Article: 'Picasso was a fraud' - discuss This very passionate but partial and uneven history of art will please traditionalists, says John McEwen Art: A New History by Paul Johnson Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pounds 25, 777 pp pounds 23 ( pounds 2.25 p&p) 0870 155 7222

READERS OF Paul Johnson's journalism will know what to expect from this book, because he often lets rip about art. The bee that particularly gets in his bonnet is "modern art". He favours Ruskin's criterion of excellence: that art should be "the perfect mirror of nature", and he likes a picture to tell an edifying story. This makes for lean pickings when he deals with the last 150 years - especially as he prefers entirely to overlook (with the exception of Walt Disney) the pictorial art unique to our epoch - moving pictures.

Johnson owes his opinions about art and his confidence in airing them to his father, who was an artist and head of an art school: "My father did not want me to become a ...

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