Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney

This is one of historian Paul Johnson’s trilogy on Intellectuals, Creators, and Heroes. It is interesting that, among the 12 intellectuals, 30 heroes, and 17 creators profiled, none belongs to the category of engineer/scientist. If you can overcome this bias, you will learn something from each book, iincluding the one under review, “Creators”.As someone trained and worked in science and engineering, I was surprised to to find no scientist/engineers among the “Creators”. The author himself stated, in the last Chapter, that he had no satisfactory answer to why he had included nothing about the sciences. Nevertheless, I did learn from reading the book. Here are a few examples:- Chaucer added more than 1,000 words to the English language.- Mozart, when he was nineteen, wrote all five of his violin concertos of extraordinary quality in a single summer.- The painters Albrecht Durer and Ramon Casas, both of whom I did not know anything about before I read the book. Durer was an influential painter in German Renaissance. Casas was the painter in Barcelona who made Picasso realize that he would not get to the top in the field of conventional painting. This led Picasso to create his own style. He replaced “fine art – paintings composed 10 percent of novelty and 90 percent of skill – with fashion art: images where the proportions were reversed.”- The number of creations of Picasso exceeded 30,000. He was a multi-millionaire but, from the portrait in Johnson's book, a most despicable human being.- The clock tower which houses the bell known as the "Big Ben" in London, was completed to the design of A. W. N. Pugin, who was principally remembered for his pioneering role in the Gothic Revival style of architecture.- The work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass.- Hokusai Katsushika, a contemporary of Joseph William Turner, not only painted Japanese landscape but also portrayed Japanese life in the first half of the nineteen century with dazzling graphic skill. He is the only Asian profiled in Johnson’s three books.There is a chapter on fashion designers Cristobal Balenciaga and Christian Dior. The reader needs to be deeply interested in lady’s fashions to be able to get through the 22 pages of this chapter.In chapter 4, Johnson stated categorically that “Shakespeare is the most creative personality in human history.” The reader may well ask: What about Beethoven, Michelangelo, Edison? It seems rather pointless to single out one individual among different types of human activities.In chapter 1, the author begins with what to me is a very profound statement:“One of the most important forms of creativity is to make people laugh. We live in a vale of tears, which begins with the crying of a baby and does not become any less doleful as we age. Humor, which lifts our spirits for a spell, is one of the most valuable of human solaces.”It is therefore surprising that there is no comedian profiled in the book. This is compensated somewhat by the following quote in the chapter on T S Eliot:“There is nothing quite so stimulating as a strong dry martini cocktail.” – T S Eliot

Kurt Vonnegut encouraged anyone dabbling in the act of creativity: “To practice art, no matter how well or badly, is to make your soul grow. So do it.” Accordingly, the art of creation is a noble act of finding a meaning of life in which man searches for his freedom of will and will to meaning by translating the principles of sentiments and reason that are universal in humankind to various forms of creativity, ranging from writing and painting to music and dance, and to even gardening and making people laugh. Such act of making something out of nothing requires Herculean feats of courage and spirit that serves as a sovereign remedy for the existential ills of everyday life, however ordinary or exceptional. Paul Johnson’s Creators, which looks into the bright side of clever, talented individuals contrary to his previously published Intellectuals in which he recounted the hypocrisy of historically famous intellectuals, presents his thesis: that we all have creative traits in us is our divine prerogative of humanity; and to produce works of the arts involves prodigies of courage as well as talent that is sublimated to the aesthetic expression of intellect and beauty, such as to be in the cases of luminous artists whose oeuvres marked their standing in literature, painting, and music.Each chapter on each different artist draws up on the artist’s unyielding courage and creativity, which is a quintessential element of creative originality of outstanding quality. Johnson admits that an artist tends to be egotistical due to his extravagant faculty of creativity into which the artist pours out everything that is in him. An unusual degree of courage that is akin to physical courage of a soldier on the front is demanded of the artist unless he bows to the final enemy of creativity, such as age or increasing debility. Take Beethoven’s struggling against his deafness by using a toothbrush in his mouth to feel the tonality of each piano key while composing his immortal symphonies. Great impressionist painter Toulouse-Lautrec’s inherited disabilities and grotesque deformities as a result of hereditary inbreeding could not stop him from producing beautiful paintings with his triumphant willpower and courage until his death at the age of thirty-seven. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote incessantly despite his chronic illness due to his weak and unreliable lungs that eventually killed him in his early forties. Emily Dickinson wrote poetry without encouragement and public response, while David Hume failed to receive public recognition upon publishing Human Understanding. So did Anthony Trollope of The Macdermots of Bally Cloran that was neither reviewed nor sold of a single copy.The life of an artist is full of peculiar aspects and strange satisfaction often spurred on by personal weaknesses, such as in the cases of Jane Austen and George Eliot whose real name was Mary Ann Evans. Both of the women led lonely and lugubrious lives without experiencing felicities of love and adulations by men despite their brilliant spirits and ingenious minds. Surely beauty was in their time and still is only skin-deep, but their plainlisness left them in spinsterhood and forced themselves to spur loneliness on writing that was the solace in which they could fall in love with the men they desired. In effect, the reader will learn that it was the courage to express their spirits and feminine aspiration to be loved that fed on their creativity. Also, self-awareness, careful nursing, and restricting of the talents and subject matters, rather than audacious rampant criticism of society in general in undisciplined tempest of words, were added to the wings of their creative spirits.In light of the above, art is not genius but a work born of love and labor of its creator whose Herculean degree of courage and desire of expressing imaginations and intellect perform a painful but delightful feat of ingeniousness. Johnson avows that rational and professional methods of using skills, experiences, creative industriousness, and self-confidence are the ingredients to create the work of art. Also, he affirms the reader that there is no need to make a pact with the devil or perform a magical ceremony to invoke a creative spirit because inspiration comes from within. It is how to find it and reveal it like a hidden diamond in its most radiant luminance. Written in common words devoid of academic locutions and once again his usual consummate narrative skills, this is Johnson’s another scintillating book to be acquainted with the human face of geniuses whose works have produced pleasure in our senses and minds.

Tengo varios libros de este autor , lo recomiendo mucho