I can only quote the Shorter Oxford Dictionary: “Bliss: perfect joy or happiness.”
He had three very happy years at Oxford, at Magdalen College. He was so ecstatic at being in Oxford that he did very little work. He never went to a faculty lecture and skipped seminars. Nevertheless, he was finally awarded what was deemed “a perfectly reasonable second.” Brian Urquhart, his contemporary at Oxford, described him as “tall, handsome, golden-haired, and always surrounded by the prettiest girls.”
Those times were shadowed by the state of hostilities between Britain and Germany. Hardly any of his contemporaries had been able to finish their three years at Oxford. One after another, they had been called up for war service, from which many of them did not return.
Rejected for military service because of his speech difficulties, he accepted an offer from Sir John Rothenstein, then the director of the Tate Gallery, as an unpaid honorary assistant.
As the Tate was then closed, and its collections were by then in safety either in country houses or in suitable caves far from London, there was nothing for him to do but to type, month by month, sixteen separate copies of the minutes of the trustees’ meeting (no carbon paper). He then joined the Tate’s emergency outpost in Upton-on-Severn, Worcester.
This was a town that had been briefly in the news when it was named as the location of a pioneering novel about two lesbians. However, John commented, “At no time in my two years in residence was there any sign of sexual activity, whether regular or irregular.”
With time on his hands, John roamed the countryside with a publisher of successful guidebooks of Britain, Harry Batsford, who had a petrol allowance. The result was John’s first book, Shakespeare’s Country. “It had to do with whatever could be reached within an hour or two by car from Upton-on-Severn. None of the places in question were related in any way to Shakespeare, but nobody pointed that out and I had a very easy ride with reviewers,” the young author wrote. It was the first of twenty-three books to be written by John Russell. He was twenty-three years old at the time.
Later in the war John had a job in Naval Intelligence on the editorial side of the weekly review of intelligence. Detailed accounts of individual actions at sea were spelled out. These often involved the movements of U-boats, which were decisive as to whether the war would be won or lost.
With other figures from the literary world, he spent nights on fire duty at Westminster Abbey.
The war over, he began writing for publications such as Peter Quennell’s Cornhill and Cyril Connolly’s Horizon. Through his friend Ian Fleming, not yet creator of James Bond, he began reviewing books for The Sunday Times.
What he described as “a disgraceful episode” occurred in 1951. At the annual dinner of the Royal Academy, the owner of The Sunday Times, Lord Kemsley, sat next to the president of the Royal Academy. At a late stage of the proceedings, during which wine had flowed freely, the president said to Lord Kemsley, “There’s something terribly wrong with The Times. It’s your art critic, he’s a disgrace, and he’s dragging the paper down.”
“Do you really think so?” said Lord Kemsley.
Deeply troubled, Lord Kemsley reported the conversation next morning to his staff. The editors protested, “Eric Newton is widely admired and he is a pleasure to work with.”
“That can’t be helped,” said Lord Kemsley. “We can’t ignore what the president said.” Someone asked if he had a successor in mind. “I don’t know about art critics,” Kemsley retorted, irritated. “Just get one.”
Someone then said, “We have Russell on the staff, sir. He knows about art.”
“Who’s Russell?” asked Lord Kemsley. “A book reviewer, sir.” “A book reviewer?” said Lord Kemsley, none too pleased. Then he said, “Oh, well, get Russell.”
In this way John became the art critic of The Sunday Times and remained there for twenty-five years, until he left for the United States.
He had married Alexandrine Apponyi, from a distinguished Austro-Hungarian family. They had a daughter, Lavinia (now Lady Grimshaw), of whom he was immensely proud.
As for the years at The Sunday Times, he never had trouble finding something to say. “Nor did I ever use fancy language. It was precisely the life I had always dreamed of.”
In the immediate postwar years in Europe and elsewhere, as a new generation of artists emerged, John traveled widely, chronicling developments in France (he wrote and spoke perfect French), Germany, Greece, Italy, Austria, Denmark, Australia, and the former Soviet Union. Speaking of the growing international popularity of modern art, he wrote, “The critic … could go to a new country every month of the year if his editor would stand for it.”
Those postwar decades saw a transformation in the art world. New money and new publicity primed the newly expanded auction market, and enterprising dealers challenged the comfortably established auction houses with their country house connections. Two Viennese Jewish refugees, Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer (with a future duke on their board), made the Marlborough Gallery the hot place to see and be seen.
Contemporary art had a new role in national self-awareness. Modern Britain had for the first time a living artist of unquestioned international eminence, Henry Moore. John, who traveled abroad with Henry for several exhibitions, said that Henry was well aware of his reputation but was never the slightest bit pretentious. He was scrupulously attentive to the local artists when he was feted in foreign countries. If he thought someone would never make it as a colorist, he would say, “Black-and-white’s your thing, you know. Black-and-white!”
John wrote, “Fifty years ago, the life of an established art critic in London was unhurried and hugely enjoyable. There were not too many shows, but we got in first to see them, and the dealers made us welcome, no matter what they privately thought of us, as did museum directors both at home and abroad. We had congenial colleagues. World-wide publishers sent us their new books. We travelled throughout Europe at our employers’ expense. I always felt I was being paid to educate myself.”
John discovered and wrote about Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon (the subject of a book), Gilbert & George, David Hockney, Anthony Caro, R. B. Kitaj, Bridget Riley, Howard Hodgkin—all of whom made us welcome when John brought me to meet them years later.
While still a British citizen, he was awarded the CBE (commander of the Order of the British Empire), the French Arts et Lettres, the Légion d’Honneur, and heavy crosses from Germany and Austria. We had quite a struggle adorning him with all of these to go to a white-tie dinner at the Royal Academy. I resorted to pins and Scotch tape.
I wrote earlier about John’s appearance in the pages of L’ŒIL, and then in my life. Eventually, our previous attachments unraveled. I was about to move to New York, when John announced he had resigned from The Sunday Times. “I am a writer. I can earn my living anywhere,” he said, and he followed me, jobless, to New York.
Within a week he was invited to lunch by Hilton Kramer and offered a job on The New York Times. John accepted immediately. “Don’t you want to know more about it?” asked Hilton. “No,” answered John.
Whereupon he went right to the Times office and wrote his first article.
His colleague Michael Kimmelman described John arriving at the office just before lunchtime one day, as usual in a finely striped British shirt, highly visible tie, and red socks (he loved color). While his colleagues were struggling to finish their articles, John sat down at his computer, dashed off his piece in his usual elegant prose, just the right length, and left for his lunch. His speed, facility, and wideranging frame of reference never ceased to astonish. He had the rare ability to write a finished draft on the first go-round.
Over here, his subjects in those first years included Willem de Kooning, James Turrell, Gilbert & George, Joseph Beuys, and Anselm Kiefer.
John flourished in his new country. He became a U.S. citizen and was amused to be asked if he could read and write.
He combined impeccable scholarship with a generous curio
sity about young artists and women artists, who had been somewhat neglected in the press until John came along. He was good nature itself, with a somewhat antic sense of humor.
There was still a telephone switchboard at the Times in those days. It was manned (an inappropriate word!) by an intelligent young black woman named Lucy. She wanted to continue her education with night courses, but there was a conflict with her schedule. Permission was not granted for a change of hours, whereupon John wrote to the managing editor that if Lucy was not allowed the time off for her studies, he would take her place at the switchboard, in drag.
Lucy got the change of schedule.
Having a huge reading public in a very large country after what John felt in the end to be the narrow confines and jealousies of writing in Britain was immensely stimulating. The Times editors gave him free rein and even sent him, as an onlooker from Mars, to cover the Republican convention in Texas in 1984.
Over his thirty years writing for the Times (1974–2004), he cast his net wide. Besides covering exhibitions, he tossed off articles on such subjects as the color green and the fact that “wisteria” rhymes with “hysteria.”
After settling in New York, in proper British clubman manner, John joined the Century Association. He drank its signature Silver Bullets and enjoyed the stimulating assortment of its members, so much so that he undertook to write the club’s monthly bulletin. He went on writing it for twenty-five years, from 1981 to 2006.
Incidentally, I was one of the Century’s first woman members.
Just as he had written that “the history of art, if properly set out, is the history of everything,” he managed to harbor the most varied and unexpected bedfellows in these pithy, witty dispatches.
Seurat found his place with Moselle wine, reflections on existentialism, macaroons, and the experience of driving on the Merritt Parkway. Incidentally, in spite of taking some driving lessons from the Smith Driving School in Connecticut, John never really mastered the intricacies of life at the wheel. He acknowledged this himself. When someone asked him who was the most courageous person he ever knew, he answered without hesitation, “My driving instructor.”
John was remarkably prolific. Besides reams written first for the weekly London Sunday Times, then the daily New York Times, he published monographs on Seurat, Georges Braque, Max Ernst, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, and the conductor Erich Kleiber and travel books on Switzerland, London, the palaces of Leningrad, and Paris. He edited the correspondence between Henri Matisse and his son Pierre and translated several texts from the French.
As he wrote of himself, “He published a slew of books that he cannot for the moment remember, much as he loves them all.”
As a critic, John never saw the point of going through life “snarling and spewing,” as he put it. If he didn’t like someone’s work, he simply avoided writing about it. But he could speak his mind. When his fellow Centurion Nick Weber was planning to write about the painter Balthus, John, who knew both the man and the work well, having curated a Balthus exhibition at the Tate Gallery, warned him, “As a liar, he is without equal.”
And as Philippe de Montebello pointed out at John’s memorial at the Century Association, on November 14, 2008, John could sling it out:
When the art historian Albert Elsen wrote a quarrelsome letter to the Times about what I thought was a tempered review by John of Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, when it was shown at the Met, John let him have it. Here is what John wrote: “I am well aware that The Gates of Hell draws a crowd. So would a public hanging, if it were allowed. There is room today for more than one estimate of the old rascal and his overblown activities. For the rest, I see less reason than ever to budge from my point of view, which is that The Gates of Hell is to serious art what a disaster movie is to King Lear.”
The Century has hung John’s portrait, by the painter Marc Klionsky, over the stairway as one gets out of the elevator. It is heartening for me to see what looks like dear John’s welcome: “Come on in and lift a glass.”
To the Met with Alex Katz
One day in 2007, our friend Alex Katz told us he would like to do a double portrait of John and me.
Of course we were delighted, but wondered if we were up to joining Alex’s gallery of insouciant, unlined young people.
We showed up and posed, one after the other, in profile. Alex worked away swiftly, in silence. We were sorry that our moment of glory was over so soon.
Out of discretion, we asked no questions. Then, in June 2010, I learned that courtesy of Alex, we were entering the Metropolitan Museum.
The Met organized a little ceremony. Alas, I was the only one of the duo who could attend. There were hospitable drinks. Alex spoke. I spoke. And this is what I said:
A few years ago, John and I had the good fortune to be invited by Alex and Ada to visit them in Maine.
We went. It was blissful. We felt ourselves becoming Alex Katz personages, radiating well-being, not unlike the characters Alex immortalized in his cocktail parties series; as John described them: “No one has ever looked vicious, nasty, hungover, left out of the party or bored.”
We had the best company. We had our own little house with a view of the lake. There was a rustic bench and table just outside where I could spread out my texts and work on my next Met lecture. John, as usual, was reading.
Alex would disappear for long-distance rambles. We would meet in the evening for congenial drinks and Ada’s delicious meals. We had our first-ever lobster rolls.
Alex and Ada had been coming to Lincolnville, Maine, for many years, where Alex, as he put it, became aware of “the great Maine landscape to be devoured.” They have lived in their present house for summers since 1954.
He became an intrinsic part of the Maine fabric when he extended his interest in Colby College with epic generosity. He gave a large body of his work to the college. The powers that be at Colby were delighted at this opportunity for the students to live with such quality. They built a new museum dedicated to the work of one artist, Alex Katz.
John esteemed Alex Katz, both the work and the man. For John, Alex was the archetypical American. He wrote: “If it turned out that in first youth he had been chosen for the United States pole vault team, we should not be at all surprised. Something of that is there in the work, if we know how to look for it—the concentrated spring of the run-up, the delicate but decisive way with pole, and the well-hidden effort that takes the vaulter over the bar.”
John found Alex a champion verbalizer: “His abrupt and often astonishing phrases come at us one by one, fast and unexpected, the way the little black ball comes at us in the squash court. If we don’t catch them on the bounce, they are gone.”
John wrote, “Alex Katz had looked a great deal at European Old Masters, and has an idiosyncratic ‘take’ on each one of them. (Who but he would have said: ‘Titian was a hired gun, and everything he did was cool. Whatever anyone wanted, he’d do it’?)”
Of Veronese, Alex said: “He’s big and bland—no hot spots, he’s just all over. He makes Rubens seem like he is kidding around.”
As it happens, “bland” is a word sometimes used for Alex Katz’s own paintings by people who do not notice the surgeon’s sharp knife, the ferocious editing, and the ever-present feeling of risk that go into those simple-seeming images. In those images, Katz himself appears quite often as founder-member, along with his wife, Ada, of the repertory company of human beings who turn up year after year. Unfailingly tender with the others, he occasionally pushes his own full-length profile to the very edge of parody.
John once wrote in a review of an Alex Katz exhibition for The New York Times, “If we had to be reincarnated, one of the better ideas would be to come back to life in a painting by Alex Katz.”
We did the next best thing: Alex painted a double portrait of us.
When Alex told us about the project, we were surprised, touched, and pleased, in that order.
And I am happy that Alex has brought John and me together
forever, even if it is only on canvas.
Afterwords
Foreword to John Russell’s Paris
This is my foreword to the enlarged and updated version of my husband John Russell’s Paris. This new version was published by Abradale Press, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1983. (It was originally published in 1960, in London.)
When I first read John Russell’s Paris, I remembered particularly a very small room halfway to the sky in what was then my favorite Left Bank hotel. The rooms on the top floor of the Pont Royal are not as large as the ones lower down, but after trying some of the others, I decided to perch above, where each room had a small balcony and you could step out through the French windows and there in front of you was a clear view across Paris.
You could look down to the right and follow the rue du Bac on its straight reach for the Seine. Eighteenth-century town houses with flat stone facades—not yet sluiced clean on André Malraux’s orders—and elegant doorways lined one side of the street, rising to steep, humped roofs (gray tile, usually) bitten into by mansard windows with projecting triangular hoods. Across the river was the cluttered mount of Montmartre, topped by the ridiculous but endearing white fantasy of the Sacré-Cœur. To the left was the Eiffel Tower and, still farther, the gold-ribbed dome of the Invalides. Paris in my pocket.
This is where I came to live in the late 1940s, when an American magazine sent me to Paris to report on the arts. The Pont Royal was cheap in those days, and it was near to everything I wanted.
I was extraordinarily lucky to be starting a career at that time, when Paris was still a great center of intellectual and artistic energy. Art and life were beginning again after the long dark night of the German occupation. As Cyril Connolly once wrote about French writers, “Intelligence flows through them like a fast river.” The river was indeed flowing fast. The great figures of twentieth-century art were still in full activity. There were new magazines, new books, new art galleries, new plays, new hopes. Even new music was beginning to make its way.
Some of My Lives Page 28
