John Russell, 89, art critic, journalist for a half-century

John Russell with his wife, Rosamond Bernier. (Bill Cunningham/file 1988)

NEW YORK - John Russell, who contributed elegant, erudite art criticism for more than a half-century to The Sunday Times of London and The New York Times and helped bring a generation of postwar British artists to international attention, died Saturday. He was 89 and lived in Manhattan.

His wife, Rosamond Bernier, said he died at a hospice in the Bronx.

Mr. Russell, an Englishman, joined The New York Times in the mid-1970s after contributing occasional reviews from London. As the paper's chief art critic from 1982 to 1990, he won a devoted readership for his literate style, his capacity for passionate appreciation, and the breadth of his interests. "Reading Russell," a collection of his journalism published in 1989, included essays on Pushkin, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Beatrix Potter, the many meanings of luggage, and the beauty of the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut.

Most of his prodigious output was devoted to art, notably his monographs on Seurat, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Max Ernst, and the multivolume series "The Meanings of Modern Art." But he also produced travel books on Switzerland, London, and Paris, a biography of the conductor Erich Kleiber, and several highly regarded translations of modern French novelists.

"Working for The New York Times, I found myself writing about art, as had already been agreed," he wrote in the book's introduction. "But I also found myself writing about the centenary of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the bicentenary of the Battle of Lexington, the special properties of the color green, and the fact that wisteria rhymes with hysteria."

In 1984, editors at the newspaper sent Mr. Russell to offer a different perspective on the Republican and Democratic national conventions.

Effortless, high-volume production was his hallmark. Strolling into the old Times building on West 43d Street in Manhattan, attired in a boldly checked jacket and violently contrasting red socks, he would say a few hellos to colleagues sweating over deadlines, lightly apply his fingers to the keyboard and rise, perhaps an hour later, having composed a feature-length article with not a word out of place.

By temperament an old-fashioned man of letters, Mr. Russell was an appreciator who liked to share his enthusiasms; as a consequence some readers and fellow critics found him too genteel.

"I do not see my role as primarily punitive," he wrote in "Reading Russell." "There are artists whose work I dread to see yet again, dance-dramas that in my view have set back the American psyche several hundred years, composers whose names drive me from the concert hall, authors whose books I shall never willingly reopen. But it has never seemed to me much of an ambition to go though life snarling and spewing."

John Russell was born in 1919 in Fleet, near London. He was reared by his grandparents in Strawberry Hill, a London suburb, and attended St. Paul's School in London. There, he recalled, he impressed his headmaster, who, befuddled by the term "Surrealism," asked a classroom of students if anyone could explain it. The future art critic raised his hand, went off to write an essay and, after handing it in, was told the next day, "Russell, you can make a living doing this."

During the war Mr. Russell worked for the Naval Intelligence division of the Admiralty. He also began writing for Peter Quennell's Cornhill Magazine and Cyril Connolly's Horizon, encouraged by the eccentric American man of letters Logan Pearsall Smith, whose sharp eye for rising talent had already spotted the art historian Kenneth Clark and the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Mr. Russell, he wrote to a friend, "is a most accomplished journalist, but I think will turn out a fine critic as well."

In 1950 Mr. Russell was pressed into service as art critic for The Sunday Times after the incumbent was summarily fired for criticizing an exhibition at the Royal Academy.

"When I first began writing, my aims as a critic were simple," he told The Art Newspaper in 1999. "I wanted to persuade people to go and see things that I myself liked."

The art historian John Richardson said that Mr. Russell "did a huge amount for English art at the time," adding, "He helped English art climb out of its pre-1939 provincialism and put it on the map."

At his best Mr. Russell exhibited sinew and vigor in his appraisals. The art that mattered to him mattered in a highly personal way, and there was something almost tactile in the way he traced the contours of an artist like Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud.

"Bacon wrenched, reversed, abbreviated, jellified and generally reinvented the human image," he wrote in a characteristic passage in "Francis Bacon," a monograph first published in 1971.