Picasso's Left Foot, Art: A New History
Johnson, Paul
BOOKS IN REVIEW Picasso's Left Foot Art A New History by Paul Johnson (HarperCollins, 777 pages, $39.95) Reviewed by Seth Lipsky ne day in the early 1990s, I fell into a conversation about...
...He says The Great Falls, Niagara made Church "the world's leading landscape painter and the successor of Turner...
...Lowry...
...He says Picasso "raises problems of appreciation which are unique in the history of art, and it is important that everyone should make up their own minds about him...
...At the heart of the process whereby beautiful objects are produced there is an abyss...
...There is a brief history of Stonehenge, a chapter on the Russians, another on art and the realities of the industrialized world, yet another on skyscrapers, art nouveau and art deco...
...It is only by admitting his imperfections that the full power of his genius, going at top speed and fury, and sweeping all before it in dazzling displays of mastery, enters through the eyes into the depths of the soul...
...At the start of the book, Johnson sets down what he calls "certain principles" which he holds "essential in understanding art and making sense of the way it has evolved...
...The courage to state his own tastes—and to focus on artists he takes seriously—is one of the strongest elements of Johnson's book...
...You'll see...
...In one paragraph about Rembrandt, he manages to observe that the Dutch master could not make a woman look conventionally beautiful, that all his efforts to paint Susanna and the Elders failed, that in Portrait of a Young Woman Seated, the "non-chin is repellent...
...Of the careers reprised in the book, the one I speculate that Johnson admires the most is that of Turner...
...Johnson quotes marvelous descriptions of Turner at work, such as one by the daughter-in-law of one of his patrons, Walter Fawkes, who relates how he painted a watercolor designed to give an idea of the size of a man of war: "He began by pouring wet paint on to the paper until it was saturated, he tore, he scratched, he scrubbed at it in a kind of frenzy, and the whole thingwas chaos—but gradually as if by magic the lovely ship, with all its exquisite minutiae, came into being, and by luncheon time the drawing was taken down in triumph...
...Johnson has a marvelous way of talking about painters...
...Most of his attempts to present his wife show he had other things on his mind than her beauty," he writes...
...For Johnson getting it right, proper drawing and form, clearly is fundamental...
...Picasso provided the rest of the kit, including the publicity...
...He comes back at the end to the point on which he began, lamenting that though more students are studying art, fewer are learning to draw...
...His Susanna Disturbed has hands that are "huge and red" and "ugly feet" and "dreadful bedroom slippers...
...Then he goes on to devote several pages, crackling with compliments...
...To close his book Johnson offers a chapter called "The Dangers and Opportunities of Twenty-FirstCentury Art," in which he remarks on, among other things, the fact that the "studio chain, stretching back to the early Middle Ages, along which knowledge was passed from master to assistant or apprentice over countless generations, has been broken...
...It was all German nonsense...
...In his Flora, the "girl comes close to fatuity...
...At some point in our palaver, he lit into Picasso...
...Balaam and the Ass is "dreadful," Diana Bathing with Her Nymphs "absurd...
...Johnson's father would have been proud...
...He says the great English seascape painter "never followed bad advice, or any advice at all...
...For all the adulation, though, Johnson declares that to enjoy Turner to the full, one has to be conscious of his faults: "his appalling figure drawing and vacuous faces, his sudden collapse of taste, his refusal to paint trees properly, his spasms of mania in seascapes, and his overuse of white and yellow when the frenzy took hold...
...Yet he rejects the idea that this is cause for despondency...
...He ends the American chapter with Sargent, saying he made "one serious error of judgment," accepting a commission to provide a series of religious murals for the Boston Public Library...
...Drawing is clearly something that matters for him...
...When I made the mistake of expressing admiration for Picasso's painting Boy Leading a Horse, Johnson stopped in mid-stride, turned to me, and gave me a lecture on how sloppy, even cartoonish, was the lad's left foot...
...He argues that "art predated not only writing but probably structured speech, too, that it was closely associated with the ordering instinct which makes society possible, and that it has therefore always been essential to human happiness...
...Frauds like Picasso will rule the roost for the next half century...
...The book gives the Hudson River School pride of place in this era, with particular honors going to Church...
...His history of art is similar to his other great literary canvases—his histories of England, Jews, Christians, America, and our own time—beautifully crafted, packed with information, and illuminated by his own biases...
...He makes much of Picasso's financial success and of the fact that during World War II he was permitted by the Germans to continue working in Paris...
...He declares that Heart of the Andes "must be reckoned one of the world's greatest paintings...
...I thought of this when I picked up Johnson's latest book, Art: A New History, which runs to 777 pages, lush with high quality color illustrations...
...Picasso's Boy Leading a Horse doesn't rank even for a mention in this magisterial volume, nor did the youngster's left foot...
...We had gone for a walk in Kensington Gardens, and Johnson stopped several times to do some sketching...
...Just take another look at it," Johnson said...
...Art," he says, "is fundamentally about order, whether the canonical or the new currently has the upper hand...
...Of Bierstadt, he writes: "You can examine one of his massive works, such as The Rocky Mountains: Lander's Peak (1863, Metropolitan), which is 6 foot by 12, inch by inch and will not find one iota of shoddy, slapdash or frauduPicasso must have been one of the few who emerged from the war richer than when he entered it...
...Do something else for a living...
...Lest one jump to the conclusion that he is talking merely about our current abstract painters or practitioners of conceptual art, he follows with a short disquisition on how the Pharaoh Akhenaten, "suffering from the delusion that he was the incarnation of a new high god, or even sole god," imposed his new fashion in theology on artists, producing "grotesque and revolting physical distortions of the way the body was represented...
...He comes back to this point several times...
...The painters he favors include the American masters, who are covered in a chapter called "Painting the American World and Its Wonders," which begins with Cole and ends with Sargent...
...Johnson's book bristles with such editorial comment...
...He calls Lady With an Ermine Da Vinci's "most perfect work...
...Certainly Johnson has made up his...
...Johnson characterizes the "more than a score" of first-class American landscape painters working in the second half of the nineteenth century "perhaps the greatest assemblage of talent ever to devote itself to this form of art...
...Here is a history that starts with stone-age painting and ends today, while containing but two illustrations of abstract works (Jackson Pollock's White Seth Lipsky is editor of the New York Sun...
...Picasso must have been one of the few who emerged from the war richer than when he entered it," he says...
...Noting that Picasso and Braque are jointly credited with the invention of Cubism, he suggests that Braque "produced the intellectual content...
...His father, he writes, didn't want him to become an artist...
...There are memorable passages on Velasquez and Goya, chapters on Asia, essays on pottery and the design of libraries...
...We need, Johnson warns, "to beware of the enemies of order, and particularly mere fashion...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW Picasso's Left Foot Art A New History by Paul Johnson (HarperCollins, 777 pages, $39.95) Reviewed by Seth Lipsky ne day in the early 1990s, I fell into a conversation about painting with Paul Johnson...
...As if history were but a painting in progress on which someone fumbled a loaded brush, Johnson writes: "All mistakes in the last century can be corrected...
...Johnson regards Cole as the "bridge between dependency and independence" as American painting moved from being an appendage of British art to being a force in its own rights...
...He attended schools, listened and watched and copied, Johnson writes, "but in all essentials he was self-taught, self-directed, self-contained and self-judged...
...He recalls that when he was a child he hid in a cupboard in his father's art room as his father—an artist and head of an art school—conversed with his friend L.S...
...He was astonishingly fluent and must have worked at high speed, doing the faces and hands more carefully than the rest, obviously, but giving BOOKS IN REVIEW everything a dashing air which is always appealing...
...This is the book Johnson has wanted to write all his life, mixing his first love, art, with his second, writing, and it was worth the wait...
...The scale, he says, "is prodigious, the depth unnerving, the variety of detail almost infinite, the effect stunning, even today, after a century of modern art, among those who come to jeer...
...Much of the book is given over to architecture, particularly classical, though there are photographs of Gehry's museum in Bilbao and Calatrava's in Valencia...
...He dilates on Whistler, Home, Eakins, and Cassatt...
...Hals," he writes, "was an accomplished and innovative painter, who worked in a way most of us would call 'modern.' No drawings survive and it is likely that he painted straight onto the canvas, wet on wet...
...NOVEMBER 2003 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 55 BOOKS IN REVIEW lent painting...
...So Johnson became a writer...
...The human need for art," he writes, "is greater than ever, for the world is more chaotic and the demand for the ordering process which art supplies is rising...
...Then he states: "No one in the whole history of painting knew more about the art, or practiced it with such complete absorption over seventy years...
...54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2003 Light and Kandinsky's Capricious Forms...
...He holds out the hope that they may come to be recognized as major works, but meantime he says the "misplaced commission must be regarded as one of the most painful tragedies of twentieth-century art...
...Michelangelo was a "true humanist," "man-centered," who "never showed any interest in landscape painting other than to denounce it...
...The first point, he says, is to grasp the "immense fecundity of humans...
...Said the father: "I can see bad things coming for art...
...Johnson does not fail to get his revenge on Picasso, dealing with him in a chapter called "The Beginnings of Fashion Art...
...Not that he's a sycophant of the great artists...
Vol. 36 • November 2003 • No. 6
