The great makers.(Art: A New History)(Book Review)

Art: A New History, by Paul Johnson (HarperCollins, 792 pp., $39.95)

EVERY sentient adult has his own favorite book by the English historian Paul Johnson. Some favor Intellectuals (1989), his devastating and often hilarious dissection of egghead hubris, pomposity, and malice. Others make a case for Modern Times (1983), or A History of the American People (1997). Until yesterday, my own favorite was The Birth of the Modern (1991), his thousand-page conspectus about "World Society 1815-1830." I am not quite ready to forswear my enthusiasm for that marvelous book, but I waver. The cause of my vacillation is Johnson's latest book, Art: A New History, an 800-pager that takes readers from the cave paintings of Lascaux up through the latest inanities of the post-post-post trendissimus stuff you see at your local avant-garde art emporium. Along the way readers are treated to guided tours of everything from the art of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, through the achievements of medieval Europe, the Italian Renaissance, the influence of Asian art, and the triumphs of Dutch masters and English watercolorists, to the explosion of art-isms in the 19th and 20th centuries.

I confess that I approached this book with some trepidation. That Johnson is a man of encyclopedic learning I knew; he has breathtaking range and velocity as a historian. I knew, too, that Johnson is an accomplished amateur watercolorist with a large appetite for art. The question was whether all these virtues would translate into an authoritative history of art.

The answer is yes. Art is an engrossing and invigorating book: a pleasure as well as an education. It is knowledgeable, yes, and also idiosyncratic. But what is perhaps most engrossing about the book is its passion. Johnson sees that art in its highest sense is more than a pastime. Deeply connected to "the ordering instinct that makes society possible," art is and always has been "essential to human happiness." Johnson's book The Quest for God (1996) is subtitled "A Personal Pilgrimage," but Art is in many ways his most personal publication. "I have," he writes, "put everything I know and deeply feel into this book." It shows on every page. What we have here is not a replacement for Janson's (or whoever's) History of Art, but a look inside the workshop of art by someone who has lived and labored there. Consider, for example, Johnson's explanation of Vermeer's artistry:

 
   He achieved verisimilitude in five distinct 
   ways. First by a highly sophisticated use 
   of perspective, including bending, which 
   puts everything firmly and exactly in 
   space. No one has ever reduced three 
   dimensions to two more securely. Second, 
   he dissolved contours and eliminated 
   any sense of line completely, an ultra-advanced 
   use of Leonardo's sfumato 
   [shading]. Third, he made cunning use of 
   alternating areas of dense impasto and 
   thin glazes, so that objects were distinguished 
   not merely by light, colours, and 
   shapes, but by surface. Fourth, he constantly 
   used slight but telling distortions 
   of shape and light to reinforce the illusion. 
   This is why his paintings never look like 
   photographs, and attempts to produce 
   "photographic Vermeers" have failed 
   completely.... [Fifth,] Vermeer, however 
   much cash he had or did not have, always 
   used the highest quality pigments then 
   available.... This shows sense and is one 
   reason his works have survived so well. 

This is writing from the inside, from someone who has a "hand" as well as an eye for art.

History is Johnson's profession. Art is his vocation. Johnson's father was an artist, the head of an art school. He admitted that his son drew well, but warned him off a career in art. "I can see bad times coming for art," he said. "Frauds like Picasso will rule the roost for the next half-century. Do something else for a living."