The preeminent art critic of Victorian England, John Ruskin elevated a personal and sentimental response to art into a manifesto against modernity

The preeminent art critic of Victorian England, John Ruskin elevated a personal and sentimental response to art into a manifesto against modernity. Like the poet Wordsworth, whom he greatly admired, Ruskin found in nature the stimulus to an untapped repository of emotion. He admired art that reflected organic forms and displayed artisan-style craftsmanship rather than academic technique. Through his multi-volume writings, he turned the tide of public taste towards the Gothic Revival, the Pre-Raphaelites, and other retrograde movements. Much like today’s Prince Charles (who opposes glass-and-steel architecture in favor of cozy, traditional buildings), he wished art to be evocative, yes, but threatening, never.

Ruskin experienced a typically English "awakening of the senses" during a trip to Italy. There the light, the colors, and the architecture were like an ecstatic vision. After he returned home, he took up full-time art criticism. His first entrée into public debate was his defense of J.M.W. Turner, published in 1843. Critics had condemned Turner’s landscapes because of their blurry abstractness. For Ruskin, however, Turner’s vast skies and hazy, sunlit seas epitomized “truth to nature.” The nature they were true to was the luminous, soft-edged, but grandiose version that called to Ruskin’s sentiments.

A second trip to Italy made Ruskin a convert of the Medieval style. He appreciated the naturalism both of the architectural forms (cathedral columns rising like trees) and of the ornamentation (simple representations of animals and people). Moreover, the cathedrals and monasteries of the Medieval world appealed to his morbidly Romantic understanding of religion. He became a proponent of the so-called Gothic Revival that was then sweeping England, and his tome “The Seven Lamps of Architecture” (1848) lent moralistic weight to his views.

Ruskin’s interest in the Gothic made him a natural ally of the Pre-Raphaelites, who were coming under attack in the 1850s for their anti-academic art. This group aimed to paint from nature in a direct, almost naïve manner, while depicting topics of deep moral or religious feeling. Men like Charles Dickens saw the sensuality of their work as disrespectful, but Ruskin championed its simplicity and naturalism. He proclaimed that the Pre-Raphaelites laid "the foundation of a school of art nobler than the world has seen for 300 years."

Each of the movements Ruskin supported represented a rejection of the Industrial Age. At the same time, these movements offered an outlet from the rigidity of Victorian manners, the predominance of bourgeois values, and the sanctimony of official church and state. Ruskin supported art that broke away from the stiff heroism and the bland aesthetics of state-sponsored projects. In this sense, he was modern: he understood the importance of art’s bold separation from the mainstream.

The notion of art as a reaction to social and political situations remains one of Ruskin’s most important legacies to art criticism. In his more utopian moments, he believed that art could suggest a more communal and environmentally sound way of living. He also, in his Romantic focus on the emotions, taught us to interpret art psychologically and use it to explore our innate humanity. In these senses, then, Ruskin the anti-Modernist was in fact a card-carrying member of the modern era.

Other interesting biographies: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]

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