When a Historian's Opinions Don't Come With Citations

Reviewed: Creators: From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney by Paul Johnson, 2007

Paul Johnson profiles a diverse range of individuals by assessing their creative work and, in some cases, providing “the dirt” on their personal lives. He certainly piqued my interest and left me with a desire to read Chaucer, but I was also frustrated by the difficulty of interpreting how much of his material was opinion and how much fact. I am all for historians allowing themselves to possess and display lively opinions. However, I also appreciate knowing their evidence and their reasoning. Because he speaks so authoritatively, Johnson’s work becomes less convincing as soon as one realizes that some of his unequivocal statements are debatable. For instance, he discusses the tragedy of Jane Austen’s death from Addison’s disease, and shares his frustration over the fact that, had she lived today, she could easily have been cured. However, according to Wikipedia, Austen’s diagnosis with Addison’s disease is only one tentative modern theory among several. Johnson also delivers announcements such as his claim the elderly Louis Comfort Tiffany was sexually active until the end. Yet I cannot help wondering whether Johnson has a witness to this, or merely theorizes it from the presence in Tiffany’s house of his mistress. In addition, Johnson tends to credit his “creators” with all subsequent similarities to their work, but I must counterclaim that, for example, Americans would still have delivered “one-liners” had Mark Twain never written.

As I read the book, I found myself increasingly inclined to discount or accept Johnson’s interpretations somewhat at random, based solely on my own preconceptions, which is not exactly a desirable way to learn history. I am ready enough to swallow his account of Pablo Picasso’s despicable and loathsome personal life because I myself do not care for the man’s art, but I question whether the portrait of Victor Hugo as an idiotic, egotistical hypocrite and turncoat is entirely fair, because I do admire Les Miserables (and surely the man that Johnson describes could not have written such an exploration of law versus mercy?).

However, I was fascinated by the author's interpretation of Picasso's role in art history. Johnson sees Picasso as transforming art from a representation of nature into something purely introspective, based entirely on fashion and therefore on continual change (he says that because Picasso is so easy to copy, even the artist himself did not always know which works were his own, and that the value of his pieces depends entirely on proper authentication: they have no intrinsic beauty or value). The idea that art, like couture, is now based on fashion is illuminating and provides a way to understand the modern art movement. The flow of fashion can be mystifying ("Why are intelligent girls wearing tights as pants?"), and so can the flow of modern art ("Why is that particular canvas/string cheese/bottle on a pedestal considered art by intelligent people?"). 

Creators is interesting. Johnson makes it so. Some would argue that my desire for further research proves the book to be a success. However, for me, at least, he did not make it entirely satisfying. He reminds me of various people I have known who were good storytellers. Their accounts of personal experiences were always fascinating and entertaining, but the details tended to change with each telling. They were not the sort of people who would lie, but they were also not the sort of people who always restricted themselves to facts of which they were fully certain.

Is this fair? Or am I maligning Johnson?


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