RUSKIN John.
Turner.
The Contemporary Workshop
Regular price
€10,50
| N° d'inventaire | 26254 |
| Format | 11.5 x 16 |
| Détails | 380 p., some black and white illustrations, paperback. |
| Publication | 2023 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782850350948 |
Here are published the most representative parts of this masterpiece of English Romanticism, in which Turner appears in turn as a scrupulous observer of nature, a poet and a prophet of the decadence of the industrial world.
Reading Ruskin remains the royal road to accessing Turner's painting.
Ruskin's method indeed gives pride of place to sensitivity, because to show Turner's superiority as a champion of nature is first to note the consonance between his paintings and the writer's vision, as expressed in the pages of the journal and in the descriptive texts that constituted a large part of Ruskin's reputation. It is only then that scientific references come to serve as a guarantee for this communion of sensibilities. Conversely, after having served as a model for the draughtsman, Turner serves as a standard for the spectator; after having translated his emotions, he channels them and offers a reference to his gaze: of a Turner painting one would say that "it is nature," and of a natural spectacle that "it is a Turner." The virtue of Ruskin's gaze, its acuity, is the reflection of the virtue of Turner's hand, its exactitude. The critic and the artist concelebrate the office of the visible.
Modern painters thus obey a need for permanent totalization—for ever richer knowledge, for an experience never completed—which makes Ruskin a "commentator on the infinite." And this need takes a double form: teaching and preaching. At this point in his career, Ruskin finds in his book a platform and a pulpit. Subsequently, he will truly take to the podium to give the lectures that will be the chapters of his future books.
It is perhaps as an apologist for the gaze that Ruskin has the most to say to us when he speaks of Turner. To write about art is first of all to do justice to the gaze: "to see clearly is at once poetry, prophecy, religion."
Reading Ruskin remains the royal road to accessing Turner's painting.
Ruskin's method indeed gives pride of place to sensitivity, because to show Turner's superiority as a champion of nature is first to note the consonance between his paintings and the writer's vision, as expressed in the pages of the journal and in the descriptive texts that constituted a large part of Ruskin's reputation. It is only then that scientific references come to serve as a guarantee for this communion of sensibilities. Conversely, after having served as a model for the draughtsman, Turner serves as a standard for the spectator; after having translated his emotions, he channels them and offers a reference to his gaze: of a Turner painting one would say that "it is nature," and of a natural spectacle that "it is a Turner." The virtue of Ruskin's gaze, its acuity, is the reflection of the virtue of Turner's hand, its exactitude. The critic and the artist concelebrate the office of the visible.
Modern painters thus obey a need for permanent totalization—for ever richer knowledge, for an experience never completed—which makes Ruskin a "commentator on the infinite." And this need takes a double form: teaching and preaching. At this point in his career, Ruskin finds in his book a platform and a pulpit. Subsequently, he will truly take to the podium to give the lectures that will be the chapters of his future books.
It is perhaps as an apologist for the gaze that Ruskin has the most to say to us when he speaks of Turner. To write about art is first of all to do justice to the gaze: "to see clearly is at once poetry, prophecy, religion."
Reading Ruskin remains the royal road to accessing Turner's painting.
Ruskin's method indeed gives pride of place to sensitivity, because to show Turner's superiority as a champion of nature is first to note the consonance between his paintings and the writer's vision, as expressed in the pages of the journal and in the descriptive texts that constituted a large part of Ruskin's reputation. It is only then that scientific references come to serve as a guarantee for this communion of sensibilities. Conversely, after having served as a model for the draughtsman, Turner serves as a standard for the spectator; after having translated his emotions, he channels them and offers a reference to his gaze: of a Turner painting one would say that "it is nature," and of a natural spectacle that "it is a Turner." The virtue of Ruskin's gaze, its acuity, is the reflection of the virtue of Turner's hand, its exactitude. The critic and the artist concelebrate the office of the visible.
Modern painters thus obey a need for permanent totalization—for ever richer knowledge, for an experience never completed—which makes Ruskin a "commentator on the infinite." And this need takes a double form: teaching and preaching. At this point in his career, Ruskin finds in his book a platform and a pulpit. Subsequently, he will truly take to the podium to give the lectures that will be the chapters of his future books.
It is perhaps as an apologist for the gaze that Ruskin has the most to say to us when he speaks of Turner. To write about art is first of all to do justice to the gaze: "to see clearly is at once poetry, prophecy, religion."