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John Ruskin on one of his daily walks near Coniston in the Lake District, circa 1885.
John Ruskin on one of his daily walks near Coniston in the Lake District, circa 1885. Photograph: T, A & J Green/Getty Images
John Ruskin on one of his daily walks near Coniston in the Lake District, circa 1885. Photograph: T, A & J Green/Getty Images

Ruskin the radical: why the Victorian thinker is back with a vengeance

This article is more than 5 years old

He believed life should be beautiful, inequality was an outrage and that capitalism leads to aesthetic degradation. No wonder the quintessential Victorian speaks so powerfully to our times

It is a familiar tableau of urban Britain. Labourers dig a tunnel, a porter delivers goods, a man swigs beer, there are young children and dogs, police and aristocrats look on; there is dirt and beauty and life all thrown together. Ford Madox Brown’s pre-Raphaelite painting Work (c 1852-63) has been reworked many times. In the latest effort, the comic artist Hunt Emerson gives it a knockabout cartoon feel, but with a distinctly current edge: the cast is multicultural, the tools more hi-tech and there are allusions to social dysfunction, the gig economy and the housing crisis.

Emerson’s update also alludes to the social critiques of Brown’s contemporary and friend, John Ruskin: a writer, artist, social critic, polymath and aesthete. Emerson’s illustration is the central image of A World of ... Work, an exhibition at Brantwood, Ruskin’s former home in Cumbria. It also figures in How to Work, a comic made in collaboration with writer Kevin Jackson, and one of three in their recent collection , Bloke’s Progress, a playful re-examining of Ruskin’s ideas through the eyes of a modern everyman, Darren Bloke.

Ruskin was born in London in 1819 to a wealthy Scottish wine-merchant father and a strict Evangelical mother. Having graduated from Oxford University in 1842, he came to public prominence with his defence of JMW Turner, published in the first volume of his acclaimed treatise on art, Modern Painters. He gained fame as a public intellectual – writing, teaching and delivering lectures on art, architecture and other subjects, all in his eccentric style. Ruskin’s art criticism and advocacy was a particular inspiration to the pre-Raphaelites.

In the 1860s, he turned his attention to politics and society against the backdrop of the inequality and rampant poverty many suffered in the industrial capitalist age. He railed against the exploitation of the poor and the self-interest of the wealthy. Ruskin proposed reform, and carried out practical projects – such as getting his students to work on widening roads in Oxford – which provided a hands-on social parable for his beliefs.

While much of his thinking was considered radical, and could be considered a precursor to socialism, he adhered to an older conservative tradition that believed in hierarchy and the established authority; it also suggested that those who naturally held power had a duty to serve and protect the poor. By the mid-20th century, some of his ideas had filtered into the perceived wisdom of the British welfare state.

“In some ways, Ruskin seems like the most Victorian of the Victorians, so not applicable to our lives now,” says David Russell, associate professor of English at Corpus Christi College Oxford. “People get hung up on how eccentric some of his ideas were, but the core of his claims remains relevant and important. That is to say: our aesthetic experience, our experience of beauty in ordinary life, must be central to thinking about any good life and society. It’s not just decoration or luxury for the few. If you are taught how to see the world properly through an understanding of aesthetics, then you’ll see society properly.”

Ruskin, who died in Brantwood in 1900, has been cited as an influence on William Morris and Gandhi, the arts and craft movement, ecological thinking and the foundations of the welfare state.

His most searing social critique is contained in his 1860-62 essays, Unto This Last, in which he takes a scythe to Victorian capitalist values: “the art of establishing maximum inequality in our own favour … the rash and absurd assumption that such inequalities are necessarily advantageous, lies at the root of most of the popular fallacies on the subject of political economy”.

In his conclusion, Ruskin states baldly: “Luxury is indeed possible in the future – innocent and exquisite; luxury for all, and by the help of all; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruellest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfolded.”

Restorers work on Giotto’s fresco of Saint Rufus, in Assisi, Italy. John Ruskin’s analysis of the artist’s work helped redefine art criticism in the Victorian era. Photograph: Alessia Pierdomenico/Reuters

A central line of thinking for Ruskin, cutting across his art criticism and political writing, is that a society founded on structures that are embroiled in heartlessness – in brutal treatment of people and the environment around them – is indifferent to beauty. As we see the growth of vast inequalities today, such billionaire tech firms employing precarious workers with diminished rights and pervasive environmental ruin, it is not hard to see parallels in our current moment.

This year, David Zwirner Books published the long out-of-print Giotto and His Works in Padua, Ruskin’s consideration of the Italian painter’s 12th-century fresco cycle at the Arena Chapel in northern Italy. Even here, when contemplating the beauty of early Renaissance art, Ruskin writes: “As long as it can bear to see misery and squalor in its streets, it can neither invent nor accept human beauty in its pictures.” As Robert Hewison adds in an introduction to the new edition: “Is this 1860, or 2018?”

Whether Ruskin remains an influence on the left, however, is another matter. “There is an important echo in contemporary radicalism,” says Jeremy Gilbert, a member of the founding national committee of Momentum and a professor of cultural and political theory at the University of East London. “Ruskin is not really much of a presence in contemporary left culture, but there are definitely resonances, especially in the popularisation of post-work politics.”

Ruskin’s criticism of the alienating nature of work and the aesthetic impoverishment of industrial capitalism chimes with current arguments about inequality and the despoiling of the environment. But, for Gilbert, “it’s never clear with Ruskin what the strategy was meant to be politically to resolve the problem.”

Where Ruskin’s continuing political influence is concerned, Gilbert says he remains central to an ethical-socialist radical tradition, a belief-system embraced by Tony Benn and even Jeremy Corbyn, whose “own vision of the world is a moral one: it’s not really about class struggles, so much as it is about wanting a moral and ethical society”. While Ruskin is not widely cited by the left today, this concept is something he espoused.

Gilbert suggests that the strongest link between Ruskin and contemporary discourse lies in the possibility that automation might be a liberation – allowing people to lead more creative and and aesthetically fulfilled lives because they don’t have to do boring work anymore.

In Unto This Last, Ruskin offers, in his elaborate style, exhortations: “The equality of wages, then, being the first object towards which we have to discover the directest available road, the second is … that of maintaining constant numbers of workmen in employment.”

There are also provocations: “Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to property of the poor.”

And there are dramatic paeans to what might be possible. “There is no wealth but life. Life including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration,” he writes. “That country is richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.”

Emma Thompson and Dakota Fanning in Effie Gray, 2011. The film examines the relationship between John Ruskin and his teenage bride. Photograph: Joel Ryan/AP/Press Association Images

When Ruskin did publish his social criticism, there was a backlash from his audience: the wealthy, educated elite. The essays that became Unto This Last were originally published in Cornhill magazine; but he had to end the series because his editor, William Thackeray, along with much of the readership, were horrified, Russell explains. The economic establishment were contemptuous and said he had no practical business insight to draw on.

“They thought Ruskin would be providing a guide to art and he provided them with a condemnation of society. But on the same sort of aesthetic principles, [he was] trying to change people’s values, which was what his art criticism was already doing but they didn’t see the continuity so much as were annoyed by his assumptions and how confusing they found it.”

The World of Work exhibition in Brantwood, which runs until this weekend, considers how artists have responded to human labour, and is underpinned by Ruskin’s writing on the laissez-faire capitalism of the Victorian industrial age. Alongside Emerson’s update of Work, there is a very broad interpretation: George Mason’s rural idyll The Harvest Moon, John Cassidy’s sculpture The Ship Canal Digger and AS Finlayson’s paintings of an aero-engine production line offer optimistic and noble visions of work. Set against these are stark visions in paintings like Peasant Woman with a Pitchfork by James Pelham and Graham Sutherland’s Press for Making Shells.

The exhibition runs into the present day, with images including Jonathan Ive’s design for the iPhone.

The David Zwirner Books edition of Ruskin’s writing about Giotto is part of the gallery and publisher’s Ekphrasis series – reissuing largely out-of-print writing on visual arts by the likes of Vernon Lee, Marcel Proust, Alice Michel and Paul Gauguin. “When I was in university, I don’t think I was ever taught Ruskin,” says Lucas Zwirner, the managing editor of the imprint. “In his lifetime he was a celebrity. And then he was totally out of fashion. There’s such richness there that I think there are cycles of engagement – maybe we’re entering a place where people want a different kind of writing about visual art.”

John Ruskin’s former home, Brantwood, in Coniston, Lake Disctrict. Photograph: Philip Hoare

Zwirner says he was introduced to the Victorian due to his somewhat unlikely influence on the punk and counter-culture infused drawings of Raymond Pettibon – former Tate director Nicholas Serota also encouraged him to publish the Ruskin work. Ruskin is referenced directly in the title of The Ethics of Dust, a series by the artist, architect and preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos. Here installations are created out of minute dirt, dust and matter that has accumulated over years at old buildings, including Westminster and Doge’s Palace in Venice.

“It’s a really important part of the radical tradition to be able to say that one of the things wrong with capitalism in general is that it produces a certain kind of aesthetic degradation,” says Gilbert. “And that does speak to something that really intuitively, people recognise – not just aesthetes, not just intellectuals. Most people have a sense of the way in which corporate culture cannot produce beauty. It can appropriate it and sell access to it, but it can’t produce it.”

There is a banner in the Brantwood exhibition that simply reads: “To Do Good Work”. It is by the Sheffield-based art partnership Poly-Technic, which uses words as polemic in its art, riffing on trade union banners and other types of sloganeering, as well as creating collective community projects that take messages out in public.

“That was something Ruskin was doing,” says Howard Hull, the director of the Ruskin Foundation and Brantwood Trust. “He was making actions and finding words or concepts which could be taken out and used.“Famously, the first bit of writing that Ruskin ever did was three lines long: a little sermon that his mother got him to preach in the home on a Sunday, in which he stood up and proclaimed: ‘People be good’.”

  • A World of ... Work is at Brantwood in Cumbria until Sunday 2 September. Giotto and his Works in Padua by John Ruskin is published by David Zwirner Books.

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