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Reading Ruskin Writing - John Ruskin - Bibliography
Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Dave Hickey
"Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites," as organized by Robert Hewison with Ian Warrell and Stephen Wildman, was as thoughtful and scholarly in its conception and selection as anyone could wish. It showed us a great deal about Ruskin at his best and most powerful, at the apogee of his generosity and modesty. We could see in the assembled works why Ruskin's intellectual contemporaries in Britain found him "wild" in his loathing of perfection and order, why Americans like Henry James and Charles Eliot Norton found him "weak" in his revulsion for the "great world" and his retreat into the local and the domestic. In a century obsessed with the grandeur of "great ideas," Ruskin celebrated the fugitive and the factual. In a century devoted to the rigor of intellectual abstractions, to the logical mechanics of global imperialism, industrial expansion and utopian social theory, Ruskin revered the intricate, irregular precision of tiny things, distant prospects and transient atmospheres, clearly seen.
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By the inclusion of a large selection of Ruskin's drawings to mediate between the works of J.M.W. Turner and those of the Pre-Raphaelites, Hewison's exhibition managed to demonstrate the paradigm shift that divides Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites while clarifying the nature of Ruskin's enthusiasm for each. Turner's paintings portray a world that is virtually all atmosphere. Their subject is always the tragic fate of empire (and of all human endeavor) when pitted against the sublimity and grandeur of nature. The Pre-Raphaelites, on the other hand, painted sharply focused pictures with virtually no atmosphere at all. The narratives of their pictures concern themselves with the consolations of nature and the "naturalness" of romantic relationships proscribed by traditional society. Turner laments the fate of the old world; the Pre-Raphaelites dramatize the difficulties of the new. What they share is the passion for veracity that we see in Ruskin's fragmentary drawings, which are bereft of any ideology beyond that passion. Thus, for all their acuity, Ruskin's drawings are more critic's art than artist's art, embodying as they do Ruskin's own critical edict that we should see what is before our eyes as clearly and as innocently as possible before passing judgment upon it.
At the Tate Britain exhibition, unfortunately, we could only share Ruskin's passion for veracity while enduring the outrageous, Liberace-Victorian mendacity of the installation design, which rigorously embodied everything that Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites were not about. According to the logic of "New" Historicism, it would seem, works by these artists are damned to hang forever amid the accoutrements of vacuous imperial grandiosity their works set out so urgently to contravene. Or, perhaps, there was another agenda in place. Perhaps the idea was to make the freshness of Ruskin and his contemporaries look dated, so the dated modernity of the new Tate might seem a little fresher. In either case, the ploy probably worked better on the locals than it did on visiting Americans, who could hardly fail to note the eerie resonance between the London art world of the 1850s and '60s and the art world in Manhattan a century later.
