Title: The Insentive Eye
Review: A stunningly mediocre book. Unorthodox, revisionist stances, can often be bracing. Johnson's are merely inane. He seem incapable of seeing with a sympathetic eye. His biases are pervasive and uninteresting. So one can "learn" from Johnson that Giotto is "wooden"; that Artemisia Gentlischi "weakness was that she was overweight"; that Cezanne is a "would be realist" producing "crude" pieces which are "stiff and awkward and anatomically incorrect....clumsily painted ( Johnson reaches this conclusion by comparing him to Chardin!) and that Cezanne's reputation is really only a result of "commerce. Johnson eye is so dead and his theories so skewed that he is obliged to excoriate virtually all art from the twentieth century onward as mere "fashion art" and "higher frivolity". Wretched history to be sure--but hardly "new"
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