Art: A New History [Hardcover]

Johnson's writing is remarkable for his ability to condense into a single sentence, with clarity, an idea which would take others a paragraph to state. As an historian, he is better able than most art critics to place art in its historical context. In order fully to understand and appreciate art, one must see it in relation to culture, history, and ideas.

Johnson is an excellent writer: his prose is lively, compact, and he makes it easy - and a pleasure - to read.

The selection of illustrations is good, with the pictures placed in the text for easy association with the discussion. The trade-off is that the pictures are not large and glossy, and the reader may feel moved to visit a library to see reproductions at higher-resolution.

By today's standards, the book - an education in one volume - is a bargain for its price.

Even though you know what's coming (historically speaking---most of the "big names" are covered), you can't wait to hear what Mr. Johnson has to say. Is he opinionated? Absolutely! But that's a great part of the fun. He has obviously devoted a great amount of his time and impressive intellect studying art. He is also a practicing artist, thereby incorporating an appreciation for the technical aspects into his views. You may not agree with everything he has to say, but it is well worth your time to read his perspective.

From his narrative of the pre-historic cave paintings in Chapter 1 to his narrative of modern architecture (dominated by bridges) in Chapter 32, Mr. Johnson captivates and illuminates. I have struggled with appreciating modern art and found the author's view that most modern art is "fashion art" to be most helpful, although I am sure there are countless others screaming in protest. I found myself chuckling at each mention of Picasso ("What made Picasso so successful professionally and financially was not so much skill as commercial inventiveness, artistic originality, ruthlessness and extreme cunning, sometimes supplemented by intelligence of an unusual kind.") and rolling my eyes when he commented that Balthus (and others) "would have produced better pictures if they had drawn the human form as it is, rather than as seen through post-Cubist spectacles". (Who knows if they were capable of doing so?) But I was totally absorbed and thoroughly entertained.

My only complaints are the lack of a bibliography and the lack of illustrations for many of the objects mentioned (particularly paintings). Thank you, Mr. Johnson, for sharing your passion.

There are some errors in the book which seem to have been propagated from older reference works: Shah Jehan actually built the Taj Mahal for himself, not for his wife; and the Vatican's "Apollo Belvedere" is now considered to be a Roman copy, not a Greek original. Definitions of technical terms are not always careful. For example (page 84), the book's definition of "contrapposto" asserts baldly that "the bent leg is forward." Actually, in contrapposto, the foot and lower part of the bent leg is set back, relative to the straight leg, with only the knee and thigh projecting slightly forward.

In terms of suggested audience, the book does not seem suitable for students or beginners, because it readily assumes that the reader is already familiar with the artists and works discussed; nor is it likely to please the professionals, since it offers no new contributions to scholarship. This leaves, as a potential audience, the hypothetical cultured reader who has seen much art, who would like to run through it again in chronological order, and who might find in Johnson a congenial and philosophically compatible guide.