Art: A New History by Paul Johnson

I'm a great reader but in recent years I have noticed that too much of my reading is casual browsing of the Internet. I browse several newspapers every morning then a dozen blogs. Along with email and text messages, that takes a lot of time. I read on my Kindle as well, but that is usually light fiction (though I have been re-reading Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell recently). So when Paul Johnson came to mind recently I decided to commit to re-reading his excellent Art: A New History which I will be doing an hour each morning. It is a large, splendid book though lacking, for budgetary reasons a lot of scholarly apparatus like footnotes and bibliography. But it does have an index. It is very readable and written from what I think is a reasonable point of view--that is, it is not all about identity politics, political correctness and who oppressed whom. It is, instead, a well-researched survey of art in human history attempting to see each civilization and culture from the inside on its own terms while not shying away from aesthetic evaluation. Re-reading it now (I first read it over a decade ago as it was published in 2003) I delight in immersing myself in the art of distant times and cultures. When we ignore history, as we seem to be doing now, we grossly impoverish ourselves. Here is one of the excellent illustrations: the pharoah Mycerenus, his goddess-mentor and wife.

Ancient Egyptian artists were not very individual as they followed, for thousands of years, a very strict set of aesthetic conventions, but they were masterful stone carvers.

I see that the book seems to be out of print, but you can purchase a used hardcover copy very cheaply at Amazon.