ARTS
Through Ruskin's eyes
Martin Gayford questions whether a critic's views should be the subject of an exhibition The pretension of a great critic,' wrote Walter Sickert kindly of John Ruskin, 'is not like the pretension of the ridiculous modern being called an expert. A great critic does not stand or fall by immunity from error.' That is, in Ruskin's case, just as well, since the great man cer- tainly came some spectacular, belly-flop- ping croppers. On the whole, the exhibition currently at the Tate — Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites (until 28 May) — is made up of art and artists of whom he approved (himself among them). But a show much bigger and at least equally dis tinguished could be made up of stuff Constable, Canaletto, classical architecture, baroque — that he loathed and excoriated.
As Sickert pointed out, however, art crit- icism is not the same kind of activity as tip- ping horses. All critics ignore winners and back losers, and nobody thinks the worse of them for it. Indeed, it seems to be a natural — if not inevitable — result of being huge- ly enthusiastic about some things that one should be correspondingly blind to their opposites. So at least Ruskin bet the ranch on Turner, even if he was fatuously obtuse about Whistler's 'Falling Rocket'.
Nor does it matter that Ruskin was fre- quently absurd, or, as Philip Hensher put it trenchantly in last week's Spectator, that he was 'a complete twit'. 'A certain girlish petulance of style that distinguished Ruskin,' Sickert remarked in the same pas- sage that I quoted earlier, 'is not altogether a defect. It served to irritate and fix atten- tion, where a more evenly judicious writer might have remained unread.' (It's hard not to think of the art critic of the Evening Standard on reading that.) Ruskin wrote enough eloquent and arresting things to inspire Marcel Proust and, more recent- ly, Peter Fuller among many others. It does not matter that he was errat- ic in judgment, absurdly over-vehement and wrote shelves of inconse- quential and barely sane bombast (how many peo- ple alive, I wonder, have read all 39 volumes of the Cook and Wedder- burn edition?).
No, the worrying ques- tion raised by the Tate show is whether a critic's views are exhibitable at all. One can, of course, collect together a lot of work of which the critic approved — which is more or less what has happened here, with the bonus that Ruskin was himself a minor but distin- guished watercolourist and draughtsman. But do these judiciously selected Turners, Millais and Holman-Hunts truly illustrate Ruskin's views of art and life?
Only up to a point, I think. One problem is that critics tend to misunderstand artists — and the more elaborate a theoretical position they adopt, the more they tend to distort. One of the very few other critics around whom one could mount an exhibi- tion such as this was the American Clement Greenberg. Just as Ruskin sup- ported Turner, Greenberg supported Jack- son Pollock. But it is also fairly clear that Greenberg misunderstood Pollock, fitting him into his own work of art, his theory.
Similarly, Ruskin revered and re-fash- ioned Turner, declaring that he 'was sent as a prophet of God to reveal to men the mys- teries of His universe, standing, like the of the Ducal Palace, Venice, 1845 or 1852, by John Ruskin `Exterior great angel of the Apocalypse, clothed with a cloud, and with a rainbow upon his head, and with the sun and stars given into his hand'. That is the essence of Ruskin's unique brand of aesthetic evangelism. Nature was the grandeur and glory of God made visible, and this in turn could be relayed to mankind by the paintings of Turner, or the organic beauties of gothic architecture.
It is a thrilling idea and captures the sense that all of us may have from time to time that art explains the whole world. (`The teaching of Art,' as Ruskin put it, 'is the teaching of all things.') But it is also excessive, putting too much weight on art, and distorting its character. As Ruskin grew older, he lost his faith, coming to believe that the beauties of nature were being obscured by a 'storm cloud', which may in part have been real, caused by parti- cles in the atmosphere, but was also an expression of his own disenchantment and sense of gathering doom.
In his middle years, in front of a Veronese in the Turin Gallery, Ruskin sud- denly realised that there was more to art than watercolours of the Alps and gothic carvings of foliage. There were bodies, for instance, 'beautiful limbs and strong' and `strange, fiery, fantastic energies'. 'One would have thought,' he mused, 'purity gave strength, but it doesn't. A good, stout, self-commanding, magnificent Animality is the make for poets and artists, it seems to me.' (This realisation, however, came just too late to prevent him from destroying most of Turner's erotic works, a few sur- vivors of which are on show.) It is an interesting question what Turner himself thought of being described as the great angel of the Apocalypse. He was grateful, it seems, for the praise (in general no degree of adulation will strike an artist as excessive). But, the painter remarked to a friend on the publica- tion of Modern Painters in 1843, 'He sees more in my pictures than I ever painted!'
The Pre-Raphaelites disagreed with him about Turner and took badly to his instructions as to how they should paint. 'Ros- setti, I fear,' Ruskin wrote, 'even exaggerated his colour because I told him it was too violent; and to this day my love of Turner dims Mr Burne-Jones' pleasure in my praise.'
The fact is that gathering together vari- ous paintings that Ruskin owned, executed or admired (or, in the case of a couple of Whistlers, attacked) does not entirely make clear his beliefs as a critic — because those exist not in Millais's and Turner's paint- ings, but in Ruskin's writings. The show works best in the section on Venice and architecture, because there, through his watercolours, Ruskin can show us what he saw (he was better, anyway, on architec- ture).
This is, then, a brave attempt to exhibit what really can only be read. It is also too big, with far too much in it, especially far too many of Ruskin's own works, which, while fine in their way, pall after one has seen a few dozen. But in at least one way it is a triumph: it is wonderfully designed and lit.
Last week the Chardin exhibition opened at the Royal Academy, full of great paint- ings but hung and lit in a fashion that verges on catastrophic. The Ruskin exhibi- tion at the Tate is the converse, an elusive theme, overloaded with minor works, but presented with absolute brilliance. The let- tering, wall colours and lighting are worth a visit in themselves, and the final, almost completely dark room is itself a work of art.
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