艾菲·格蕾

John Ruskin: Mike Leigh and Emma Thompson have got him all wrong

He was a critic who could out-paint most painters, a great educator who reinvented how we see art. Why has John Ruskin been reduced to a prude and a fop in two new films?

Philip Hoare
Tuesday 7 October 2014 21.00 AEST

On behalf of John Ruskin, I would like to sue Mike Leigh for defamation of character. In Mr Turner, Leigh’s astonishing and sweepingly beautiful new film, the painter’s greatest champion has been traduced. Ruskin, played by Joshua McGuire, is a simpering Blackadderish caricature of an art intellectual: a lisping, red-headed, salon fop.

I almost felt physically sick when I saw him onscreen. Not just because of the extraordinary disconnect between Leigh and Timothy Spall’s brilliant realisation of Turner and the complete misrepresentation of Ruskin, but because this injustice is one that has been going on for more than a century. For Ruskin celebrated Turner above all other artists. While others decried his work, he wrote that his paintings “move and mingle among the pale stars, and rise up into the brightness of the illimitable heaven, whose soft, and blue eye gazes down into the deep waters of the sea for ever”. This posthumous portrait is unconscionable.

I’d barely recovered from the shock when along comes Emma Thompson’s equally wonderful but equally misleading Effie Gray. Two Ruskins in one season? Neither comes near to the truth. In Thompson’s film, the critic is centre-stage. His portrayal, by Greg Wise, is nearer the mark, at least visually. But Wise plays Ruskin as an austere ascetic, whose passions are reserved for the stones of Venice and the paint of the pre-Raphaelites. He cannot countenance the physicality of his young bride Euphemia Gray, as she confronts him on their wedding night with her post-pubescent body. The film tacitly endorses the notion that Ruskin was rendered impotent by the sight of female pubic hair, being accustomed only to the frozen marble bodies of classical sculpture.

I don’t believe that for a second. In his recent book, Marriage of Inconvenience, Robert Brownell claims that Effie was something of an adventurer, encouraged by her importunate family to marry Ruskin to forestall her father’s bankruptcy. Far from being disgusted with her physicality, Ruskin – a rigorous Christian and idealist – felt anxious and subconsciously betrayed by the realisation that his love for Effie was a one-sided affair. For him, there simply could be no sexual consummation without the moral exchange of love. Anything else would have been dishonest. And when Effie sued for annulment on grounds of his impotency, Ruskin was too gentlemanly to argue.

Nor is this the only calumny Ruskin has suffered. Despite having been the prophet of his age, the best art critic this country has ever produced, the patron of the pre-Raphaelites and of Turner, his legacy has been reduced to one of a bearded reactionary who, in 1878, accused James Whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” when confronted with the American painter’s avant-garde nocturnes.

But turn that quote around for a minute. Wasn’t it an accurate, kinetic description of an action painting before its time? When the attention-seeking Whistler sued for libel, the action landed Ruskin back in court. Whistler won, but was awarded risible damages of one farthing. He went on to accrue yet more fame on the back of the publicity. Ruskin suffered one of the nervous breakdowns that would contribute to his eventual insanity.

Why can’t we cope with Ruskin’s genius? He was an astonishing figure, as Tim Hilton’s magisterial 2002 biography of him proves. He was a great artist in his own right: his watercolours of Swiss mountains and nature studies speak of an extraordinary brilliance, made more passionate by their creator’s intent. Ruskin put art into practice. He was a utopian who devised the Guild of St George, a celebration of workmanship that underpinned the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris. He was, above all, a great educator. In his bravura lectures in Oxford, he used giant blown-up watercolours of nature studies thrown on to screens by limelight, more akin to Andy Warhol’s Flowers. These events became performances in the same way that Joseph Beuys’ blackboard lectures would a century later.

The Stones of Venice, Ruskin’s bestselling book, styled an entire century. Indeed, he blamed himself for the endless gothic terraces that coursed through Victorian suburbs. Modern Painters, his volumes of criticism, reinvented the way we saw art. Their rebooting of critical theory is still cited by such discerning critics as Michael Bracewell, acclaimed author of The Space Between: Selected Writings on Art. “Ruskin’s passionate championing of particular artists paved the way for such great later critics as David Sylvester and Robert Hughes,” Bracewell says. “Such erudition, clarity and richly opinionated rigour is sorely missed in contemporary art criticism.”

Ruskin was a visionary, more the progeny of William Blake than a member of the Victorian establishment. He foresaw climate change in The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century – both as a physical threat, in industrial pollution, and a metaphysical one, as a “plague cloud made of dead men’s’ souls”. He despised capitalism and influenced the early Labour party more than Marx, a legacy embodied in the Oxford college founded in his name. His work inspired a new generation in the 20th century: ordinary people of my father’s generation, men such as Philip Ashurst, a Coram hospital foundling and later shop steward, who was introduced to radicalism by Ruskin’s writings.

Although he disdained new technologies such as the train, Ruskin did not reject other advances. He advocated the new medium of photography, and in his monthly newsletter to the working man, Fors Clavigera (Fate’s Hammer), he created what was in effect a 19th-century blog. Sitting at his desk with a pile of newspaper cuttings by his side, he worked through the day’s stories to surreal effect, creating new juxtapositions of imagery that augur the work of the modernists and even, perhaps, William Burroughs’ cut-ups. Even now, this writing seems bizarre and shocking. Debating the nature of the soul, he mused: “I don’t believe any of you would like to live in a room with a murdered man in the cupboard, however well-preserved chemically; even with a sunflower growing out at the top of a head.”

This was a man who defied the expectations of his age. Like his pupil Oscar Wilde – who willingly dirtied his pale hands in Ruskin’s campaign to mend roads in Oxford as a demonstration of the dignity of labour – he was his own invention. One key detail that both Leigh and Thompson get right is the ever-present cornflower blue necktie Ruskin wore, knowing that it highlighted his blue eyes, along with a brown-velvet-collared greatcoat. They were as much his trademarks as Warhol’s wig, or Beuys’s homburg hat.

Indeed, he continues to inspire more thoughtful contemporary artists, such as Tania Kovats, Jeremy Millar and John Kippin, while the Ruskin School of Art has recently recreated his Elements of Drawing as a digital resource. Paul Bonaventura, curator at the school, acknowledges that to some Ruskin’s writing seems “illogical, self-contradictory and just plain silly”. But, says Bonaventura, that’s missing the point: “One goes to Ruskin for the power of seeing. The sustained, inquiring scrutiny of visual experience, the incisive glance and vivid insight; these are the things for which he is rightly celebrated.”

Some might regard this as rearguard action in the face of conceptual art. But Turner prize-listed artist George Shaw – whose intensely painted scenes of inner-city decay might be the product of a modern-day Ruskin, although not his shaven head and Ben Sherman shirts – is not taking this lying down. “Ruskin-bashing has become something of a bloodsport for the nobs and yobs of the contemporary culture machine,” he says. “It’s because he’s fucked up and commentators are obsessed with frailty – it’s their version of the Jeremy Kyle show and it allows them to put the boot in.”

Shaw has been a fan of Ruskin since childhood. “I admired his seriousness and saw him as something out of the Old Testament, forging ahead and pointing the way madly into the new world. He was fur coat and knickers because he could draw better than the artists he championed. I’d like to see today’s blabbermouths try that. Isn’t he a Victorian Warhol, on the edge and in the centre at all times? And like Warhol, he saw his own philosophy and his belief not within himself but in the world around him.” Barely drawing breath, Shaw cites a painful image of Ruskin “as a wounded animal searching for cover in a re-created world”.

On the shores of Coniston Water, perched like a Wagnerian fantasy over the gun-metal Cumbrian lake, stands the physical embodiment of Ruskin’s outsiderdom: Brantwood House. Its Ludwig-like atmosphere is enhanced by the gilded steam barge by which one sails across to Ruskin’s retreat, ascending the banks to the manse. Once inside, the full force of Ruskin’s personality hits you. Everything in its interior – from the cabinets of shells and minerals to the paintings on the walls and the tapestries embroidered with his motto: “There is no wealth but life” – is an expression of this ultimate collector, a man who sought to catalogue our experience of the world and the way art attempts to portray it. Wonderingly, you wander upstairs and into the sanctum of his bedchamber. The room is lit by an oriel window, forcing the lake light into the room, as if it might conjure up a hologram of its tenant.

If it did, it would be a disturbing sight, since this is where Ruskin went mad. It happened one night, as devils danced on his bedpost: he looked out to the lake and finally lost contact with the real world. This last crisis came at the end of another traumatic love affair. He had fallen in love with Rose La Touche when she was barely 10 years old, and he in his 40s. He had pursued her, as she turned of age, to her parents’ horror. Barred from her company, he would chase her carriage through London, at one point confronting her in the Royal Academy and handing her a forbidden love letter. Just as the affair with Effie Gray had begun in hope and ended in disaster, this last relationship concluded even more finally. Rose, psychiatrically disturbed and suffering from anaemia, died at the age of 24. A grieving Ruskin sought the services of mediums to conjure up her spirit; as he began to lose his senses, he believed they had been married, with Joan of Arc as their bridesmaid.

Art could not retrieve Ruskin’s sanity, but it remained his consolation. Under Coniston’s Turnerian skies, he would lie in the bottom of his boat and watch the clouds. He was a burnt-out wreck, a shuffling figure with an ever wilder beard, his pale blue eyes fading – a great evangelist struck dumb. Yet he remained the greatest cultural commentator of his age, because he stood apart from it, and saw it with clarity. A man of such ferocious spirit should not be remembered as a reactionary prude. Far from caricature, Ruskin demands, now more than ever, our absolute praise.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/07/john-ruskin-emma-thompson-mike-leigh-film-art

期待这部电影的原因有两个，一是因为Emma Thompson再次担当编剧，二是因为对John Ruskin, Effie Gray, John Everett Millais这三个人的关系比较感兴趣。

18岁的苏格兰少女Effie Gray与家族旧识，事业正如日中天的艺术评论家John Ruskin结为夫妻。离开父母的温暖羽翼，苏格兰坦荡开阔的山川高地，Effie跟随夫君来到车水马龙的伦敦。哪想新婚燕尔，丈夫却因厌恶年轻妻子的裸体而摔门逃走。自此之后，她再没有得到一丝夫妻间应有的亲昵与温柔。John Ruskin, 在外界眼里是令人尊敬崇拜的学者，而关起门来却是冷漠，偏执，只懂得埋头工作，对父母惟命是从的“情感缺陷患者”。对爱情心灰意冷，绝望至极的Effie遇到了贵人Lady Eastlake和当时还贫困潦倒，将Ruskin视为伯乐的Millais. 在前者的帮助下，Effie以“未行夫妻之实”为名起诉离婚，并最终成为了Millais的妻子，为其养育了八个孩子。

挑选这样的题材来做电影改编，Emma Thompson 着实很大胆。虽然一直有人提倡将艺术家和其人格分开来对待，但在感情层面上这几乎是不可能的。估计John Ruskin的忠实拥趸在看过这部电影之后心中偶像的形象多少会打些折扣，甚至还会有人出头为其抱不平吧。在没看这部电影之前，听过“Ruskin 的老婆后来跟Millais跑了”的传说，当时的想法是，贵圈太乱，暂不做评论。可是看过Emma Thompson的改编，对Effie滋生深深同情，对Millais这位相貌出众，对待女性温和体贴的有志青年，更是青睐有加。

先来说Effie的悲剧。她唯一的错就是嫁给了一个天才。天才的爱情总是很自我，像梵高，毕加索。Ruskin也一样，他爱上的是含苞待放的少女Effie，他把她女神化了，一旦这个女神有凡人的任何欲望，他都像梦想破灭般无法接受。而Effie却是一个脚踏实地的女子，她想要过人间烟火的生活，经营两个人的家，生儿育女，洗洗涮涮，缝缝补补。夫妻二人，生活在不同的世界。就像Ruskin那位保护欲过剩的母亲所说：You married no ordinary man, the best you can help, is to leave him alone. 嫁给一个才情过高的人，注定要以孤独为代价。然而，还有更糟的，Effie遇到了现代剧中标准的刁蛮婆婆。从第一次进Ruskin家的大门，她应该就有预感，自己不属于这儿，或者说，并不受欢迎。在这里必须为Julie Waters的演技点个赞。简单两个小细节，就把Mrs Ruskin的性格展露无遗。比如John Ruskin带着新媳妇刚进家门，她马上抱着儿子嘘寒问暖，根本都没正眼瞧儿媳妇。再比如吃晚饭的时候，一脸不情愿的把礼物送给儿媳，到老还不忘添一句“反正我死后他们也会把这东西给你的。”遇到这样control freak的婆婆，稚嫩的Effie当然无法招架，唯有更加消沉抑郁。

所幸，她的救星及时出现了。Emma Thompson给自己挑了个讨巧的角色。这位Lady Eastlake放到近代绝对是女权主义者。对于Effie的尴尬处境，她在吃惊的同时，更感诧异。无论对方是如何名望鼎盛的艺术权威，虐待妻子，就无法容忍。在她的劝导和疏通之下，Effie 通过律师最终解决了离婚问题。这位Lady Eastlake就像Emma Thompson之前饰演的神奇保姆McPhee，权杖一挥，便为Effie扫清了障碍，重获自由之身。只不过，看着Emma额头和脸上的皱纹，让人无限怀念起《理智与情感》中她与休 格兰特眼波传情的青葱岁月。

再来说三角关系中，另外关键的一环：Millais米莱。不得不承认，浓眉长睫粉唇的Tom Sturridge为“第三者”米莱加了不少分。不过，暂且撇下颜值不谈，有哪一个女子不希望嫁给一个体贴的人呢？从道德上来讲，Ruskin是自己的资助者，是必须要尊敬的长辈。但从感情上来说，Millais无法强迫自己为一个冷漠自私的人工作，更无法眼看着一个好端端的女子硬被折磨得心灰意冷，麻木不仁。在陪同Ruskin夫妇回苏格兰高地度假期间，Millais每天与Effie相对，他看到了她深藏在心底的开朗，她的善良，她的才华，也看到了她的苦难。但迫于伦常，两人相爱，却无法相守。影片中几次穿插Millais的画，其中那副溺水的Ophelia 奥菲利亚意在映射心如死灰的Effie。一次采风途中跌倒，鼻子撞破流血之后的Millais对Effie说过，我的鼻子不能破，找人当模特太贵了，我总是拿自己当模特，鼻子破了就麻烦了。与Effie在一起之后，Millais以妻子当模特画了无数副画。而Effie也圆了自己的愿望，为Millais生了八个孩子。而为了供养妻儿，Millais后来也不得不疯狂作画赚钱，以至于有人说他的画尺寸越来越小，质量也越来越差。但是，对比一下，不惜为五斗米折腰也要享受夫妻天伦之乐的Millais和宁肯禁欲也要维护纯洁幻想的Ruskin，哪个更幸福呢？怕是如人饮水，冷暖自知吧。

P.S.这个月末关于英国另外一个泰斗级画家William Turner特纳的电影也即将上映。看来今年是画家传记电影大年~

A perfectly adequate movie which demystifies a Victorian scandal, where the plot drives towards its inevitable conclusion, showing how the mores of upper-class stiff Victorianism are ultimately as culpable in John Ruskin's frigidity towards his young wife. Ruskin is a nuanced and conflicted character: both pitiable but also possessing a cruel streak.