In 1878 the American painter James McNeil Whistler sued the art critic John Ruskin for liable, seeking £1000 of damages caused to his professional reputation. A year earlier, in a review of an exhibition at the newly opened Grosvenor Gallery, Ruskin had accused Whistler of charging 200 guineas ‘for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’. The painting in question was ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold: The falling Rocket’ of 1874, one of a series of impressionist inspired renditions by Whistler of night time firework displays. During the trial Whistler famously argued that he was not charging 200 gunnies for the time he took to make the painting itself, but for the lifetime of knowledge and skill that it had taken to make the painting possible. Subsequently Whistler won the court case, but was only awarded a Farthing of damages. In addition, Whistler was also required to pay the court costs of bringing the case to trial, a result which saw him bankrupt and living in relative poverty for much of his remaining life. Perhaps more importantly, this court case came to be seen as a historical point of juncture, a crossroads at which advanced Modernist ideas of ‘art for art’s sake’ won out over more traditional and conservative calls for art to remain firmly embedded within the social and historical context of its production. Consequently, Ruskin has often been portrayed as a rather backward looking and reactionary King Canute figure, hopelessly trying to hold back the tide of artistic and cultural progress that was beginning to engulfing late Victorian Britain. But, as is often the case, the full story of this trial is far more complex than this and, I would argue, to leave it as a simplistic set of received wisdoms would be to miss out on some of the key lessons that it could still teach us today. Instead of a straight forward ‘parting of ways’, I would argue that this trial in fact maps out two opposing, and often overlapping, viewpoints on the role and function of art in society that are still with us today. More specifically, I would argue that both Ruskin and Whistler were not only concerned with the impact that industrialisation was having upon our understanding of how art and art works should function in society - but that they were also equally concerned with how the alienating processes of mass industrialisation were fundamentally altering our ideas of what the work or labour of making art was or should be.

I.

First of all, it is perhaps worth casting a little more light on the court case itself. In Letter LXXIX of Fors Clavigera, Ruskin’s self-published monthly ‘Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain’, his criticism of Whistler formed only a very small part of a wide ranging polemic in support of Working Men’s Guilds (which Ruskin associated with the qualitative and ethical value of non-alienated labour) and with art’s potential to play a role in the improvement of everyday social environments, education, and civil society. In this context, Ruskin also praises the work of the pre-Raphaelite Burne-Jones. What is interesting here is Ruskin’s acknowledgement that the flaws, mistakes and problems embodied in Burne-Jones’ work are evidence of a moral and ethical labour of art, one which runs counter to the precise and machine driven accuracy of everyday mass produced objects. Seen in this light, it is not the speed or expressiveness of Whistler’s work that so provoked Ruskin, but the presentation of such work as a disembodied, socially autonomous and purely decorative, commodity:

Lastly, the mannerisms and errors of these pictures, whatever may be their extent, are never affected or indolent. The work is natural to the painter, however strange to us; and it is wrought with utmost conscience of care, however far, to his own or our desire, the result may yet be incomplete. Scarcely so much can be said for any other pictures of the modern schools: their eccentricities are almost always in some degree forced; and their imperfections gratuitously, if not impertinently, indulged. For Mr. Whistler's own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser. Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face. [1]

For his part, during his evidence at the libel trial of 1878, Whistler offered a defence of these pictures, and his rationale for making them, which encapsulated a move towards the conception of art as being culturally autonomous:

I have perhaps meant rather to indicate an artistic interest alone in my work, divesting the picture from any outside sort of interest which might have been otherwise attached to it. It is an arrangement of line, form and colour first, and I make use of any incident of it which shall bring about a symmetrical result. [2]

Although Whistler ideas here clearly echo those some of the ideas about l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake, that were establishing themselves in Paris at the time (by such writers as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire), and which were beginning to have an impact on a new generation of British artists and writers such as Oscar Wilde,  it is as well to remember that Whistler never foreclosed the possibility of a moral, ethical or political reading of an artwork. Instead, Whistler’s arguments for an autonomous art were based around the proposition that the kind of immaterial and aesthetic values that art represented could only develop in isolation from the material necessities and conditions of everyday material existence.

II.

In addition to this, I would also argue that it is perhaps worthwhile reminding ourselves of the real social, historical and cultural impact that the Industrial Revolution had had during the nineteenth century. I say this because Ruskin’s often perceived medievalist romanticism, as well as Whistler’s perceived progressive modernism, are often underscored by our own familiar notions of industrialised work or labour that we have largely inherited from this period. For example, the sub-title of Ruskin’s own publication Fors Clavigera, ‘Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain’, apart from its obvious Victorian gender specificity, may seems to us to point toward a relatively ‘fixed’ category of audience - ‘workmen and labourers’ - which Ruskin (and the likes of contemporaries such as William Morris) would have liked to return, or regress, to a centuries-old phantasy of rural and pastoral idle. 

However, the tenor and tone of these collective nouns begins to change quite radically if we allow ourselves to re-think how ‘new’ the working relationships of those ‘workmen and labourers’ had become within Ruskin’s own lifetime. In 1819, when Ruskin was born, the quickest mode of travel was by horse (literally one-horse power), and the fastest that news could travel was, consequently, less than 100 miles a day. By the 1880s, less than a few years after the Ruskin/Whistler court case, it became possible to send a telegram from London to Mumbai (then colonial Bombay) in two minutes. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the city of Bristol, in the county of Somerset, was in a different local time zone to London (separated by 10 minutes on account of differences in local meridians). It was only in 1845, when Ruskin was twenty-six, that such local time differences were abolished due to the need to standardise railway timetables across the UK. 

In 1825, when Ruskin was six, the Stockton-Darlington railway opened as the world’s first passenger line, followed by the Liverpool Manchester passenger service in 1830. By 1851, when Ruskin was thirty-two, more than 6,800 miles of track had been laid and it was possible to travel at speeds in excess of 60 miles per hour. Industrialisation also saw a population explosion. At the beginning of the 1800s, less than twenty years before Ruskin was born, the UKs population was just 6 million, by 1911, just eleven years after his death, that figure had risen to 36 million (a 600% population explosion). As Britain, like much of Europe and North America, began to shift from a traditionally agrarian economy to an industrialised economy based in the newly emerging cites, so the mass of the growing population began to migrate to those cites in seek of work. As a result, and for the first time in history, the majority of ‘workers’ and ‘labourers’ began to be paid in factories for an hourly wage, and for largely unskilled labour, as opposed to receiving money for the crops they grew or the objects they made or crafted. 

This new ‘working class’ of hourly paid labourers, to whom Ruskin addressed his ‘Letters’ were also largely at the mercy of industrialists and factory owners who could set wage rates and working conditions at will. These working conditions were also largely horrific. In fact a large part of Karl Marx’s first volume I of Das Kapital, first published in 1867, is given over to an empirical account of British labour law and working conditions (including the exploitation of child labour) during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. It is perhaps also worth remembering that these labour conditions, which were largely ‘outsourced’ or foisted upon colonial countries in the early part of the 20th century, still exist today, underpinning our click and collect fast fashion industries whilst, at the same time, ensuring the comparatively low prices of our more recent revolution in mobile technologies.

III.

From our current standpoint, dominated as we are by neo-liberal rhetorics of globalisation, underpinned by zero hour contracts and the gig economy, it is perhaps becoming increasingly harder to see some of the stark similarities between our time and those of Ruskin’s. Not only do Ruskin’s ideas seem somewhat quaint and nostalgic – a kind of rose-tinted nostalgia for a craft-based medievalism that never was – it can also be easy for us to view the Industrial Revolution itself, and with it the Victorian epoch, with an equally false nostalgia. It is worth keeping in mind perhaps that the neo-conservative ‘re-inventions’ of Victorian Britain that took place during the 80s and early 90s during the Thatcher and subsequent Major governments – when Victorian values were held up as something ‘to return to’, as themselves an ‘idle’ of colonial Britain that somehow preceded the uncertainty and instability of the ‘Modern’ epoch – has been recently compacted in frequently misleading debates that surrounded Brexit. From this point of view, it becomes even easier to miss-read Ruskin as a nostalgic and escapist fantasist. Equally, through this lens it is also easy to perceive Whistler as a credible fore-runner of our own ‘art for art’s sake legacy’ – in which art, as a special category, is held to be separate from and immune to the profanities and struggles of everyday life; as something we need only look upon in museums and galleries to be reminded that, somewhere beyond the day to day toil and moil of work and labour, a civilisation of higher ideals and moral enlightenment awaits us.

The problem with either of these viewpoints – Ruskin as conservative nostalgist and/or Whistler as progressive Modernist - is, of course, that they both wilfully obscure some of the key relationships and historical specificities that give us our Western notion of ‘art’. Furthermore, such an overly simplistic viewpoint would also demand that we continue to misread (or wilfully forget) the specificities of our own history if we are to continue with the fallacy of artistic autonomy – that art and artists can somehow continue to provide a gateway to a ‘true’ experience of life that always somehow lies beyond our grasp. The first of these problems is a demand for historical amnesia – art, as we know it or knew it to be, is neither trans-historical or Universal. It is only since the opening of public and municipal museums – a process instigated with the first public opening of the Louvre in Paris in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution - that artists, freed from their traditional relationships to crat-based guilds, began making artworks and objects purely for ‘public’ spectacle and enjoyment. Second, and this is something we need to continue to confront head on, was a concern that Ruskin concerned with the inherent elitism of art-for-art’s sake autonomy. Whilst public museums and galleries began to house artworks that came to be seen as the height of cultural achievement within a secularised and industrialised Western society, a line was simultaneously drawn between the corresponding ‘difficulty’ of this culture and that of its ‘mass’ or ‘popular’ equivalent. For example, it is just over a century ago that the English critic and theorist Clive Bell felt it reasonable to proclaim that:

The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity. They do not produce to live – they live to produce. There is no place for them in a social system based on the theory that what men desire is prolonged and pleasant existence. You cannot fit them into the machine, you must make them extraneous to it. You must make pariahs of them, since they are not part of society but the salt of the earth.

In saying that the mass of mankind will never be capable of making delicate aesthetic judgments, I have sad no more than the obvious truth (Clive Bell, Art, Chatto and Windus, 1914, p. 261)

IV.

What is perhaps interesting to note here is how recently our own sedimented stereotypes of artistic endeavour have actually been produced – and, ironically, propagated within the popular culture that Bell found so abhorrent. The artist has become a saint, driven by necessity, a pariah who has no place within society. They are not part of the ‘machine’ nor in a social system in which men desire a prolonged and pleasant existence – nor do they belong to the ‘mass’ who are, by default, incapable of ‘delicate aesthetic judgements. What is useful to remind ourselves here is quite how embedded these notions of the artist as outsider genius now are – how historically specific and recently they are, how exclusive they are, and how they still underpin our approach to both high culture as well as to the ‘tortured geniuses’ of rock, pop, sport and film. These ideas of a necessary separation between art and everyday life have, also, underpinned almost every attempt by avant-garde artists who have sought to somehow ‘bridge the gap’ between art and everyday life. From the Readymades of Duchamp, through the Pop art of Warhrol, the Happenings of Kaprow to the Turner Prizewinning social architecture of Assemble, the ‘history’ of Modern Art seems centred around the necessity to use an ‘Art’ which, we are told, belongs to another kind of world entirely.

On the other hand, rather than trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, and persist with the avant-garde struggle over the complex relationship between autonomy and everyday life, we could choose again to look back, with a more open mind, to the kind of claims that Ruskin was making about the possible social role and function that art could have within a truly progressive egalitarian society. If we remember just how new and radical the changes to the conditions of Ruskin’s ‘Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain’ were, then some of his ideas – originally mapped out in Ruskin’s  1857 lectures The Political Economy of Art, or, A Joy Forever (and Its Price in the Market), and re-presented within the Whitworth’s 2019 Exhibition ‘Joy Forever: How to use art to change the world and its price in the market” - begin to make a lot more sense. Ruskin’s ‘The Political Economy of Art’ Lectures, delivered as they were in response to the Great Art Treasures exhibition in Manchester of the same year, began to map out an alternative route for art practice, and art education, that would see it become neither a luxury commodity for the nouveau riche, or an ideological bastion against industrialisation for the educated elite. Instead, Ruskin began to imagine a new social role and function for art which would provide a newly emerging working class with the tools that were necessary to take back some control of their lives and their society. Instead of a nostalgic return to an imaginary past, Ruskin was imagining a revolutionary future in which art could be used as a means to imagine and realise negotiable models of how to live otherwise – as a shared responsibility to nurture and adapt a functioning aggregate of community centred interests and needs. As we now know, Ruskin’s lectures on ‘The Political Economy of Art’ later became his seminal book ‘Unto This Last’ (which inspired, amongst other things, the founding of the Labour Party in the UK and also Ghandi’s post-colonial reform of India). However, rather than seeing these texts, and indeed the historical figure of Ruskin himself, as anachronistic and historical oddities, I would argue that they could still provide a template and toolkit for re-using art as a tool for developing and growing constituent social change in our own time. In order to release some of this capacity for change all we have to do is return to the time when art was, quite literally ‘put on trial’ and, in doing so, to remind ourselves of how complex, shifting and urgent these times were, and also how similar they remain to our own.

REFERENCES

[1] Ruskin, John. “Life Guards of New Life.” July 1877. Letter 79 of Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain. Ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1907. 146-69. Print. Vol. 29. of The Works of John Ruskin. 39 vols. 1903-12.

[2] James McNeil Whistler – Whistler v. Ruskin. Art and Art Critics (London 1878).

[3] Clive Bell – Art - Chatto and Windus. 1914, p. 261