Did the aesthetes get Ruskin wrong?

The aesthetic movement rejected John Ruskin’s high-minded approach to art – but there was real radicalism behind his moralising What are you rebelling against? If you had asked this of the founders of the aesthetic movement, whose art is surveyed from this week at the V&A and whose ideas I describe here , they might have said “what Victorian stuffiness have you got?” Or perhaps they would have answered just one word: “Ruskin.” When Walter Pater wrote his aesthetic manifesto, The Renaissance – which was published in 1873, though its essays had been on the lecture circuit for years – he was, in fact, launching a not-so-veiled critique of the art critic and social campaigner John Ruskin . When Pater claims art exists to give pleasure, he is defying the ethical patriarch Ruskin, for whom art exists to redeem the world. Even by simply championing the Renaissance , Pater was begging to differ with Ruskin. In his book The Stones of Venice , Ruskin – equally at home with art and architecture – celebrates the buildings of medieval Venice. In this 19th-century literary and intellectual masterpiece, Ruskin goes into raptures over the facade of the Doge’s Palace. He argues that gothic design is superb because it rejoices in nature, and because it is the “honest” work of true craftsmen who worked anonymously and cared more for the glory of God than the glory of artistic fame. For Ruskin, gothic Venice stood for an organic, communal way of life, and the beauty of its buildings reflects a wholesome social order. All his social reform projects, which included getting Oxford students to build a road as an exercise in honest toil, can be understood through The Stones of Venice. The Renaissance, Ruskin claims, was a decay, a decline, from the true golden age of Venice. In place of the natural complexity of all things gothic, it imposed a chilly classical order. It led to what he saw as the heartless architecture of modern classical buildings such as the Bank of England . Where medieval art was communal, Renaissance art was selfish – the plaything of plutocrats. Pater’s vision of the Renaissance is a conscious repudiation of Ruskin’s. He embraces the very amorality that made Ruskin shudder and argues the aesthetic mission is not to change society but yourself. This debate was not confined to Britain. The Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt also rejects Ruskin in his classic book The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, asking outright what was so special about the primitive world of the Christian middle ages. In art, however, the currents are not so clear. Although the aesthetic movement rejected Ruskin’s moralism, artists such as William Morris , the Arthurian Marxist, shared his belief that art can change the social world. For Ruskin, too, was rejecting ugliness, above all attacking the ugliness of industrial capitalism. Where Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray was a snob, Ruskin wanted to improve working-class lives. Modern art owes a lot to Pater, but the welfare state and the socialist tradition owe quite a bit to Ruskin. In the end, what is so moving about all these passionate Victorians is the scale of their thinking, the radicalism of their ambitions, the intensity of their engagement with art and society. As the achievements of the Labour movement are thrown away by an amnesiac age, we have a lot to learn from their ideals. Art Jonathan Jones guardian.co.uk

Posted by on March 29, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.