John Ruskin: Self-Portrait,1874 Lucerne,1863 A Capital in the Upper Arcade of the Fondaco dei Turchi, Venice, c. 1850 Dawn at Neuchatel, 1866 The Grand Canal, Venice, from Ca'Bernardo to Ca'Grimani, c. 1875 Guttanen: Passage of Gruntel, 1835

john ruskin at salander-o'reilly by John Mendelsohn John Ruskin (1819-1900), the English art critic, wrote books that were enormously influential during his lifetime, including Seven Lamps of Architecture and the multi-volume studies Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice. His influence was particularly strong in Victorian England, but through Walter Pater and other writers (including his celebrated opponents), he helped shape the debate over the nature of esthetic experience in modern art. Throughout his life Ruskin made numerous drawings and watercolors, both in conjunction with his writing and as independent works. Thirty-three examples of this rarely seen work were on view during September at Salander-O'Reilly. Ranging from architectural studies to urban and landscape travel sketches, the pieces on view reveal Ruskin as a sensitive and highly skilled draughtsman. Beginning with View of Coblentz, drawn when he was 14, Ruskin prized literal transcription, fine detail and exactitude of form. The illustrative quality of his drawings had its origin both in their role as scholarly documentation and in Ruskin's devotion to the "old cult of nature," in the words of Paul Walton's excellent catalogue essay. This faith in the visible world comes through in everything from grand mountain landscapes, to architectural ornaments, to minute studies of feathers and blossoms. Especially in the early, classical phase of his work, elegantly detailed passages are set against stretches of blank paper, indicating sky or water. This gambit flatters what is closely observed, like a jewel against velvet. It connects Ruskin's work with, in Walton's words, "the tradition of the picturesque." Especially favored are "the sweeping expanse of sky around his favorite mountains, vertiginous recession along a Venetian canal or plunging down a twisting street." For all its drama, this unpeopled world is seen in ways that strictly conform with the then-current protocols of picture-making. For Ruskin, "the cult of old nature" is inextricably bound with the cult of beauty. To be esthetically sensitive before nature was to receive, in his words, "the impression of the mystery which, in our total ignorance, we call beauty." It is this preoccupation with beauty that, beginning with Pater, is transformed into the modernist devotion to pure esthetic experience. Ruskin, especially in the second phase of his visual work, is concerned with the play of light on surfaces, and with the rhythmic, curvilinear abstraction of natural form. A rather stirring example is his Tintoretto-influenced Thunder Clouds, Turin, with its huge clouds leaping like waves above the miniature landscape below. In many of his watercolors and drawings, color is reduced to pale washes or limited to monochromes. Ruskin seems reluctant to compromise the clarity of his observations with the expressiveness of color. At times, as in Lucerne, a watery view of the city, color while still understated, is used with great warmth and charm. There are, however, a number of examples of Ruskin fully under the sway of Turner, his hero in Modern Painters. In these vivid watercolors, sky and water is fired by the rising or setting sun. Ruskin allows yellow, magenta and cobalt blue in delicate washes to describe the scene and to become themselves the subject of our contemplation. Intoxicated with beauty, some are nearly over the top with picturesque intensity. The final stage of Ruskin's work, interrupted by intervals of mental illness, takes on a sketchier, more atmospheric cast. These works focus primarily on Alpine and Venetian themes, as well as Gothic architecture. In Ruskin's visual work are intimations of the "intensity of esthetic feeling" that, in Walton's estimation, was one of his unique contributions to art criticism. This reliance upon one's deeply felt response was formative not only to the esthetic movement of the 1870's, but to the modern notion of what constitutes the experience of art. "John Ruskin: Watercolors and Drawings" at Salander-O'Reilly, 20 E. 79th Street, New York, N.Y., Sept. 5-28, 1996. JOHN MENDELSOHN is a New York artist who occasionally writes on art.