John Russell, journalist, art reviewer, art historian, exhibition organiser, writer and man of letters, wrote more than 20 books and exhibition catalogues and contributed essays to several more. He organised five major exhibitions and wrote many thousands of articles and reviews for newspapers and magazines, covering literature, music, drama, architecture, travel and history, besides his main topic, art — art of whatever sort or period.

He became a regular contributor to The Sunday Times in 1945 (he was recommended by Ian Fleming) embarking in 1949 on a 25-year stint as its art critic, until 1974 — when he launched with renewed vigour on a career in America (where there were still art heroes) as an art critic for The New York Times; becoming the newspaper’s chief art critic in 1982, and critic emeritus in 1990. From 1957 he also served as the London representative for the American magazines Art News and Art in America.

In another age Russell might well have been a diplomat who wrote elegant belles lettres in his abundant spare time; diplomacy was always his strong point publicly, if not always in his private life. As it was, he was writing in an era when Europe was re-learning its past and re-establishing a culture of the present — with Britain needing to catch up as much as any. It was a time for general mental expansion and this suited Russell, who was more interested in the mind behind the art than in evaluating the image. He was an art critic who seldom criticised. For him, writing about art was writing about life in its entirety.

It was perhaps his stutter that — as with some other notable writers — spurred him to that extra touch of elegant fluency, the choice phrase displayed, the magisterial (one of his favourite words) diction of the thinking man and patrician elder statesman of art. A reviewer of his survey of modern art published in Britain in 1981 commented that there were for Russell “no failures, no frauds, no heretics”. He would now be designated “Establishment”. Rather, he was a civilised and erudite man, at ease in at least three European literatures and most of the arts, addressing himself to the reader as to another equally civilised but less well-informed person, and assuming that a consensus of professional admiration indicated that there was something in an artist worth admiring and elucidating. He would pass diplomatically over controversy or the dark recesses; one of his fellow writers christened him “Our Man in Bohemia”.

He was not incapable of being acerbic or waspish — for instance in his assessment of the painter Christopher Wood, whom he could see only as an immoral careerist. He was tentative at first in his assessments of young contemporary artists; but sent a fiercely supportive letter from New York at the time of the hullaballoo over the Tate Gallery’s purchase of Carl Andre’s bricks. He championed early in their careers a number of artists who have since entered the modern canon, including David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Howard Hodgkin and Antony Caro.

On arrival in New York in 1974 the zest and tempo of his writing accelerated; he felt more inquisitive, more alert, and vastly more energetic and was encouraged by his newspaper to cover the widest field. The level of encouragement and support, he said, was a hundred times higher than he had previously received.

John Russell was born in 1919 in Fleet, Hampshire, and educated at St Paul’s School and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he edited Cherwell magazine. On coming down from university, he joined the staff of the Tate Gallery in June 1940 as an unpaid assistant. Two days later the building was seriously damaged by enemy bombing. Russell was evacuated with a number of art historical treasures to Worcestershire. Call-up diverted him into the Ministry of Information from 1941 to 1943, and then into the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty from 1943 to 1946. However, the war did not hinder an early start to his writing career: by 23 he had already published for the famous Batsford series of evocative British themes, a nostalgic and richly ecclesiological Shakespeare’s Country in the emotive and perilous year of 1942, and a lightly argued British Portrait Painters in 1945.

It was during these years that he began to write art and drama reviews, becoming a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and to the magazines Cornhill, Horizon (then edited by Cyril Connolly) and The Listener.

When he took up regular art reviewing, he turned his pen, as a balance to the miniaturisation of press comment, to longer pieces. His stylish book on the writer Logan Pearsall Smith appeared in 1950; in the same year, an unenthusiastic travel book on Switzerland; in 1956, a respectful account of the conductor Erich Kleiber; and in 1960 he wrote romantically of Paris (and informatively of its architecture) — a book that survived to be enlarged and reprinted in 1983.

Then in 1965 Russell reverted to writing substantially on the visual arts, with his perceptive book on Seurat (the best received of all his books, and which remains in print). Then in the same year came the first “coffee table” luxury tome on the contemporary art scene in Britain, Private View, in collaboration with the gallery director Bryan Robertson and with Lord Snowdon’s photographs excellently printed. With his 80 artists written up as a lengthy addendum to its glimpses of the personalities of the art scene and their activities, this has become a document of the times, typically ignoring all the art scene except the West End oriented; it would be described nowadays as “seriously fashionable”.

This was a busy period for Russell, for he also organised the Arts Council exhibitions of Modigliani in 1964, Rouault in 1966, Balthus in 1968 (to the distaste of some) and Pop Art — in collaboration with his friend Suzi Gablik — in 1969; this was accompanied by their misleadingly titled book Pop Art Redefined. He continued to write monographs at the same time, at the rate of one or more a year: a eulogistic Max Ernst in 1967, a serviceable Henry Moore in 1968, an extended introduction to Ben Nicholson in 1969, The World of Matisse in 1970, a respectful Francis Bacon in 1971, and in the same year a book on Vuillard that accompanied the exhibition of that artist, which Russell organised and which was seen in Toronto, Chicago and San Francisco.

In 1970 Russell was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Book of the Month Club to produce a survey of modern art, which was published in 1974-75 in 12 monthly parts by mail subscription only. This was reworked and published in book form in 1981 as The Meanings of Modern Art; it aimed to be more a history of modern ideas than of modern art alone, in keeping with its author’s belief that “the history of art, if properly set out, is the history of everything”. The book was praised as the best of its kind by Sir Kenneth Clark, though sniped at by combative critics of the day. The College Art Association of America gave Russell the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism, citing his enormous erudition and subtle, sprightly prose. In 1989 an anthology of excerpts from his writings was published under the title Reading Russell.