"Ruskin's Italy, Ruskin's England," at the Morgan Library

John Ruskin In the spring of 1843, having only recently taken a middling "Double Fourth" degree from Oxford, John Ruskin finished the first volume of Modern Painters. The book, launched like a cannon shot into the complacent pond of the English art establishment, was written when the author was only 24. Inspired by attacks on the fantastical late style of J.M.W. Turner, Ruskin threw himself into a spirited, article-length defense of the painter. The piece, alas, was never published, but its argument?the notion that Turner's near abstractions could provide a more "truthful" depiction of nature than neoclassical mimesis?survives well into our present day. The turn of the century marks the centennial of the death of Ruskin, the granddaddy of all art critics in the English language and arguably one of England's most important social theorists. Widely selected as the time to celebrate this singular Victorian, the year 2000 has seen the mounting of major shows of Ruskin's life and works (besides being a compulsive writer, he was also an accomplished draftsman, watercolorist and an avid collector of his contemporaries). Exhibitions have opened at London's Tate Gallery, New Haven's Yale Center for British Art and at New York's Pierpont Morgan Library, where an impressively exhaustive review of Ruskin's oeuvre is now on view. A new biography of Ruskin, John Ruskin: A Life (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 369 pages, $30), written by John Batchelor, has also appeared to positive reviews.

"Ruskin was never, merely, an art critic," British critic Andrew Graham-Dixon wrote. "Art mattered to him in a way that now seems virtually inconceivable, since its function as he saw it was to unveil the workings of God." Combining the biblical literalism of his domineering parents and Wordsworth's idealized love of nature, Ruskin fused two frictional 18th-century philosophical currents: Evangelical Protestantism and Romanticism. In Ruskin's ambitious person, Christian Theology met Natural Theology, and sparks flew. Nature for the young critic became, after the Bible, God's second Book of Revelation.

Art's ultimate value for him, simply put, hinged on the inspired abilities of artists like Turner and the pre-Raphaelites to read nature. But "Truth to Nature," Ruskin's rallying cry in Modern Painters, was more than a simple expression of doctrinaire piety. It was, more significantly, the germ of an esthetic, moral and religious system with which he sought to free artists to interpret the physical world. "The greatest thing a human soul does," Ruskin effused in volume III of Modern Painters, "is to see something, and tell what he saw in a plain way... To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion?all in one."

"Hitherto I have only had instinct to guide me in judging of art," Charlotte Bronte wrote after reading the first volume of Modern Painters, "this book seems to give me eyes." Volumes II, III, IV and V of what was to be Ruskin's most celebrated work were another 17 years in the making. By 1860, the date of the final edition of Modern Painters, he had published three more books on art, four books on Gothic architecture, begun lecturing on political economy, founded a Working Men's College and helped design the Museum of Natural History at Oxford. The period between 1860 and 1889, the year the critic suffered his final mental breakdown, proved no less feverishly fertile: Ruskin, among other things, was named the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford and published more than 20 books, most of them aimed at the heart of the burgeoning industrial civilization he opposed with his entire fragile being.

Ruskin was, in his own exaggerated way, the soul of High Tory Victorianism: obsessively industrious, philanthropically generous, staunchly antidemocratic (he declared the working-man's vote to be "not worth a rat's squeak"), at once morally conservative and socially aware, and, above all, sexually repressed. A weird shut-in by any standards, even English ones, Ruskin worked all day, read well into the night and was perennially at pains to extricate himself from turbulent, obsessive relationships. His disastrous marriage to Euphemia "Effie" Chalmers Gray, their annulment on the grounds of Ruskin's "incurable impotence" (they never, apparently, did consummate) and Effie's subsequent marriage to Ruskin's protege, the painter John Everett Millais, made the celebrated critic the cuckold of London. Another, no less public obsession with Rose La Touche, a child 30 years Ruskin's junior, begun only four years after his annulment, only served to sharpen the cutting jokes.

Ruskin's relationship with his parents, financially soothing but controlling as anything found in Pakistan, created an adult at once demanding of public praise and neurotically fearsome of social intercourse. Reading his letters in Batchelor's biography or in manuscript form at the Morgan Library can, at moments, turn excruciating. Described by his doting father as "the most intellectual creature of his age" and possessing "the air of a professor that has not yet taken the Chair," young Ruskin was recognizably formed into the infant ambition of a socially insecure, middle-class couple: the child prodigy. Years later, in missive form, he returned the favor. Recognizing his parents' suffocating influence, a thirtysomething Ruskin naturally blamed them exclusively: "You fed me effeminately and luxuriously to the extent that I actually now could not travel in rough countries without taking a cook with me!"

Ruskin's personality, whatever its original sources, was unstable, utterly selfish, sometimes cruel, full of self-advertisements and pathologically quailing of physical intimacy. (Millais, who certainly had his own ax to grind, describes him in a Morgan manuscript thusly: "an undeniable giant as an author, but a poor weak creature in everything else, bland, and heartless.") It's a wonder, then, that such a flinching fop could have produced so much, so quickly, and of such importance. But to Ruskin we owe a considerable portion of our modern sense of beauty. It was he who virtually invented our modern formal study of art. Art's public discussion also turns out to be, in the main, Ruskin's brainchild. Praise him or condemn him for the latter (art criticism), his esthetic innovations have, like his elegant writing, endured way beyond his personal foibles to become, in a word, timeless.

"Ruskin's Italy, Ruskin's England," through Jan. 7, 2001, Pierpont Morgan Library, 29 E. 36th St. (Madison Ave.), 685-0610.