JOHN RUSSELL (1919–2008)

William Grimes reports in the New York Times that 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, where he was chief art critic from 1982 to 1990, and who helped bring a generation of postwar British artists to international attention, died on Saturday. Russell, an Englishman, joined the New York Times in the mid-1970s after contributing occasional reviews from London.

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. In 1984, editors at the newspaper sent Russell to offer a different perspective on the Republican and Democratic national conventions. 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 beauties of the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. But art, for him, remained a glorious love affair and a lifelong adventure. “When art is made new, we are made new with it,” he wrote in the first volume of “The Meanings of Modern Art.” “We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer.”