Indeed, in an expanded and deliberate pursuit of the topic of genius and intelligence, one unifying theme that loosely threads a grand paginal course through Creators, emerging here and there during discussions of Turner, Shakespeare, Eliot, Picasso, Chaucer… and just to throw the reader off course for a spell, the tidbit of the off-kiltered titularity that is “Victor Hugo: The Genius Without a Brain.” Johnson’s riveting writing makes this funhouse psychological and historical look at an artist of "high creative gifts but low intelligence" read like an ad for one of those old 1950’s Horror movies: “A century and a quarter after his death, he is still a loose cannon, crashing about the deck. Why is this?” For a double feature I could envision a film based on Balzac's quote, so seemingly seized upon with glee by Johnson: "Hugo has the skull of a madman..."

If an exploratory scrutiny of Hugo was Johnson’s most inquisitive and inconclusive, even to the extent of ending with a query of a comparison with Dickens (“Which is the greater creative artist? Impossible to judge.”), the penultimate chapter in this most topsy-turvy of tomes may be his most didactic and determined. It’s also part and parcel of one of the more formalized chapters throughout Creators devoted to a pairing-up of artists, of which the most striking is struck in “Picasso and Walt Disney: Room for Nature in a Modern World?” It’s structured for a comparison and contrast between two 20th century masters and set to signal a direction for 21st century art, Picasso representing the old-world manner of the artist’s studio, while Disney was of the New World of Hollywood and new technologies.

Not that things stayed that way. Disney, a product of the arts and crafts movement and of art nouveau, came to dislike the artificial side of the Hollywood “picture palace” industry. Hollywood was art deco, a different visual influence, and Disney's instinct was also to get back to nature, to “reinforce, transform, and reanimate nature, to surrealize it,” especially in contrast to Picasso -- that champion of non-representational art — with his desire to get away from nature.

But that latter longing may be the least of the sins of Picasso, who was also known for his cavalier amorality and boorish debauchery. And if Johnson does not hold back in his non-artistic contempt for Picasso and the negative influence he’s had on painting, it is because the author has come around to believe — and to believe that it’s his mission to belabor — the point that “evil and creative genius can exist side by side in the same person. It is rare indeed for the evil side of a creator to be so all-pervasive as it was in Picasso, who seems to have been without redeeming qualities of any kind.”