the trouble with ruskin…

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335The Trouble With Ruskin…

Tom Hardy

JADE 22.3 ©NSEAD 2003

Art teaching is a uniquely satisfying job. Morethan anyone else in education, we in Britainremain, for the most part, the authors of our ownsyllabuses in spite of occasional skirmishes withthe Qualifications and Curriculum Authority(QCA) and those who would box us in. Ourmystique remains unassailable. Yet, within theseramparts, is a profession riven by a philosophicalchasm which is peculiar to this country and occa-sionally manifests itself with disagreement,rancour, entrenched opinion and self-righteous-ness. Central to this divide is an unhealthyretrospection which has skewed the debate

about art and art education in Britain for thebetter part of a century and a half. The contentionof this essay is that this malaise can be tracedback to John Ruskin, the polemics of his TwoPaths diatribe and his ‘predilection to admit amoral element into the assessment of artisticvalues [1].’

Abstract


There is but one right way of doing any given thingrequired of an artist; there may be a hundredwrong, deficient or mannered ways, but there isonly one complete and right way. Whenever twoartists are trying to do the same thing with thesame materials, and do it in different ways, one ofthem is wrong [2].

In spite of the sea change brought about by theNational Curriculum in England, seminal works byRod Taylor et al and touchstone publications suchas the Gulbenkian report and more recently theNSEAD Directions manifesto, it is very apparentthat there still lurks in the system a mindset inca-pable of escaping the shackles of the archaicprejudices evident in Ruskin’s earlier writing.Where Ruskin eschewed innovative experimen-tation of his time in favour of the Gothic style,today’s Ruskinites run a mile from anything narra-tive, conceptual or issue based. Where (inModern Painters I) Ruskin foreswore renderingthat was not strictly from direct observation,today’s acolytes rail against contextual study.Where Ruskin saw decadence in the art of histime, echoes of his dismay can be heard in thereaction in some quarters to the postmodernapproach driving the debate today.

I deplore what X has produced but, no doubt, it’spoor enough to get her into art school…[3].

Torchbearers of this retrogressive mindset overthe last century have been many and some,highly regarded. At the same time as ClementGreenberg was, like a master of ceremonies,championing the avant garde and definingmodernism across the Atlantic, in Britain the lateSir Kenneth Clark watched the parade go by. Inthe introduction to his series of essays, Lookingat Pictures,Clark makes the remarkably blinkeredand pompous observation that he lived in an agewhere the ‘standard of painting’ [4] was less thanat any time in history.

No great school ever existed which had not forprimal aim the representation of some natural factas truly as possible [5].

Ruskin’s belief that artists should only ‘draw whatthey see’ [6] was given substance in the workingmethods of the Pre-Raphaelites and the view thatdirect observation is the be all and end all of arteducation remains entrenched in many school artdepartments. He believed that art had becomedecadent since Raphael’s time and admired thePre-Raphaelites for shunning the normal appren-ticeship (which involved studying from antiquity)and harking back to an ethos where direct expe-rience was all.

Pre-Raphaelitism has but one principle, that ofabsolute, uncompromising truth in all that it does,obtained by working everything, down to themost minute detail, from nature, and from natureonly. Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape …is paintedto the last touch, in the open air, from the thingitself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure …is a trueportrait of some living person. Every minuteaccessory is painted in the same manner [7].

I imagine that Lizzie Siddal was not so enamouredof this process on catching a fever while posingin a cold bath for Millais’ Ophelia.

Of course Turner, another of Ruskin’s petcauses, was also famous for the extraordinarylengths to which he went to capture from directexperience the weather in his painting,Snowstorm, Steamboat off A Harbour’s Mouth.Many art teachers today would, I fear, rather lashtheir students to the mast of a wave tossedbarque than suggest secondary source material.

I found it very disappointing that X worked fromphotographs…death to originality[8].

I have also heard teachers impose limited paletteson their students. One teacher of my acquain-tance forbade alizarin crimson in her classroom. Ifound this an incomprehensible foible until I found

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precedent in Ruskin’s rant extolling the ‘virtue’ ofyellow and the ‘viciousness’ indicated by ‘a preva-lence of purple’ [9]. Indeed, Ruskin found crudecolouring in any form ostentatious proclaimingthat ‘there was never a noble or brilliant work ofcolour yet produced whose real power did notdepend on the subduing of its tints rather than theelevation of them [10].’

He was also a Luddite who railed against the‘evil’ of the machine. It was ever thus. In a recentcopy of the Societies A’N’D newsletter, TrevorColluney, secondary sector representative on theNSEAD council, took his lead from a quotationfrom Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing and wenton to state,

My premise in defence of a pure fine art contin-uum rooted in the disciplines of representationaldrawing is that simply the tactile elements are aprerequisite of the fine art experience and notablyabsent in the pixels of the digital [11].

Ruskin’s tireless efforts to raise the standard ofliving of working class craftsmen are rightlyapplauded and commemorated. It is worthnoting that in his later more socially enlightenedyears he was all in favour of issue based paintingwhich highlighted the plight of the victims of theindustrial revolution. However, the cultural dividepromoted by his patrician stance is, I’m sure,partly responsible for the extraordinary educa-tional partition that exists in this country betweenthe fine arts and design technology and theconsequent disparity of esteem between acade-mic and vocational career paths.

Art may be healthily associated with manufacture,and probably in future will always be so; but thestudent must be strenuously warned againstsupposing that they can be one in the samething… Each must be followed separately…[12].

Most disturbingly Ruskin held views on racialpurity which would not have sounded out ofplace at a Nuremberg rally. In an Oxford lecture of

1870 he called on the audience to celebrate the‘undegenerate’ nature of the English race, ‘a racemingled with the best northern blood [13].’Ruskin’s view of art from outside the Judaeo-Christian tradition was also naively patronisingand displayed an astounding ignorance for asupposed man of letters.

[The art of India] has one curious character distin-guishing it from all other art…-it never representsa natural fact.. It either forms its compositions outof meaningless fragments of colour and flowingsof line; or, if it represents any living creature, itrepresents that creature under some distorted andmonstrous form. To all the facts and forms ofnature it wilfully and resolutely opposes itself: itwill not draw a man, but an eight-armed monster;it will not draw a flower, but only a spiral or azigzag. It thus indicates that the people who prac-tise it are cut off from all possible sources ofhealthy knowledge or natural delight; that theyhave wilfully sealed up and put aside the entirevolume of the world, and have got nothing toread, nothing to dwell upon, but that imaginationof the thoughts of their hearts of which we are toldthat it is only ‘evil continually’. Over the wholespectacle of creation they have thrown a veil inwhich there is no rent. For them no star peepsthrough the blanket of the dark-for them neithertheir heavens shine or their mountains rise- forthem the flowers do not blossom- for them thecreatures of the field and forest do not live. Theylie bound in the dungeon of their own corruptionencompassed only by doleful phantoms, or byspectral vacancy [14].

This passage reveals Ruskin’s hand as an exponentof art as a servant of science rather than one whomight revel in the realm of the imagination.Although true to the Victorian vision of the symbi-otic relationship between the two fields, it alsoreveals a voice completely out of step with thecolonial eclecticism of his age; certainly one whoseviews have no place influencing a contemporarycurriculum which celebrates multiculturalism.

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Once again the high moral tone is employed toperpetuate the theme of European culturalsupremacy.

You will find that the art whose end is pleasureonly is pre-eminently the gift of cruel and savagenations, cruel in temper, savage in habits andconception [15].

The ‘Asiatics’ and the ‘Hindoos’ are beneathcontempt in Ruskin’s view but special horror isreserved for the ‘Arabians’ and their dogmaticabstraction. Even the Alhambra is described as‘detestable’ [16]. Ruskin’s present day acolytestake comfort from the denigration of distortionapparent in his writing.

We do not want [the artist’s] mind to be like badlyblown glass, that distorts what we see through it…Nothing can atone for the want of truth, not themost brilliant imagination, the most playful fancy,the most pure feeling; not the most exaltedconception, nor the most comprehensive graspof intellect, can make amends for the want oftruth: first, because falsehood is in itself revoltingand degrading; and secondly, because nature isso immeasurably superior to all that the humanmind can conceive [17].

As can be gathered from this passage, Ruskin’soverarching theme was that all high art is depen-dent ‘on the sculpture or painting of organic form[18]’ (this reverence of all things natural might seemstrange coming from one so dismayed by the sightof his wife’s pudenda). His letter in support of thePre-Raphaelites, after their initial critical drubbing,cared little for the romantic, religious or mythicalnarrative themes. For him the faithful rendering ofthe flora in the bottom quarter of C. A. Collins’Convent Thoughts was all that was of value.

For as a mere botanical study of the water lily andAlisma, as well as of the common lily and severalother garden flowers, this picture would be invalu-able to me [19].

Talk about damning with faint praise. Even artistswho overtly dedicated themselves to studies ofnature were castigated if expressive rendering oridiosyncratic interpretation got in the way ofscientific examination. Constable is a case inpoint. He is dismissed as a ‘third rate painter’ andan ‘amateur blundering his way to a superficialexpression of one or two aspects of commonnature[20].’ Strangely, this dislike of an expressiveapproach to painting, which famously landed himin trouble with his infamous slur on Whistler (andthe subsequent loss of a slander case), did notextend to the work of Turner who was champi-oned by Ruskin throughout his life.

I would no more involve the art schools in thestudy of the history of art than surgical schools inthe study of the history of surgery [21].

In schools where art teachers took their lead fromRuskin, this myopia has had a disastrous effectover the century since his death. While the worldturned and the twentieth century became anunprecedented era for experimentation anddiscovery in all fields; while art movementssegued into each other at an extraordinary rateand advances were accelerated by momentousworld events and through the Hegelian paradigmof thesis, antithesis and synthesis, schools’ artdepartments turned away from the outside worldand students were encouraged to produce workthat related to nothing except itself.

We don’t put posters up, it might confuse thestudents [22].

It was only when I entered art school in the early1970s that my eyes were opened to the kind ofcontemporary practice that is common knowledgein most schools today. It was only here that Ilearned to express myself and not feel subordinateto the subject matter. It’s not as though the idea ofdeveloping one’s oeuvre through the synthesis ofinfluences was a new concept to Ruskin. SirJoshua Reynolds had said a century earlier that,

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Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than anew combination of those images which havebeen previously gathered and deposited in thememory. Nothing can be made of nothing; hewho has laid up no materials can produce nocombinations [23].

This approach would have been anathema toRuskin who said that an artist ‘has only to askhimself whether he cares for anything excepthimself; so far as he does, he will make a goodpicture; so far as he thinks of himself, a vile one[24].’ In some quarters a century of modernismhas failed to eradicate such a view.

There is perhaps, no phenomenon connectedwith the history of the first half of the nineteenthcentury, which will become a subject of morecurious investigation in after ages, than the coin-cident development of the Critical faculty, andextinction of the Arts of Design [25].

So opposed was Ruskin to the influence ofanything that interfered with the pure observa-tional recording of nature that he suggested thatstudents were ‘withdrawn from teaching alto-gether [26].’ His take on art sullied by the stylisticsignature of the artist was that it has ‘an influenceof the most fatal kind on brain and heart [27]’ andresults in ‘the destruction of both intellectualpower and moral principle [28].’ I was once dumb-founded to be told by an art teacher of someexperience that she considered the keeping ofcritical study sketchbooks as ‘evil’. Having readRuskin at some length I now know where suchexaggerated, florid and morally spuriouslanguage comes from.

X actually thinks too much for her own good. Sheneeds to be reminded to be truthful rather thanturn out something which looks good [29].

This mindset resulted in what became identified(first by Efland and later by Rose), and rightlyderided, as ‘School art’ which, according to Rod

Taylor ‘all too often turns in on itself and is taughtin a vacuum [30];’ the perennial cut peppers andsoggy trainers painted for decades withoutrecourse to the kind of understanding of tech-nique into which critical and contextual studiesoffers induction today.

There is a curious notion that I have come acrossrecently which is that you mustn’t show too muchart, past or present, because otherwise they mightattempt to copy it and that would crush their orig-inality. But if you want to teach creative writing youwill encourage extensive reading without any fearthat by reading too much Beckett they are goingto write another Godot.. Most artists learn by copy-ing masters and making pastiches [31].

In his lecture entitled, A Joy Forever,Ruskin woulddo us all out of a job with his contention thatartists are found, not made.

You can’t manufacture him any more than you canmanufacture gold… A certain quantity of art-intel-lect is born annually in every nation, greater or lessaccording to the nature and cultivation of thenation, or race of men; but a perfectly fixed quan-tity annually, not increasable by one grain. You maylose it or you may gather it; you may let it lie loosein the ravine, and buried in the sands, or you maymake kings thrones of it and overlay temple gateswith it, as you choose: but the best you can dowith it is always merely sifting, melting, hammer-ing, purifying-never creating [32].

ConclusionIf we want students to gain some sort of personalinsight, whether spiritual or temporal, through artmaking then we must teach in the truest senserather than instruct. The mere regurgitation of ourown prejudices and methodology can only act asa constraint to insightful learning. Ruskin wouldhave had all students study from Titian and Titianalone. Too many departments have their own‘Titian’ and ‘house styles’ in some quarters seemto be displayed with pride. Worryingly, much in

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the way of imposed styles was evident in exem-plar material for the most recent post 16 examspecifications. One department head of myacquaintance told me recently that her studentswere very much ‘in the ‘Camden Town’ mould,’little realising that what inspired her in her youthis not necessarily what will fire students of today.Ruskin was only interested in ‘the impact of thepicture upon his own sensibility [33].’ We mustnot fall into the same trap ourselves. A broaderoverview of possibilities is required by today’sstudents. Cathy de Monchaux, in true,unashamed, postmodern fashion, calls such aneclectic approach ‘cultural plundering in anattempt to evoke a culture of [one’s] own [34].’

Of course one must concede that, over his life,Ruskin had much that was positive to contributeto art criticism. He was very young when at hismost outrageous, mellowed with age and contra-dicted many of his most outrageous stances ashe was confronted with a more Darwinian viewof nature. The problem with modern dayRuskinites is that they are like the worst sort ofreligious zealot. Only those elements of the ‘scrip-tures’ which support a narrow and small-mindedstance are seized upon, all else is handily ignored.They feel that those who are not with them areagainst them and are somehow lacking in moralfibre. Arguments naturally become polarised.

I do not, however, place myself at the oppositepole. I do not argue against tight illustrative draw-ing skills, naturalistic rendition, direct observationor any of the other predilections expressed overhis lifetime. Each may be entirely suited to indi-vidual students as a catalyst for their own voice.Neither do I argue for an ‘anything goes’ method-ology. I argue for an all inclusive approach toteaching where art teachers, led by their pupils’needs, embrace all approaches, including thoseof Ruskin, tailor their advice according to the indi-vidual pupil’s needs and revel in increasing, yearon year, their own the breadth of vision while cele-brating the difference of each year’s cohort andtheir concerns. Only by embracing the Hegelianmodel as method can students hope to synthe-

sise their own style. They can only do this withteachers who can provide objective guidancerather than insistence on a strict set of handeddown rubrics. The imposition of a house stylesmacks of cowardice. The fear of making thatleap into an area where teaching cannot bedefined; where brainstorming, dynamic relation-ship with students, seat of the pants decisionmaking and the risk of failure is all. It is the onlyapproach, however, that brings freshness andnew excitement to each teaching year. It is theonly method whereby the teacher can grow andlearn as well as the students.

Ruskin defined his ‘Two Paths’ as ‘the rightway’ and the ‘wrong’ way [35]. Let us in schoolsfinally acknowledge the postmodern zeitgeist;that there are infinite right ways.

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References1. Ruskin, J. (1859) The Two Paths, London: Allen and Unwin.

2. Ibid. p. 60.

3. Overheard at a parents’ evening 2000.

4. Clark, K. (1960) Looking at Pictures, London:John Murray p.15.

5. Ruskin op. cit. p. 19.

6. Ruskin quoted in Evans, J. (Ed) (1959) The Lamp of Beauty, London: Phaidon p.48.

7. Ibid. p.64.

8. From a subject report 2000.

9. Ruskin quoted in Evans, J. op. cit. p.29.

10. Ibid. p.38.

11. Colluney, T. (2001) A’N’D NewsletterSummer 2001.

12. Ruskin, J. op. cit. p.56.

13. Paxman, J. (1989) The English, London:Penguin p.66.

14. Ruskin, J. op. cit. pp. 11-12.

15. Ibid p.73.

16. Ibid p.79.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid. p.7.


20. Ruskin op. cit.


22. An art teacher puts a positive gloss on theavoidance of contextual study 2000.

23. Marland, M. and Rogers, R. (Eds) (2002)Managing the Arts in the Curriculum, London:Heinemann p.9.


25. Ibid. p.40.

26. Ruskin op. cit. p.67.

27. Ibid. p.16.

28. Ibid..

29. From a subject report 2000.

30. Taylor, R. (1986) Educating For Art, London:Longman p. 90.

31. Rose, L (1981) What’s Wrong With SchoolArt? Arts Council Education Bulletin 5.


33. Evans, J. (1959) The Lamp of Beauty,London: Phaidon p.12.

34. De Monchaux, C. quoted by Ash, A. inAddison, N. and Burgess, L. (Eds) (2000)Learning to Teach Art and Design in theSecondary School, London: Routledge/Falmer)p.216.

35. Ruskin op. cit. p.60.

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the trouble with ruskin…

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