The History of Human Creativity

Art: A New History by Paul Johnson, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, 777 pages,

No single volume could ever properly do justice to the history of art. Art has been produced by every human society, from the most simple to the most complex, throughout mankind’s long history. Even if we narrowed the subject matter to the history of one kind of art, lets say sculpture, in one civilization, that of Italy for example, the story would be far more than could be condensed into one book even if it were a thousand pages long.

Paul Johnson’s Art: A New History is not a thousand pages long although it falls short by only a couple of hundred pages. Nor does Johnson limit himself to a single civilization. For while he focuses upon the art produced by the various Western civilizations and their antecedents in the near East, he also brings far Eastern, African, and native American art into the picture as well. Everything from cave art to the anticipated art of the 21st century is covered.

Which is not to say that Johnson covered everything that could conceivably be included in a history of art. The art that he writes about consists of the visual arts – architecture, pottery, sculpture, painting, and basically any sort of activity in which the appearance of the items made is an important consideration in their creation. You will not find a history of literature, music, or the theatre here, although specific writers and musicians do appear when needed to illustrate movements and trends that cross over into their territory.

The necessary limitations on a book of this nature are such that any one-volume history of art must be considered an introduction to the subject. This is something Paul Johnson himself would undoubtedly agree with. He has the humility to know and acknowledge that his work is not the final word that could be or has been written on the subject of the history of art. As an introduction, his history is excellent. This is what we would expect from the historian who provided us with the superb introduction to the history of the 20th century that was his Modern Times.

Painting must have a pre-eminent place in any history of the visual arts and it has that place here. Johnson, the son of a painter and a painter in his own right, marvelously shares with us his knowledge accumulated over a lifetime of interest in his subject. Architecture, however, plays as important a role in his history. The chapters on the construction of temples, mosques and churches are among the most interesting in this book.

The repugnant phenomenon which has come to be known as “political correctness” is avoided like the plague which is a pleasant relief. In chapter 16, “The Golden Century of Spanish Art”, for example – the century which included Spain’s colonization of the New World, Johnson does not shy away from describing the ugly side of the indigenous cultures encountered by the Spanish colonists nor does he treat the actions of the European settlers as unpardonable sins. This does not mean that he does not appreciate the creations of the indigenous peoples, particularly their architecture. Interestingly, in discussing their architecture he explodes a popular myth:

Both Aztecs and Incas seem to have understood vaulting. In some areas they were superb masons. At Cuzco in Peru and elsewhere, there are Inca walls of irregular polygonal blocks, some of great size, which are carved and fitted together to the point of perfection. It is not true, as is often said, that a knife blade cannot be passed between the stones—I have tried and it can.

That came as a surprise to me as I had always heard that that was true.

A good book of art history must in some ways be like other history books. It requires basic facts – people, places, dates – that are brought together in a story told in a lively and interesting way. In other ways it differs from history books in general. Illustrations, which are optional in most history books, are indispensable in art history books. The more the better.

Then there is opinion. It is widely considered to be bad form to include a great deal of personal judgment in the writing of history. This is not a universally accepted standard, is perhaps impossible on the level of practicality, and is ignored by some of the best history books. In art history, at any rate, opinion can not be exorcised. An inevitable element of any art history book will be art criticism.

Johnson’s history is excellent when it comes to the facts. He knows his subject well and has clearly “done his homework” as the expression goes. He talks about architecture that he has personally visited, at one point even giving his readers advice about the best way to experience a particular building, and paintings and sculptures that he has seen in person. His book is fairly well illustrated although there is room for improvement here. An editorial decision to throw in a few hundred more reproductions of paintings, even if it brought the page total up to a thousand, would not have been amiss.

It is in opinionating, however, that the author truly shines. Johnson is a born opinionist and his judgments on artists and their art are both interesting and entertaining. His judgments sometimes appear rather singular. “Who commissioned the Mona Lisa? Whoever he was he must have been disappointed” he writes, and then two pages later he invokes Samuel Johnson’s assessment of Milton’s Paradise Lost to say of the Sistene Chapel “No one ever wished the ceiling larger.” There is nothing wrong with that, however, and as his history draws to an end he lets his readers know where he ranks the opinions of art historians, presumably including himself – only slightly above art critics on a scale of knowledge that has the critics at the bottom and the restorers of art at the top.

One of Johnson’s opinions which stands out in this history, is his conviction that the system of classification into various periods and schools utilized by most art historians is of little worth. He does not structure his book around it and dismisses it on several occasions. To give one example, he dislikes the term Impressionism, which he says has “confused art history ever since it came into vogue.” The term was derived from the title of one of Claude Monet’s paintings and applied by hostile critics to a number of artists associated with Monet in rebellion against the art establishment at the French Salon. Edgar Degas in particular, he makes a point of emphasizing, had little in common stylistically with the others and with the common idea of what “Impressionism” was.

Johnson is not the only writer to take this position. Indeed, in researching the matter further I found more writers who tried to distance Degas from the Impressionists than who supported the supposedly routine inclusion of him in the school. Impressionism is not the only classification that Johnson writes off however. He takes a very individualistic approach to art, stressing at several times throughout his history, that artists are individuals and that it is in this light that their work must be viewed.

Johnson uses Degas’ own terms for himself – “realist” and “naturalist”. These are terms of high praise in Johnson’s vocabulary, and rightly so. In his chapter on the northern European art of the late medieval to early Renaissance he argues that the influence of Christianity at this time produced individualism among artists who made the depiction of reality their ideal. He writes:

Realism meant stressing individuality. The artists perception of how people differ, in body, mind and soul, the essential foundation of any great art based on human beings, inevitably made him more self-conscious. The fifteenth century, especially in northern Europe, is the first occasion in history (so far as we know) in which the self-portrait becomes frequent.

This chapter, in which the early Flemish masters are discussed, culminates in the career of the German Albrecht Dürer who, a century and a half before Rembrandt, routinely painted self-portraits of himself. Johnson thinks very highly of Dürer who is his bridge to the Italian Renaissance in the next chapter.

It is in his assessment of the Renaissance and those who subsequently followed its tradition that I would most question Johnson’s judgment. He points to humanist writers like the art biographer Vasari and the scholar Lorenzo Valla who dismissed the cultural and artistic output of the centuries between the fall of Rome and the Italian Renaissance as being worthless because it was “gothic”.(1) While I agree with Johnson that this was a huge flaw in humanist thought I think that he allows it to overly colour his assessment of the value of the Graeco-Roman revival in art.

This is especially noticeable after he moves beyond the Renaissance itself. When he comes to the seventeenth century he writes that Caravaggio “achieved one of the most important revolutions in the history of painting” and that the era of realism that began with his work was “both the climax and the golden age of European art”. While Caravaggio was certainly deserving of this praise, we we find later in the chapter that the Bolognese Carracci family are cast in a very negative light.

Johnson writes: “It is arguable, however, that Italian painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would have flourished more healthily if the Carracci methods had never been taught”. He goes on to write “All three main Carracci drew well but their sense of colour was defective, their composition painstaking but ultimately dull, and none of them seems to have been capable of creating an arresting image”. This is not how I would describe what I have seen in reproductions of Annibale Carracci’s paintings for the gallery ceiling of the Farnese Palace in Rome. Perhaps they look worse when viewed in person.

Johnson’s treatment of Nicolas Poussin in the chapter on “The First Great Landscape Paintings” is less harsh than his treatment of the Carraccis but is along the same vein. Here the contrast is with Peter Paul Rubens, who is described as the “eventual successor” to Titian and “not only one of the greatest, he was also one of the happiest of artists”. As with the contrast between Caravaggio and the Carraccis, it is difficult to disagree with Johnson’s assessment about those he lauds, but he gives the impression of being less than fair to the others. He describes Poussin as being too bound by rules and too engrossed with his books to notice the real world around him and allow it to influence his art. In this we hear an echo of Johnson’s earlier work The Intellectuals but it is by no means clear that his assessment is valid in this instance.

The difference between realism – the depiction of things as they appear, and classical idealism – the depiction of things in perfect form, is less important in the later history of art, when the very idea that art should be representational at all was challenged, a development that Johnson is not at ease with, nor am I. When he gets to the twentieth century, he discusses “one of the key developments in the history of art: the rise of fashion art as opposed to fine art”. The distinction, he notes “is not absolute”. “All that can be said is that fine art becomes fashion art when the ratio of novelty and skill is changed radically in favour of novelty”. He identified Cubism as “the first major instance of fashion art” and writes that fashion art “inevitably produces more fashion art since, when the novelty wears off and the low degree of skill becomes apparent, there is a demand for fresh novelties, and a new phase of art is produced to satisfy it”. I can see some people being quite furious with these remarks although I tend to think they sum up the 20th Century rather nicely myself.

Many of the early chapters of this book were devoted to architecture and it is to architecture that Johnson returns in his last chapter. He looks at the accomplishments of architecture and structural engineering in the production of skyscrapers and suspension bridges as the true marvels of artistic expression in the 20th Century. In architecture there is the good, the bad, and the frivolous and here Johnson distinguishes between what he calls “High Frivolity” and “Low Frivolity” in architecture. He offers Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as an example of the former, and the buildings in Los Angeles and Las Vegas as examples of the latter. “Low Frivolity” is ephemeral – “built to entertain but not to last”.

Despite this, Johnson ends on a positive note, expecting greater things from architects, engineers, and artists in general in the century to come.

(1) “Gothic” was originally used as a pejorative because it is derived from the name of several of the tribes who sacked Rome in the last days of the Roman Empire. It literally means “German”. The Gothic revival of the 19th Century, which Johnson discusses in his chapter on Romanticism, was an architectural movement that looked to northern Europe in the medieval period for its inspiration, just as the classical movements looked to Graeco-Roman civilization for theirs.

What is Art?

Art in the singular, is a more difficult concept to grasp and to define, than that of the arts plural. We can arrive at a fairly reasonable understanding of what the arts are by simply naming them – painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature and so on. We only run into difficulties when differences of opinion arise as to whether something should be classified as an art or not. Some people speak of every human endeavour as being, at least potentially, an art. Others restrict the term to activities which are creative. There are those who would restrict it even further by distinguishing between two kinds of creative activities. The first kind are activities in which something is created to serve a practical utilitarian function. An example would be the act of making a chair for somebody to sit in. The second kind of creative activities involve the creation of things that do not have that kind of practical use but which are rather intended to be enjoyed for themselves Those who make such a distinction would call the first kind of activities crafts and the second kind of activities arts.

However widely or narrowly we choose to draw the circle around what we include in the category of the arts we tend to agree that the arts are human activities which involve the exercising of skill and knowledge. Even the person who seems to trivialize the concept by speaking of “the art of twiddling one’s thumbs” does not, by this expression, mean to include every individual who in a moment of extreme boredom takes to distracting his attention in this manner. Rather, he is suggesting that there is a kind of skill which can be applied to thumb-twiddling , which elevates the thumb-twiddler who masters it to a degree of superiority over the amateur who merely dabbles in thumb-twiddling.

“Art” is more difficult to grasp than “the arts” because it is a more abstract concept. Philosophy professors tend to use geometrical illustrations in explaining Plato’s concept of the Forms to their students. The Form of a triangle is an abstract three-sided figure as opposed to an actual triangle drawn out on a piece of paper. We frequently use the word art in such a way that the relationship between art and the arts is similar to that between the abstract concept of a triangle and a triangle you can see on a page before you. From this perspective art is the category to which each of the arts belongs. We also, however, use the word art to refer collectively to that which is produced by the arts. Thus, if we were in a museum filled with sculptures and paintings we could make a gesture taking in all the objects on display and say that they are art, although this second meaning would probably be more properly expressed by “works of art” or “artwork”.

Another way in which we use the word art is as a standard by which we qualitatively judge works of art. We might look at a painting that we really admire and say “Now that’s art!” Conversely, we might look at a museum exhibit that we find loathsome and say “This is supposed to be art?”

It is not always clear what exactly we mean when we use the word art this way. It is common today, to treat such judgments as being simply an expression of one’s personal likes and dislikes and therefore having little to no objective value. Now there is obviously some truth to that. There is always a subjective element in our evaluation of works of beauty. We call this element taste and arguing about matters of taste has long been considered to be a pointless exercise.

There is a difference, however, between a pointless argument about matters of taste and a discussion about the quality of a person’s sense of taste. If I say “I like this and dislike that” and you say “I like that and dislike this” we may give reasons for our likes and dislikes but by doing so we will not be able to prove the other person “wrong” or ourselves “right” in our opinions. “Right” and “wrong” are not judgments that apply to cases of “I like” and “I dislike”. This is what the person who first coined the Latin adage de gustibus non est disputandem obviously had in mind.

We do, however, speak of people having “good taste” and “bad taste”. Is this also a completely subjective judgment or can we arrive at an objective standard by which we evaluate people’s tastes?

We should not be too quick to answer no. There is another way of looking at our use of the word art as a qualitative judgment. When we look at two paintings and say that one is art and that the other is not, we may simply be saying that we like the one and dislike the other, but we might also be saying that we see indications of skill, talent, expertise, and inspiration in the one painting that are lacking in the other painting. If it is the latter we mean then our judgment is not entirely subjective but is an evaluation of specific qualities that we are looking for in the paintings and measuring against a standard.

If that is the case then when we say a person has good taste we may be saying more than just that his likes and dislikes are similar to our own. What we describe as good taste might be simply a high degree of correlation between someone’s personal likes and dislikes on the one hand and the standard of excellence by which we judge the quality of an artist’s work on the other.

Now a case can be made that the standards by which we judge such things as skill, knowledge, and talent are also subjective. If, after having spent an evening at the concert hall listening to a Bach concerto and a Haydn symphony, I come home and find that my neighbor is listening to a recording of some punk screaming obscene lyrics about sex, drugs, and violence to the accompaniment of screeching electric guitars that sound like chalkboard scratches and the heavy pounding of drums that produce an instant headache, I would not be inclined to use the word “music” to describe my neighbor’s acoustical preferences. “Cacophonous noise” or “bloody awful racket” would be the descriptive words that I would most likely use.

Is that simply a matter of taste?

Many would say yes, and on actual occasions where a situation resembling the one which I have described above has occurred I have had it pointed out to me that the band that I, with my prehistoric opinions on music was so rudely dismissing as untalented noisemakers, consisted of members who had actually studied music at a conservatory from an early age and possessed masters degrees in music.

Such arguments do not usually impress me because for someone with such training and talent (you need talent to get into a conservatory) to waste their skills in this way strikes me as being blasphemy of a similar nature to that of an ordained Christian priest celebrating at a Black Mass. There is an interesting point to be made about this kind of argument however. The person who points to the orthodox musical education of someone who has made a career out of generating noise pollution does not appeal to any intrinsic quality or value in the product of their preferred artist. They rather, appeal to the fact that he has the established capacity to produce music that meets the standards by which I have negatively assessed the music he actually does produce.

Does this argument not therefore uphold the very standards it seeks to dismiss as arbitrary, subjective, and artificial?

The idea that good art requires skill which involves a mixture of innate talent and acquired learning which can be evaluated by a set of standards points to the root meaning of the word art. It is derived ultimately from the Latin word ars. This word, like its Greek equivalent techne, refers to a productive skill that was generally passed on from father to son. There was no distinction originally between an art and a craft. The meaning of art has evolved and been refined over the centuries. It is only in the last couple of centuries however that it has been in danger of being cut off from its root meaning entirely.

Those who dismiss the idea that art can be judged as good or bad on the basis of established societal and cultural standards frequently embrace the recent idea that the primary function of art is the external expression of the artists inner feelings. This idea can produce some pretty strange ways of thinking.

My maternal grandmother is a painter, mostly of watercolour landscapes of the terrain around the farm in southwestern Manitoba where she lived most of her life. She has frequently told me that others have said that her painting is “not art”. When I asked her what the reasoning was behind this bizarre assessment she said that it was because she just painted places that she saw whereas a real artist paints what is on the inside.

Think about what that implies if taken to its logical conclusion. The landscapes of Peter Paul Rubens, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and Thomas Gainsborough would have to be dismissed from the category of “art”. So would Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s drawings of wooded corridors and paintings of waterfalls and beautiful gardens. That is not all. Still-life painting would be excluded by this and much portrait painting as well.

The ideas that art exists only or primarily to express the inner feelings of the artist and that art can only be judged subjectively are in major conflict with the reality of art, the function it has historically served, and how the best art has been produced through the centuries. Art is a vital part of culture, which is the product and life of a community and society. The health of a society’s culture is reflected in it’s art and art which exists for no reason other than to express the feelings of narcissistic and egotistical artists does not reflect a healthy culture. It reflects the culture of a society where social atomization has taken place and the sense of community has been terribly compromised.

Historically, the great masters created works of art depicting religious and classical themes for the palaces of the royalty and aristocracy and for the churches which were the cultural centres of traditional societies, and portraits, landscapes and still-lifes for middle class clients. It was commonly and universally understood by the artists and by their patrons and clients that the purpose of art was beauty. Beauty is what artists sought to create and beauty is what patrons and clients wished to purchase.

Beauty, it has commonly been said, is in the eye of the beholder. Undoubtedly, there is a great deal of truth to that. If beauty were entirely subjective, however, art would be impossible. If a culture did not possess a common understanding at some level of what is aesthetically pleasing artists would not know what to create and their patrons and clients would not know what to buy.

The idea of beauty has come under attack in recent decades. The attacks are generally overreactions to ways in which the concept of beauty has been misused. Beauty is a quality that we look for in people as well as in places, objects, and what we call art. Some people greatly exaggerate the importance of beauty in relation to other personal qualities. This kind of exaggeration can manifest itself in a number of negative ways. Vanity can arise out of obsession with one’s own beauty. Or, if one is obsessed with attaining beauty this can lead to self-destructive behaviour such as starving oneself. People who value physical beauty over all other desirable qualities display the trait we call “shallowness” which is a negative trait.

These tendencies have been present among human beings since the earliest times and the traditional way of dealing with them has been to encourage people to show moderation in balance in how they how they look at beauty in themselves and in other people. You are beautiful? That’s good but it doesn’t mean much if you are spoiled, arrogant, and inconsiderate of others. You do not think you are beautiful? Then look at the other good qualities you possess and maximize those. In your assessment of other people place greater value on character traits like honesty, dependability, and kindness than upon physical traits.

This has always been the sensible approach to human beauty but some now feel that the problems described above require the radical solution of challenging and overthrowing the very concept of beauty itself. This has tremendous implications for how we understand art. For we cannot separate the concept of physical human beauty from the concept of beauty in general. The depiction of human beauty has been a part of art for millennia. Moreover, the depiction of human beauty in an idealized rather than a realistic form was one of the primary goals of some of the most important artists in the history of Western art.

This was what ancient Greek and Roman sculptors sought to achieve and what the artists of the Renaissance, who looked to the Greeks and Romans for their inspiration, also sought after. When art seeks to depict beauty in a balanced, harmonious, ideal form that is a perfected version of the beauty we see in the world around us, this is called classicism, after the Classical Era in ancient Athens. Classical idealism has historically been balanced by other competing tendencies. Caravaggio introduced a kind of realism into art by depicting ordinary people in everyday situations as they look in real life, even using this style in his depiction of people in extraordinary situations, such as his paintings of the conversion of St. Paul and the crucifixion of St. Peter. The balancing of the ideal with the real itself achieved in a way the classical ideal of balance.

Whichever vision guided the artist however, of the ideal, the real, or something that was not quite either or a combination of both, his goal was to show people, places, and objects which other people like would want to look at and which would draw them back to look at them again and again. This is what defines beauty – the quality of being desirable to the senses of sight or, in the case of music, sound.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the 20th century revolution in the arts was the rejection on the part of many of the idea that art should be beautiful. Throughout history, art has been made depicting things which are not beautiful. The Last Judgment is a common theme in religious art and the damned being sent off to Hell, or dragged there by demons, is not something that can be depicted in an aesthetically pleasing way. The purpose of such paintings is to produce moral and spiritual reflection. Quentin Massys for some reason painted the portrait that has come to be known as The Ugly Duchess. The entire oeuvre of Hieronymous Bosch could not be described as beautiful in any conventional sense of the term. These kinds of painting, however, were understood to be exceptions to the rule. They depicted ugly subjects for reasons which were considered sufficient to overrule the general understanding that artwork was to be beautiful.

That is very different from the later 20th Century idea that there is no necessary connection between art and the beautiful, that the latter is entirely subjective, and that art exists as a vehicle of the artist’s self-expression which is apparently so valuable to society that it deserves to be funded from the public purse. This idea is fatal to the concept of art for the only justification for thinking of art as something unique within the general category of the application of human knowledge and skill to the making of things (the original meaning of the word “art”) is that art is the making of things which are beautiful.