Flinging a pot of paint in the public's face: On the life of John Ruskin
John Ruskin
Art criticism is a career that generally leads to prompt obscurity–it's the rare critic indeed who is remembered after his or her death, and usually only then for passing misguided judgment on art later deemed hugely significant.
John Ruskin is the rare exception–an art critic remembered for his contributions to interpretations of art, his promotion of artists still considered masters and his overall influence on the culture. Ruskin, born on this day in 1819, shaped the course of art in 19th-century Britain more than any other single figure.
And even better, for our entertainment, he embroiled himself in several scandals along the way.
Ruskin was one of those wealthy, well-connected Englishmen of his era who spent his childhood reading Shakespeare and touring Europe with his indulgent parents. He began writing art criticism, not out of any need or desire for a career but simply to express his thoughts. These thoughts centered largely on the role of nature in art.
European art at that period worshipped at the altar of the Renaissance. Michelangelo and Raphael had achieved the pinnacle of art and everyone else was just mucking about in their wake. That meant when nature and the Renaissance conflicted, the Renaissance won. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (on whom more later) once got in trouble in art school for painting grass a vibrant green, which, as you may have noticed, it usually is. He was sternly reprimanded, since in Old Master works grass was a muddy shade of brown. This was actually the consequence of truly filthy paintings and the oxidation of green paint, but the fact remained: if Raphael's grass was brown, so much be yours.
Artists were beginning to rebel against this sort of rote acceptance of Academic truisms, and Ruskin supported them wholeheartedly. He celebrated the work of these rebels and argued that they were actually better than the Old Masters because they captured the truth in nature instead of following pictorial convention. The job of the artist, Ruskin argued, was to observe the reality of nature and recreate the truth of that reality, ignoring all the conventions of composition and color theory.
Ruskin's case in point was the Englishman J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), who over the years transformed from a fairly convention landscape painter to a stylistic innovator who captured atmosphere like no one else.
J.M.W. Turner, "Juliet and her Nurse," 1836
After an 1836 exhibition at the Royal Academy, one Reverend John Eagles attacked Turner and particularly the above work by Turner as "a composition as from different parts of Venice, thrown higgledy-piggledy together, streaked blue and pink and thrown into a flour tub." An outraged Ruskin rushed to Turner's defense, although at the request of the reticent Turner, his response to Eagles didn't appear in print until after Ruskin's death. However, the incident prompted Ruskin to begin writing about art in general and Turner in particular, and before long he was recognized as a significant critical voice.
As well as championing Turner, Ruskin also became a prominent supporter of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (P.R.B.) and its followers. Founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, the group sought to cast off the conventions of art that they believed dated from the Renaissance, hence the time of Raphael, hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite." (They didn't actually have a beef with Raphael, just what his name at that time stood for: stodgy, narrow-minded, formulaic art.)
Ruskin began defending the Pre-Raphaelites in 1851, lauding their attention to nature. The P.R.B. had a dedication to realism unmatched by others of their era, sometimes going to extreme ends. Take for example this work by Millais:
John Everett Millais, "Ophelia," 1852
Millais hired the model Elizabeth Siddal (who later married Rossetti) to pose for the work, but to capture the details of the half-submerged maiden he insisted she lie fully dressed for hours in a full bathtub. In chilly London, this was an unpleasant chore, so Millais lit a lamp and placed it under the tub to keep the water warm. On one occasion, however, Millais didn't notice the lamp had gone out, and Siddal lay for several hours in increasingly cold water. She ended up coming down with a nasty cold that turned into pneumonia.
Another Millais is this lovely work, which I've seen many times at the Kimbell:
Whistler painted the work at a Thames-side pleasure garden known for its magnificent fireworks displays, and it is intended to show rockets exploding at night over the dark waters–although the title "Nocturne in Black and Gold" was intended to emphasize that the point of the work was not a story about rockets or a lesson about fireworks or anything narrative or edifying in nature. Just a musical nocturne has no meaning outside of itself, neither does the painting.
Well. Ruskin may have rejected Academic cliche, but he still believed that art should have a purpose. He wrote a review of the work in which he sniped, "[I] never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."
Whistler, one might say, lost it. He had disgraceful temper at the best of times, an alarming tendency to denounce people in letters to The Times and a passion for lawsuits, so he sued Ruskin for libel. The charge was ridiculous, but neither Ruskin nor Whistler was willing to back down, so in a hugely publicized trial, the critic and the artist battled in court over the nature of art and the meaning of beauty. Whistler counted on winning the case–he was up to his eyeballs in debt–but grew increasingly frustrated as one artist friend after another begged off testifying; Ruskin, on the other hand, was able to call on old Pre-Raphaelite friends to argue on his side of the case. In the end, the jury found Ruskin guilty of libel but only awarded Whistler one farthing (a quarter of a penny) in damages. Whistler went bankrupt soon after.
Ruskin's scope was enormous. He helped shape the Arts and Crafts movement, became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, and wrote extensively about social equality and reform. He influenced writers such as George Eliot and Marcel Proust. He even invented the term "pathetic fallacy." His last years were tormented by mental illness, and he died, incurably insane, in 1900, but honored and esteemed by many. His reputation declined in the early 20th century, but in recent years his significance has been recognized and his writing rediscovered.
Happy Birthday, John Ruskin. As a humble writer of the arts myself, I hope I can be half as insightful.
