Common-Sense Investing in Real Estate Investment Trusts Book

This an exhaustive study of an almost limitless subject. At approximately 450,000 words, Paul Johnson's Art: A New History is more than 80 percent the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.

This is a thoroughly honest book of opinion, and the opinions are often grim. A prospective reader, before committing himself to the 30 or more hours of reading this book will require, ought to peruse the introduction, in which Johnson, right at the tippity top, presents a resume that includes artist and art teacher for a father, who painted churches and discouraged his son's apprenticeship as a painter because the century was certain to be ruined by frauds like Picasso. There are departures from this theme - thousands in fact over hundreds of pages - but this book knows where it is headed and gets there: The last century, marked by the birth of Impressionism and codified by the arrival of Cubism, took fine art and turned it into fashion art, and in so doing, gave itself, mostly, to the frauds. After hammering at this theme for about 129 3/4 of the last 130 pages, Johnson reserves his final paragraph for a note of optimism, though it hungrily wants the sincerity of its 400 predecessor paragraphs.

Johnson is an excellent writer possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of European art. He is a Brit, and so, unsurprisingly, a large number of the best works by the best artists can be found in London. There is nothing wrong with this approach, of course, but one does find himself turning the pages of many of Johnson's most effusive treatments wondering when the authority of the National Gallery will be brought to the witness stand.

But again, the writing is excellent:

In Rome, you achieved an effect by piling on the marble and porphyry, by doubling the size, by raising the gold and silver content, by gilding and embedding jewels in it, by importing immense quantities of rare plants, exotic trees and animals. ... There was an ineffable whiff of the nouveaux riches about the top echelons of Roman society which time's patina could never quite cover. (p. 97)

Though one is forced to question slightly Johnson's reasons for working so hard at a definition of excellence over 650 pages, when he comes to the final 100 and finds the definition used like dynamite on the legacy of most every 20th century movement that took "ism" as a suffix, Johnson's efforts at defining excellence, and its origins, are fantastic nonetheless:

If one had to define the success of Italian art during these times in one sentence it would be: a cultural climax occurs when a superb workshop tradition of craftsman is led by a ruling elite of discernment, taste and imagination. (p. 208)

and

Vermeer is now more generally, and unreservedly, admired than any other painter. (p. 379)

and

The genius of Le Nôtre, then, like that of all the greatest artists, was in creating apparent, or even real, order, and within it, effecting deliberate disorder to stimulate emotions and give pleasure. (p. 401)

and

The truth is, art is all, or mostly, a matter of self-confidence, which comes from the acquisition of reliable skills, and a major artist always possesses it. It allows him to follow his daemon, to the degree he wishes, consistent always of course with making a living, and a self-confident artist can usually do that. (p. 415)

and

. . . that salient characteristic of great art: if you owned one of them you would wish to look at it every single day of your life, as soon as you got up in the morning. (p. 555)

Then Johnson goes after his own century, beginning with its forefathers, Monet and Van Gogh and even Munch:

Like Van Gogh's work, The Scream has been acclaimed as a masterpiece by popular vote, since many people feel like it and can see themselves, granted the skill, actually painting it. (p. 617)

Finally, Johnson comes to his unifying theory of fine art vs. fashion art:

Cubism can fairly be classified as the first major instance of fashion art, as opposed to fine art. By traditional standards of measurement, going back over thousands of years in the Western tradition, fine art is a combination of novelty and skill. ... The distinction between fine art and fashion art is not absolute. All that can be said is that fine art becomes fashion art when the ratio of novelty and skill is changed drastically in favor of novelty. ... It is another characteristic of fashion art that it 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. (p. 661)

With rare exceptions, then, do not look at painting or sculpture created in the last 120 years, Johnson counsels, but rather at contemporary buildings and bridges, gardens and museum structures. He is right to dismiss much of Picasso, all of Warhol - "not so much an artist, for his chief talent was for publicity" - and, in a rather amusing way, Pollack ("much thought went into this inspired linoleum"), but he perhaps, and quite uncharacteristically, does not give two of his own British contemporaries, Hockney and Freud, nearly the credit they deserve.

American readers will be relieved to know, however, Paul Johnson thinks the 19th century landscape paintings (erroneously) bunched together in the "Hudson River School" are the finest works of the last 150 years of paint, and it's hard to look at any work by Albert Bierstadt and disagree.

This book deserves enormous credit for the size of its undertaking, an undertaking serious enough for its author to do something probably never done before: Post, in the introduction, his home mailing address, to which he asks any recommended corrections be sent.