John Harrison's Reading List

"Not entirely pointless, but he does take a radical, 1970s Marxist view. The book was written to accompany a BBC television series, which was very refreshing in its day but is now a little bit dated. The reason I chose it is that Honour and Fleming don’t give any grounds to the Marxist interpretation. They’re good on other interpretations—like the feminist perspective. But you need to know about Marxism because it still holds the field in most universities around the world. The Marxist interpretation of art history says, ‘Look beyond the art and see who is controlling whom, who has the power, who is controlling the means of production and the means of exchange.’ Berger never actually deviated from that classic Marxism in the rest of his life, though he died a couple of years ago. “Why should any child study art history? It sums up human life.” And it is a very, very exciting new way of looking at pictures. Another brilliant book is The Painting of Modern Life , by T J Clark, who followed Berger. You have to understand the Marxist interpretation of art; it is absolutely fundamental to the way that art history departments now study the material. Then you have to critique it, because we’ve moved on from the 1970s and the collapse of Marxism in most of the world shows—amongst other things—that the model was flawed. But it’s still a very good book to read, for a teenager especially. Which I think is very healthy."

"From a very left-wing interpretation with John Berger we now go to a very right-wing interpretation from David Watkin. I also praise his smaller book, Morality and Architecture , which is possibly his most elegant summation. This book is a great celebration of the skills of architecture. What he admires are patrons working with architects to produce great masterpieces. It covers Western architecture, not world architecture. Here we are dealing with the great, famous buildings. He was such a widely read and widely travelled man and he writes beautifully. Although I’ve said Honour and Fleming do deal with architecture, you were right to suggest that mainly they’re dealing with painting and sculpture. This outstanding book gives you the history of architecture, which none of the other books I’ve mentioned do. “It’s such an intellectual challenge to think in three dimensions” You’ve got to understand the history of architecture—it’s taught at all university departments. It’s a challenging subject because it is three-dimensional: you have to intuit that if the staircase is there, and there’s a window there, then that window will not properly light this staircase—or you’ve got to move that room to fit there. People like Sir William Chambers designed these incredibly clever 18th century houses and other buildings. It’s such an intellectual challenge to think in three dimensions. A lot of people can’t do it, but you’ve got to learn if you’re going to delve into architectural history. Yes, that’s right. His book Morality and Architectu re says that we mustn’t think in terms of the 1920s and 30s idea of there being ‘good’ architecture and ‘bad’. His basic thesis is that you can disconnect morality from architecture. Therefore, he likes the modern architects who are more playful and maybe post-modernism was something he would appreciate. That was a critique of the rather serious and austere work of the international modern movement, of which he has some criticisms."

"One of the most exciting things that’s happened in the last 50 years has been the feminist interpretation of everything, but not least the feminist interpretation of art. Along with Griselda Pollock , Linda Nochlin was the great pioneer of this. “Why Have There Been no Great Women Artists?” is her most famous initial essay, which was a question actually put to her by a gallery owner. She went away and said, ‘God damn! It’s not that there aren’t great women artists—the point is they’ve been excluded by society. They haven’t been given a chance.’ And she brilliantly went through all the social and economic constraints—the two are of course linked—which kept women artists out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (There’s the famous campaign, ‘ Do Women Have to be Naked to Get into the Met ?’) She’s humane and witty in a way that we appreciate and admire. She’s brilliantly well-read, and I’d also like to recommend her last, posthumous book which is coming out this year. It’s called Representing Women and it’s a wonderful summary of her most important essays. She deals very well with French art, particularly the role of women there and in America (she was American). She broadens perspective in a way that Honour and Fleming would have loved to do if they’d had the chance, but David Watkin would have detested. She’s an outstanding writer. It has. She goes a little bit off-track when she follows Edward Said’s Orientalism , a book which, in my opinion, has stood the test of time much less well. It’s a great, challenging book, an important one in its time, but some scholars have shown that Edward Said was biased in his use of examples. In particular, he gives no attention at all to homosexuality and queer theory, whereas she’s prepared to do that. The portions of her book that have stood the test of time deal with how women artists have been constrained and held back, and how some women were able to surpass constraining social conventions. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It helped to be wealthy. Berthe Morisot, for example, as a wealthy woman, could be an artist and successful in her own right in the 1860s, 70s and 80s. She married Manet’s brother and was a very good artist. In that same period there was Mary Cassatt, who was American. It’s a bit like the novelist Edith Wharton: she could be a great novelist because she was a very intelligent writer and because she married a millionaire and was rich herself. She could have the kind of confidence and financial security that was out of the question for wonderful women artists who might have been very good—like Rodin’s mistress, or the young girl posing as Olympia in the painting by Manet, Victorine Meurent. We know her name; we know she wanted to be an artist; and we know that she essentially was destroyed, or failed to get anywhere because she wasn’t rich."

"Every book I’ve mentioned so far is relatively easy and enjoyable to read, but I thought I’d give you a difficult one. This is a wonderful book, but it is not an easy read. She’s arguing that maps and mapping are a way of understanding much of Dutch art. She’s absolutely brilliant in the way that she shows that Dutch art is, in many ways, following the mariners, the tradition of seagoing. A lot of maps actually appear in the background of the paintings she’s talking about. But it’s more than that—it’s an epistemological way of approaching it. Mapping and describing come naturally to the Dutch for all sorts of reasons. It is a very challenging and original way of responding to Northern art, to Dutch art in particular, which has been a bit absent. It’s obviously there in Honour and Fleming, but not so much in the John Berger or the Nochlin. It’s nice that Dutch art is given a little special attention here. That’s certainly true, although she shows how the great artists can ring the changes, like Vermeer . She explains how brilliant Vermeer’s art of describing is, the way he avoids contour but instead uses modeling with light, and how a lot of his work can be understood with Dutch cultural context. It’s a difficult society to understand, having an emphasis not only on hierarchy but also on Calvinism. This is something which is very interesting in Vermeer’s paintings. He was a Catholic so working against the grain and yet at the same time celebrating some of those Calvinist-inspired values. This is taken up by Simon Schama’s very good book, The Embarrassment of Riches , which he wrote at roughly the same time as Svetlana Alper’s but has got a different take on it. He comes at it much more from the political and economic side, but I think that her work is still preeminent in this particular field. Let’s be careful about context here. There was a proposal to abolish the A Level, but it was quickly brought back from the dead. Eton College had already abandoned the A Level and moved to Pre-U. Most subjects at Eton are now Pre-U, which stands for pre-university. It’s more difficult than A Level and it’s run by the Cambridge International Examinations Board. However, if that hadn’t been invented, we’d still be with the A Level. I thoroughly enjoyed teaching A Level course, which I did for 25 years. “Why should any child study art history? It sums up human life.” Why should any child study art history? It sums up human life. The same issues that might be involved in geography or English or economics come into art history: poverty and wealth, the growth of cities, the landscape, colonialism. You can study Gaugin, or you can study Manet, but it’s the same issue. The great stories in poetry or novels or drama you can also find in great paintings. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling is the story of the Creation and the Fall of Man. All the excitement and humanity of human beings is there, as in any great artist’s work, right up to the present day with David Hockney. So art history is humanity in the most important sense of the word. It is something that young people should be allowed to study if they are interested. It does require a good visual memory. It’s not for everyone. As with the study of physics and chemistry, there are complicated technical terms. It’s not an easy subject for the mentally lazy. It used to. It must be clear that you’re sitting in a darkened room looking at slides—this is still the case, as it was when Anthony Blunt was teaching at the Courtauld. There’s a temptation for the slacker to think a darkened room looks nice. But any good teacher pounces on people and asks, ‘What does that look like? What have you learnt here? What’s new about this and do you think that succeeds or not? Is that a balanced painting or not? Is this a moral subject well expressed or is there some problem here? When you’re looking at Degas’s famous pastels of naked women—where he wanted to show the woman, as he put it, “like an animal” and they’re observed as though through a keyhole like a voyeur—does one feel uneasy about this, especially in the year 2019 after Me Too?’ You’ve got to make it quite difficult, because its reputation used to be of a fairly easy ‘A’ level or Pre-U. But I think and hope that reputation is not the same today."