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Reading Ruskin Writing - John Ruskin - Bibliography
Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Dave Hickey
Writer and artist John Ruskin was a towering yet discomfiting figure, exalted in his vision of art as the instrument of a moral society troubled in his private life. A spate of centenary exhibitions demonstrates the enduring authority of that eminent Victorian's achievements.
During the spiritualism craze that swept Victorian London in the 1860s, John Ruskin would occasionally allow himself to be brought along by fashionable ladies to complete the circle at seances. On one such evening, Ruskin and a group of earnest seekers had seated themselves around an elegant table in a darkened Mayfair drawing room. They were trying to access "the other side" when the medium in charge suddenly announced in a quavering voice: "John Ruskin! John Ruskin! Do you wish to speak to your grandmother!?"
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"I do not," Ruskin replied with alacrity, "I wish to speak to Paolo Veronese."
This is my favorite anecdote in Tim Hilton's magisterial, two-volume biography of Ruskin and by far the most intriguing, since Ruskin's remark sounds like a cool, Wildean bon mot, yet we know that it is no such thing. As always, Ruskin is making an argument, but, as ever, he is doing so with mixed feelings. With his impertinent request to speak to Veronese, he is reducing the whole "spiritualist" occasion to absurdity by conjuring up the afterlife as a vast waiting room within which the legions of the dead mill about through all eternity, awaiting calls from home. (One imagines Ruskin's grandmother, in the midst of this crowd, turning around and shouting, "Paolo! Paolo Veronese! Call for you!") No one who knows anything about John Ruskin, however, would suspect him of simply speaking for effect or doubt that, had the medium been in actual contact with Ruskin's grandmother, he would have said anything other than what he did.
The more one knows about John Ruskin, in fact, the more one feels the undertone of petulance in his demand to speak with the Italian painter, because Ruskin was a great critic and a master of English prose, but he was also, always, a sad, excitable boy who made extravagant demands on the world around him. As Hilton puts it, "erudition never calmed him," so, even as Ruskin mocked the fantasies of that beau monde seance, we can be sure that a part of him was hoping against hope that a torrent of demotic Italian might suddenly issue forth from the medium's lips, presenting him with the opportunity to chat with the noble Veronese. It would have been a good chat, too. No one was better prepared for or more desirous of such a conversation than Ruskin, and this ardent preparation and unquenchable desire, I think, are his great gifts to us. Because Ruskin really cared, and he really looked. In the extremity of his caring and looking, he would ultimately evolve into something of a sacred monster--as much addicted to the realm of the visible as he was an adept of its virtues--but the fact remains that no one, before or since, has taken visual art more seriously, or written about it with more passion and eloquence, than John Ruskin.
Today, no critic in the history of art is less read and more subliminally present. It is really to Ruskin that we owe the idea of visual art as the quintessential manifestation of human endeavor, to him that we owe the idea of visual culture as an enduring embodiment of public and private virtue, and to him, for better or worse, that we owe the idea that "the teaching of art ... is the teaching of all things." Prior to Ruskin, critics had revered works of art and architecture as the products of human genius and divine inspiration, as objects of spiritual devotion and national pride, as instruments of emulation and instruction. Ruskin regarded works of art and architecture as the moral and spiritual substance of human history, as the palpable texture of human culture, and upon this rock our whole idea of the art museum (as distinct from the museum of artifacts) has been constructed. So, it was perfectly appropriate that the old Tate Gallery in London reopened last spring as Tate Britain with an exhibition titled "Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites," concurrent with the opening of the new Tate Modern across the Thames [see A.i.A., Sept. '00].
Both of these institutions (and all such institutions, in fact) are the progeny of Ruskin's conviction that seeing clearly, "rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing," is a redeeming activity in itself, one that binds us both to the natural world and to our fellow humans. Even the division of mandates between the "old" Tate Britain and the "new" Tate Modern acknowledges the great cultural schism that, in Ruskin's view, made the refuge of the museum necessary: the rise of industrial modernity whose agencies befouled the air, beclouded the waters and regimented thought, thus making clear sight impossible. Along with Marx and Carlyle, Ruskin is one of the three great contemporary critics of burgeoning industrialism, and he shares with them a clear-eyed view of its brutal depredations and a common delusion that the future of humanity is ineluctably bound up with industrialism's simplifications. Since this has not yet turned out to be the case, we may, perhaps, divine an intimation of Ruskin's renewed currency from the fact that the "old" Tare Gallery (now Tate Britain) feels so much more available to us, in its Georgian intimacy, than the "new" Tate Modern, which, sadly enough, feels like a grandiose period piece--an oppressive, outsized exercise in plangent industrial nostalgia.
