, Johnson is seldom prepared to give any manifestation of
Modernism the benefit of a doubt. For on this great subject he has no
doubts. His eyes are closed to its beauties, and his mind is closed to
the immense feat of imagination, invention and intellectual adventure
that Modernism has brought to the arts, painting included. As a
historian, Johnson knows very well that the past can be neither repeated
nor repealed, but as an art lover his yearning to return to the
certainties of his father persuades him otherwise.
Monet's late "Waterlily" paintings are thus indicted on charges of
"mass production" and commercialization, while Seurat's pointillisme is
characterized as "an old idea which painters had played with at times
since the sixteenth century (at least) and dropped as ultimately
destructive of art." Cezanne, too, is categorically disparaged. Of his
great series of "Women Bathers" paintings in the Barnes Foundation, the
Petit Palais and London's National Gallery, Johnson writes: "They are
stiff and awkward, anatomically incorrect, virtually without faces and
grotesquely posed, but as Cezanne's reputation has risen, theirs has
surged upwards too -- such is art, or commerce."
"Commerce," which is inevitably linked to "fashion" in Johnson's
thinking about the art of the modem era, emerges in the book's later
chapters - "The Beginnings of Fashion Art" and "The Dangers and
Opportunities of Twenty-First Century Art" -- as one of the principal
perils that this book is dedicated to exposing and resisting. Another is
what Johnson describes as "the decline, and in some cases the
disappearance, of effective training in art skills.... What is lacking
are opportunities for would-be painters and sculptors to acquire
first-class training."
I think Johnson exaggerates the extent of this "decline" in the
teaching of art skills. In New York, anyway, there has been an energetic
revival in the teaching of such skills since the 1960s, when a group of
artists founded the New York Studio School in, what had been the
original building for the Whitney Museum in Greenwich Village. Under the
leadership of its current dean -- Graham Nickson, himself a figurative
painter and draftsman of high accomplishment - training in life drawing
is the priority. Nickson's teaching program, especially a crash course
called the Drawing Marathon, has proved to be so successful that it is
now emulated in art schools from Italy to Australia. (On this subject,
however, I have to declare my own interest, for I have served on the
Studio School's board of trustees for many years;)
Johnson is remarkably cavalier, too, in consigning some of Modernism's
greatest achievements to the lowly realm of "fashion", writing, for
example, that "Cubism can fairly be classified as the first major
instance of fashion art, as opposed to fine art." Suffice to say that on
Cubism, he exhibits something approaching total incomprehension, and the
very thought of collage and constructed sculpture is taken as a sign of
a decline in civilization.
Fortunately, Johnson is anything but consistent in his distastes. About
the abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock he writes with, if not
enthusiasm, at least a certain sympathy for the man himself, and the
earlier masters of abstraction -- Vassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian
-are similarly treated with respect, with Johnson conceding that
"Abstract art is thus fine, rather than fashion, art, and among the
abstractionists there have been a number of major, even great, artists."
Yet, predictably, Johnson's highest praise among 20th century American
artists is reserved for Edward Hopper -- "perhaps the greatest
representational artist of the first half of the twentieth century" --
as well as for Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth. Indeed, Wyeth is said
to be the "only narrative artist of genius during the second half of the
twentieth century."
It is not for Johnson's animadversions on the art of the modern era,
however, that "Art: A New History" is likely to enjoy a large and
enthusiastic readership. About many of the greatest painters in the
history of Western art he writes with such an engaging combination of
passion and instruction that the reader longs to hurry off to the
nearest museum to renew his acquaintance with the works under
discussion. About how many writers on art can that nowadays be said?
-= END =-
------------
Weaving the Conundrum
-=| NOUMENON |=-
Erik A. Mattila
Noumenon wrote:
> Rather unsual, and should I say --
> surprisingly sharp and uncompromising book
> on ART HISTORY was published last month ...
>
> It mercilessly criticizes Picasso, Cezanne (and others alike);
> It prizes classic and academic achievements;
> It sneers at quality of education in art schools;
> etc...
>
> (see Review Below...)
LOL, Johnson is an Art Hitorian now? Who would have guessed?
'Picasso was a fraud' - discuss
(Filed: 01/10/2003)
John McEwen reviews Art: a New History by Paul Johnson
Readers of Paul Johnson's journalism will know what to expect from this
book, because he often lets rip about art. The bee that particularly
gets in his bonnet is "modern art". He favours Ruskin's criterion of
excellence: that art should be "the perfect mirror of nature", and he
likes a picture to tell an edifying story. This makes for lean pickings
when he deals with the last 150 years - especially as he prefers
entirely to overlook (with the exception of Walt Disney) the pictorial
art unique to our epoch - moving pictures.
Johnson owes his opinions about art and his confidence in airing them to
his father, who was an artist and head of an art school: "My father did
not want me to become a painter, though he admitted I drew well, and he
took me with him when he went out to draw churches. When I was six, in
the mid-Thirties, he said to me: 'I can see bad times coming for art.
Frauds like Picasso will rule the roost for the next half century. Do
something else for a living.' "
Just how much the subject means to Johnson is passionately declared: "I
have put everything I know and feel deeply into this book. It tries to
cover all time and the world and, in the process, threatened to become
prohibitively expensive and bulky. So I was obliged to cut it, for the
first time in my life as a book writer, and the pain has been acute."
Johnson writes like a dream, so the cuts may explain why this book seems
rushed in comparison with his other histories.
Cuts may also account for the alarming disproportions of coverage:
Portugal and its empire is dismissed with a single sentence; there is
one chapter for most of the arts of India and the entire Far East - the
same weight as is given to the narrow subject of late 19th-century
Russian, Canadian and Australian painting. Proportionately England is
insularly favoured. Maybe Art: A New History should have been published
in two volumes.
The lack of design does not help. Illustrations are scattered like
stickers through what is still a bulky book. Few fill a page, many are
token. If the commercial aim was to replace Ernst Gombrich's Story of
Art then Gombrich's heirs can sleep easy.
Johnson's argument is that art evolved happily down the centuries until
novelty got the better of skill. This phenomenon - which he reckons has
its roots in the establishment of Paris as the fashion capital of the
world in the 19th century - he dates from about 1900 and dubs "fashion
art"; it is a canker made worse since 1960 when general studies replaced
drawing as the basis of art education.
Fashion art thus applies to more or less anything called "modern art",
with the exception of " 'pure' abstract art at its best". This art,
founded in Johnson's opinion by Kandinsky, is praised for being
"defined, distinctive and intellectually coherent" - qualities which he
feels do not apply to Abstract Expressionism.
It hardly needs saying that Johnson is far from intellectually coherent
himself. He is as fashionably reactionary as those he attacks are
fashionably progressive, shaky ground from which to launch an assault on
fashion. His confusion is exemplified by his attitude to Picasso. While
he despises Picasso as the supreme fashion artist, Johnson cannot deny
the painter's mythic status which he attributes in part to "artistic
originality" or to the "individualism" which he elsewhere proclaims to
be the sole mark of greatness.
Photography, a prime cause of the sea change in modern visual
perception, Johnson avoids. The reader is left to conclude that
photography is not an art. The parity of women, the greatest social
change of the last 40 years, goes unmentioned. Just what the role of art
can be in a technological world whose future, as he has written
elsewhere, will probably depend on the colonisation of the moon and
outer space, he does not attempt to answer. He ends on a bland
Panglossian note that all, somehow, will be well.
Art for Johnson is about looking. His only test of merit being whether
he can go on looking. This means he can look forever at Alfred
Munnings's slick horse paintings and Norman Rockwell's sentimental
magazine covers. So be it, but when he states that the caricaturist
Daumier is a better draughtsman than Michelangelo one seriously doubts
his eye as much as his judgment.
That his eye is dodgy is easily demonstrated. Two examples must suffice.
He says Brueghel's Hunters in the Snow are in a "hurry" - but the
illustration shows men and hounds as the epitome of weariness. And on
the subject of conservation he picks out Velazquez's Rokeby Venus as
"incorrigibly cleaned and restored". I happened to be checking the truth
of this at the National Gallery when the head of conservation, Martin
Wyld, and the much respected figurative painter John Lessore passed by.
Both assured me that the picture is regarded as a model of good
restoration by painters and conservators worldwide. Artists, of course,
know best about art, but when Johnson lists his hierarchy of experts,
artists are not mentioned.
Many of Johnson's opinions provoke an agonised "You cannot be serious!"
but not all. His stout defence of our right to own the Elgin marbles is
spot on; nor can one disagree with the contention that most art at any
time is not worth a second look. But facts are his saving grace. There
are many mind-blowing statistics in this history. Did you know that the
Union railway station in Cincinnati was designed by Ronald A. Wank?
# John McEwen's monograph on the artist William Gear will be published
later this year (Lund Humphries).
Lauri Levanto
Luna Lovegood wrote:
> In the bigger picture, modern art was
> part of the communist movement to destroy the culture of the middle
> class.
Was it more an attempt to wake up the sleeping middle class
that was blindly following into WW 1?
> Modern art is leftist art. Leftists want everything to be
> lowered down to the least common denominator. Ugliness is more common
> than beauty.
As you can see in the sicialistic realism?
> Picasso was a communist.
True, but not as much a communist than Malewich,
the leader of the Russian avant-garde, who wanted
"to surround the people of future with beautiful things".
He was later doomed by the party, that wanted classicism and heroism.
> I reject modern art.
By all means, you are not the first one here. Everyone is allowed to have
an opinion.
-lauri
Erik A. Mattila
>
> Luna Lovegood wrote:
>
>
>> In the bigger picture, modern art was
>>part of the communist movement to destroy the culture of the middle
>>class.
>
>
> Was it more an attempt to wake up the sleeping middle class
> that was blindly following into WW 1?
Who the hell is "Luna Lovegood", Lauri? Is this something coming from
the crossposted groups? In raf your post is attached to mine.
>>Modern art is leftist art. Leftists want everything to be
>>lowered down to the least common denominator. Ugliness is more common
>>than beauty.
>
>
> As you can see in the sicialistic realism?
How far left were the Futurists?
>
>
>>Picasso was a communist.
>
>
> True, but not as much a communist than Malewich,
> the leader of the Russian avant-garde, who wanted
> "to surround the people of future with beautiful things".
> He was later doomed by the party, that wanted classicism and heroism.
>
>
>>I reject modern art.
>
>
> By all means, you are not the first one here. Everyone is allowed to have
> an opinion.
> -lauri
But reject it on political grounds? Hmmm....then, as you point out, we
would have to reject socialist realism also. Where would that take us?
Erik
>
>
>
Oliver Gili
"Erik A. Mattila" <emat...@oco.net> wrote in message
news:3F89D703...@oco.net...
> Lauri Levanto wrote:
> >
> > Luna Lovegood wrote:
> >
> >
> >> In the bigger picture, modern art was
> >>part of the communist movement to destroy the culture of the middle
> >>class.
> >
> >
> > Was it more an attempt to wake up the sleeping middle class
> > that was blindly following into WW 1?
>
> Who the hell is "Luna Lovegood", Lauri? Is this something coming from
> the crossposted groups? In raf your post is attached to mine.
its a character from Harry Potter I think, the person who has adopted the
name for their usenet persona seems to be part of the fanatically uninformed
and paranoid far right (y'know "oh.my.gawd.*wrings hands and starts foaming
at the mouth* its those damn marxists in the californian state
government").... either that or a troll
Oliver
Oliver Gili
> >
> > Luna Lovegood wrote:
> >
> >
> >> In the bigger picture, modern art was
> >>part of the communist movement to destroy the culture of the middle
> >>class.
> >
> >
> > Was it more an attempt to wake up the sleeping middle class
> > that was blindly following into WW 1?
>
> Who the hell is "Luna Lovegood", Lauri? Is this something coming from
> the crossposted groups? In raf your post is attached to mine.
its a character from Harry Potter I think, the person who has adopted the
Lauri Levanto
Noumenon started this thread crossposted.
Anyone who replies, please remove the crosspostings.
"Erik A. Mattila" wrote:
> Lauri Levanto wrote:
> >
> > Luna Lovegood wrote:
> >
> >
> >> In the bigger picture, modern art was
> >>part of the communist movement to destroy the culture of the middle
> >>class.
> >
> >
> > Was it more an attempt to wake up the sleeping middle class
> > that was blindly following into WW 1?
>
> Who the hell is "Luna Lovegood", Lauri? Is this something coming from
> the crossposted groups? In raf your post is attached to mine.
>
> >>Modern art is leftist art. Leftists want everything to be
> >>lowered down to the least common denominator. Ugliness is more common
> >>than beauty.
> >
> >
> > As you can see in the sicialistic realism?
>
> How far left were the Futurists?
I suppose the Italian futurists were often inclined to the left.
The Russian futurism was closely connected to the revolution,
though the movement turned to constructivism.
>
>
> >
> >
> >>Picasso was a communist.
> >
> >
> > True, but not as much a communist than Malewich,
> > the leader of the Russian avant-garde, who wanted
> > "to surround the people of future with beautiful things".
> > He was later doomed by the party, that wanted classicism and heroism.
> >
> >
> >>I reject modern art.
> >
> >
> > By all means, you are not the first one here. Everyone is allowed to have
> > an opinion.
> > -lauri
>
> But reject it on political grounds? Hmmm....then, as you point out, we
> would have to reject socialist realism also. Where would that take us?
>
> Erik
>
For me socialistic realism spells "3rd rate illustratosrs" like our guru
would say.
-lauri
Erik A. Mattila
Lauri Levanto wrote:
> Dont blame me Erik,
> Noumenon started this thread crossposted.
>
> Anyone who replies, please remove the crosspostings.
Oh, I wasn't blaming you - I wouldn't do that. I was just confused
about where that post came from, since I couldn't see it on my reader
(Netscape). Also, I would have liked to have attacked it - but you did
a good job.
Erik