REVIEWS

Photo credit: John Macarthur

John MacArthur. 2007. The Picturesque: architecture, disgust, and other irregularities. Routledge.

Reviewer: Dr William Taylor, University of Western Australia.

Stirring the pot with The Picturesque, architecture, disgust and other irregularities

THOMASINA: "When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?" Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

I had the good fortune to see Arcadia on two occasions. I found both challenging, the second a little less so. The playwright’s erudition and the drama’s twists and turns gave me reason to pause, clear my head and survey the audience both times. Whereas the London theatregoers were listening intently to a story about a garden embellished with picturesqueness, murder, and chaos theory, the Los Angeles crowd lost the plot completely. I pictured the first to be absorbed by the play and its celebration or satire (depending on one’s point of view) of a very English scene. I imagined the second to be preoccupied with other things, perhaps other picturesque landscapes with images of their own figures, slimmed, stretched, and stapled in them. At any rate, I suspect John Macarthur’s production of The Picturesque, architecture, disgust and other irregularities may not play well to an LA-type crowd. However, there is much to learn from it.

As anyone familiar with Arcadia will know, the script moves freely back and forth between timeframes and characters, from the drawing room of a large country house in Derbyshire in the early years of the 19th century to the same room, but different characters, situated in the present. By means of this deceit, the play is partly a commentary on the folly of historical understanding. It reflects on the improbability that one can ever really know the past for what it once ‘truly’ was; that is, know it accurately and regularly, as one event causes another, regardless of missing evidence and the scholar’s biased eye. As characters from both periods move around the room, in some scenes occupying the same space together at the same time, there is not so much a sense that time has been suspended, but of déjà-vu. The comparable accents of the two sets of characters, their wit and at times contempt for one thing or another and of course, the garden and weather outside framed by the drawing room windows, make us feel we have been there before. The play acts out (and indeed alludes to) the ploy of Humphrey Repton’s presentation books with their fold-out illustrations superimposing old and new styles of landscape gardens onto a common ground. So too, in a manner equally intriguing and at times no less complex, Macarthur questions accepted wisdom regarding sources for the picturesque style of gardening. He highlights ideas and patterns of sensibility, works up historical and philosophical perspectives on the discourse and – some would say surprisingly – shows ways in which the whole lot can and even should be relevant for present day concerns. Despite the challenge of putting so much in one bowl, a far more comprehensive and intriguing landscape of concepts and practices results.

One start for separating the mix of narratives and arguments in this book is to begin by considering a “bifurcation” in scholarship and inference of meaning for the words ‘picture’, the ‘picturesque’ or ‘picturesqueness’. Early on in his writing, Macarthur observes this split in academic study where, on one hand, the terms acquire critical charge when appraising 18th and 19th century texts and debates on topics such as painting and pictures, landscape gardens and architecture where they serve any critic in identifying philosophical and material factors characterising the period. On the other hand, given more recent scholarship the terms are anachronistic in view of modern canons and standards of aesthetic judgment. They comprise a “pathological remnant” of former times and values. Examples of the first side of the equation are many, including Macarthur’s book, while absences marking the second are notable, but beg a moment’s reflection. Pause and consider how, today, few serious artists or architects embellish their work with ‘picturesqueness’ or would claim they did so anyway. Likewise, on library shelves, while books abound with one or the other kind of garden or landscape in their titles (landscapes of emotion and alienation, desire, power and fear to name a few), none of these treat the picturesque as a relevant critical category. Imagine, if Deleuze had named his book A Thousand [Picturesque] Plateau, it would have hardly attracted such an enthusiastic audience. Paradoxically, it is partly because of the pervasive tendency in modern times to reflect upon experience through means of imagery that the picturesque “which once meant a radical blurring of art and life, is frequently used as a synonym for aesthetic failure” today. Macarthur’s book broadens and extends the life and saliency of these concepts for contemporary issues, particularly concerns for architecture and visual perception and the contribution of both for understanding human subjectivity.

Now, Macarthur’s bifurcation can be paralleled by another split that distinguishes the circulation of the ‘picturesque’ in historical discourses, treatises or scholarly disputation on subjects like beauty and the sublime, on the one hand, from the term’s use in communicating social or moral disapproval, on the other. This second split lingers in The Picturesque as an immiscible component disrupting the orderly, but oftentimes anodyne chronicle of aesthetic theory found in some accounts; it draws the debates of the distant past into striking proximity to ours. On the one side of the split there is writing on the picturesque that assembles 18th and 19th century discourse into a history of philosophical ideas or otherwise makes for a ‘conversation’ between great minds, facing one in a common debate. This book may seem to do the same - at first. The first two chapters provide a comprehensive reckoning of well-known interlocutors like Price, Knight and Repton. Loudon and Ruskin are given their due and the particular contributions of clergyman and amateur draughtsman William Gilpen and French painter and art critic Roger de Piles are accounted for. Through it all, however, Macarthur proceeds to stir things up. These introductory chapters place emphasis on the particularities of practice, drawing attention to both the manners of argument and rhetoric that unseat these characters from a common table and the specific technical practices that restore a sense of distinction to artistic genre (sketching, painting and fresco, architecture, gardening and landscape design). Emphasised are the divergent values behind these practices which have informed understanding “art and life.” Artistic movements and historical accounts of them help frame some of these particularities; the Rococo, for instance, is compared to the picturesque, both having “disturbed the boundaries and distinctions of existing disciplines.” Historiography shaping modern perception of the picturesque is highlighted with reference to contributions by Wölfflin and Hussey, Gombrich and Watkin amongst others. On the other side of this second split there is a history of moral disapprobation where references in times past to the picturesque served to distinguish high from low art, the sensual objects these referred to and the subjects that designated them and spoke about them. Historically, charges of picturesqueness in a painting or landscape could open fissures between different types of people, those gaps appearing within the learned and aristocratic elite that had outgrown some of its inherited authority and others opening between a growing cast of new experts like landscape gardeners and architects. This history continues into our own time, accounting for the suspicion we all most likely feel when facing a building developer’s signage promising picturesque views.

Treating the history of aesthetics as a ‘conversation’ between great minds makes for ‘anachronistic’ or ‘presentist’ histories. These exhibit an inability to think that the past had different conditions (ways of thinking and living) than the present. Ignoring the moral values and disapprobation at work in aesthetic discourses, past and present introduces another blind spot into history writing. The squabbles between musty scholars and aesthetes from the past may be just that, squabbles, made from mixtures of effete learning and petty self-interest, gentlemanly sport and class rivalry and, on the whole, the ephemera of past centuries. However, as Macarthur warns, it is unwise to dismiss these debates and disagreements as so much outmoded quarrelling because traces of former prejudice linger in historiographical bias against the picturesque. Dismissiveness may also constrain understanding of the aesthetics of contemporary architecture, particularly by directing scholarship away from some of its seemingly problematic, but constitutive tendencies, its ‘distastes’ and ‘irregularities’.

These terms, along with ‘appropriation’ and ‘movement’ in modern architecture identify topics for the remaining four chapters of the book where the strategy of bringing together philosophical and historical material, past and present continues. In chapter three, following a knotty, but useful theoretical exegesis outlining possibilities for understanding ‘disgust’ (phenomenological, anthropological, and psychological analyses), the term is shown to have played a pivotal role in historical debates over the nature of art and taste. In pre-modern times the fixity of artistic genre and canons guided what could be represented and for what effect, including images of putrefaction and decay and ruined labourer cottages. However, with the imperative to make aesthetics something akin to an empirical science, what becomes significant is not that a Dutch painting of an ox butchering or an architectural treatise imaging a butcher’s shop is ‘disgusting’ for their visceral or unedifying subject matter. Rather such scenes provide important visual material for defining what art (or architecture) might be.

The fluidity of perception and the multiple contexts available for understanding sensuous experience - the multiple meanings of aesthetic terms and their availability to mark shifting terrain for negotiating artistic, social and moral values – continues to characterise The Picturesque in chapters four, five and six. Macarthur’s discussion of ‘irregularity’ shows how perception of the anomalous qualities of picturesque views, landscapes, and buildings so closely identified with the idiom not only involved, as suspected, carefully controlled aesthetic manoeuvres. Irregularity in visual composure was also closely dependant upon novel planning practices and value placed on plans as a means of anticipating, coordinating, and imposing a distinctly spatial experience of architecture and its setting. The attention thus placed on the inhabitant and by extension their social status and morality is clearly illustrated by historical debates over the planning, plans and facades of rural cottages and the publication of designs for model dwellings in numerous 19th century treatises. Importantly, in connecting these, Macarthur goes on to significantly extend his account. He is able to question how the discipline formed by a purposeful and “picturesque regularity” evidenced by these designs and pattern books - but also by Le Corbusier’s concept of the architectural promenade - emerges as “a mature means of making architecture.”

By Macarthur’s thinking, the value of studied irregularity in designing for and controlling of an experience of some kind is concurrent with a broader imperative to appropriate terrain. Visual ownership entails more than competing class interests and prevailing ideologies, but is a means of making sense of the broader inter-connectedness of interiors and public spaces, landscapes and entire cities. At a perceptual and cognitive level, appropriation entails the marking out of thresholds and limits, the things incorporated into a view and those outside the frame which are nonetheless implicated. There is a very good account here of the origins of the ‘Townscape’ movement in Britain during the 1940’s and 50’s and Macarthur makes a compelling case for the invigoration of picturesque discourse in writings by Pevsner and Cullen and the actions of post-war planning authorities. Appropriation and ‘movement’, which is discussed in the concluding chapter, opens the subject matter of this book onto a politics of landscape. Thinking of landscape more or less as a picture, like a surface and frame, potentially frees it to be both a world onto itself and a mixture of all worlds, requiring attentiveness, thought and discernment of its components, organic and inorganic, seemingly vegetal and ‘natural’ or obviously human made, potentially ‘architectural’. This awareness, though obviously drawing on older forms of aesthetic perception, esthetical and aristocratic tastes is not reducible to the limits of accepted canons and highbrow learning. One could argue that landscape gardening, most clearly picturesque gardening, made all objects and images equal at one level, but potentially poetic and meaningful, at another, with meanings that could be manipulated and possibly controlled, fought over and read for their overt or subliminal messages.

It is difficult in so short a review to further identify and separate out the intertwined arguments and narratives of this book without making a muddle of things. This is because the key issues are complex, but all too easy summed up in academic circles as ‘visual culture’. Macarthur avoids the generalities commonly implicated by the phrase, emphasising ‘the visual’ as more a broader critical category that subsumes ‘the picturesque’, but which is in turn defined and possibly challenged by picturesque discourse. Visual culture has come to have a considerable bearing on architecture and landscape architecture, their character as discrete disciplines, but more importantly, on perceptions and understanding of ourselves.

In Arcadia Thomasina’s conundrum is paralleled by unrecognised opportunity. Her difficulty in getting the jam and porridge to separate again is not the key issue, but rather, it is the paradoxical fact that her stirring, the technique and her awareness of it, bring the dilemma about and at the same time give the viewer pause to think about important things. Macarthur does something similar in this fine and scholarly book. He draws much of interest out of the cold porridge of the picturesque, separating the oats from some of its chaff and drawing out quite a few useful grains of truth along the way. So buy the book (do not wait for the screenplay).

Excerpt from The Picturesque, p. 98 (published with permission from the author).

Before we return to examine Ruskin’s concept of sympathy and what it means for picturesque theory, note how much of eighteenth century genre hierarchy remains in Ruskin’s criticism. Price wanted the picturesque, in part, to maintain the gradient of nobility between Rembrandt and van Ostade, even when their subjects are equally low. Just as in Price’s examples, the nobility of Turner is its independence from generic determination, which is exhibited in technique. Just as Rembrandt ennobled the kitchen piece by his free brushwork, Turner painted a picturesque cliché, but critically, through his powers of detailed observation. Ruskin writes that Stanfield ‘pursued his career’ in the picturesque, implying a salaried and hence mechanical relation to art, as opposed to Turner’s free genius. What is more remarkable is that the whole structure of the chapter on the Turnerian picturesque appears as if it might have been developed from a passage in Price (which Ruskin does not acknowledge). In ‘Essay on Picturesque Architecture and Building’, Price approves a picture of a mill by Sebastien Bourdon over a picture of a mill at Beauvais by Francois Boucher:

in which he [Boucher] seems to have collected together all the singularly abrupt and irregular forms that he had ever seen, in order to be superlatively picturesque; and in the same proportion that the wheels and intricate parts of the mill are less distinct in the picture of Bourdon, than they appear in the landscapes of Ruysdale or Hobbima they are more so in that of Boucher: the picture of the former, is a model of the use which may be made of the qualities of the picturesque; that of the latter, one of the best examples I know of their abuse. [1]

[1] Price, Essays on the Picturesque, II, 321-22. The other artists mentioned are most likely Ruysdael, and Hobbema

Photo credit: Carmen Casaliggi

Ruskin in Perspective: Contemporary Essays, edited by Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March-Russell, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.

Reviewer: Dr Anuradha Chatterjee

Ruskin in Perspective argues: “perspective is an indispensable component of both the external and the internal worlds, and that in Ruskin’s work it offers a vocabulary for wide-ranging exploration”. Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March-Russell progress a subtle argument that perspective is not merely an artistic technique. Casaliggi and March-Russell explain that the Renaissance concept of the perspective entailed a detached observation of an event, located in space, which had taken place in the past. This legacy introduced the “Romantic conception of the artist, in which personal vision is equated with clarity and comprehension.” In other words, intellectual knowledge was analogous to the act of casting a spatial and temporal net over the world. To see, and to see clearly, was to know. To this end, perspective functioned as an intellectual faculty, which allowed one to seek a transcendent reality from a singular and a subjective position. The choice of this thematic is not arbitrary as literal and metaphorical explorations of perspective pervade Ruskin’s artistic, spiritual, cultural, and political imagination. The theme of perspective informs the logic of constructing a multidisciplinary anthology of essays by well-known as well as emerging scholars. According to Casaliggi and March-Russell, there are four aspects to this: “First, Ruskin’s consideration of artistic technique in terms of formal development; second, the role of vision in its moral, political and spiritual guises; third, Ruskin’s maintenance of a critical distance from his own times; and fourth, our own need to set Ruskin’s legacy in relation to present concerns – political, philosophical, cultural.”

The book is organized into three parts – art and literature; aesthetics and politics; and geography and landscape – consisting of four essays each. The first part consists of “Blind mouths”: Ruskin and the Reading of the Text by Toni Cerruti; Theseus and the Spider: Autobiographical structures in Ruskin and Proust by John Coyle; Anglo-Italian Contrasts in Ruskin’s Stones of Venice by Richard Read; and The Words on the Page and the Eye of the Soul: Ruskin’s Literary Vision and The King of the Golden River by Jeremy Scott. Cerruti argues that Ruskin discourse on writing prefigured twentieth century literary theory. In his own writings, he acted as go-between the readers and the text, making scholarly material available to a diverse audience. In addition, he rejected the Victorian realist novel, and begun the writing of fictional pieces based on myth and legend. Coyle adds to this line of inquiry as he rescues Ruskin’s works from being maligned through their comparison with Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Coyle sets the two writers apart, in terms of genre, identification with the work, structure and unity, and narrative style, in order to show us that Ruskin and Proust have been practitioners of their own personal “autobiographical narrative.”

Read is interested in ‘contrast’ as a way of producing knowledge. He argues: “To make contrasts is an intervention on the world that opens knowledge up. We depend on them to make sense of the world and define our place in it.” Read situates this idea in the context of literary and artistic histories of travel, as he points out that Ruskin contrasted the Italian basilica with the English Gothic cathedral, in terms of moral character of the people and the visual imagery, to convey his ethical argument. Scott focuses on Ruskin’s technique of word painting, in other words, the descriptive, precise, and evocative language, which highlights the representational capacity of words. Scott argues that Ruskin’s emphasis on precise and expressive language was a response to the foremost moral value – truth. He notes the strength of Ruskin’s sense of organic form; awareness of movement; and a childlike and innocent way of looking when alluding to moral purity, and the failure of this descriptive apparatus when confronted with signs of modern ugliness and greed. Scott notes the literal performance of literary imagination (presence and absence) in Ruskin’s writings.

The second part consists of The “Insinuating Touch of Influence”: Aspects of Ruskin’s Political Legacy by Stuart Eagles; Ruskin, Herbert Read and the Neo-Romantic Imagination by Paul March-Russell; Museums of the People: A Signifying Practice of Order within a Community by Iolanda Ramos; and From the Picturesque to the Genuine Vernacular: Nature and Nationhood in Ruskin’s Architectural Thought, 1830-1860 by Martin Schmidt. Through a reading of varied but key historical sources, Eagles delineates the institutions, societies, and political figures that picked up on Ruskin’s views, thereby suggesting the pervasive influence of his political economy. March-Russell explores the legacy of Ruskin’s thought in modern art criticism through a re-evaluation of Herbert Read’s writings. Read used Ruskinian romanticism (particularly the expression of the spirit in cultural artefacts) to defend Surrealist art, which allowed the expression of the repressed unconscious of the individual through creative practice. According to March-Russell, Read displayed a complex response to Ruskin and his writings marked the “passage from Victorian to contemporary art.”

Ramos argues that Ruskin provided an alternative to the dominant discourse on museum, which had two aspects to it – entertainment, access to culture, and citizenship on one hand, and covert control and disciplining of bodies and minds on the other. Ruskin suggested that the practice of looking of art was not in itself educational. It was the exposure to ordered arrangement of objects that inculcated a sense of cooperation and subjection, which was intrinsic to the integrated and hierarchical structures in the medieval society upheld by Ruskin. Schmidt explores Ruskin’s writings from 1840s to the 1850s to suggest that Ruskin introduced the distinction between picturesque and vernacular architecture. For him, picturesque architecture was naive, formalistic, and indecorous. In contrast, a vernacular approach was the way to achieve a truly national architecture. The example for this was the Swiss chalet, which was built after considering the landscape, climate, local materials, and mentality.

The third part consists of the Ruskin and the Alpine Ideal by Roger Cardinal; Lessons of Multiple Perspective: Ruskin, Turner, and the Inspiration of Venice by Carmen Casaliggi; “A Glass Picture”: A Window into Ruskin’s Aesthetic by Rachel Dickinson; and Geographer of the Soul: John Ruskin’s “Fairy Books of Science” by Howard Hull. Cardinal argues that like the architecture of Venice, the Alps formed a much traversed and a personalized terrain, which was the “pivotal reference” for a number of ideas and images. The mountain formations were central to the understanding of the ideas of beauty and imagination. In addition, Ruskin’s obsession with minutiae supplanted the grand sweeping vision of the sublime as put forward by Kant and Burke. Casaliggi explores another dimension of the landscape in Ruskin’s writings. She argues that Ruskin was well aware of Turner’s perspectives of Venetian sky and water. His interest in the multiple views of the city, its luminous reflections on water, and the incandescent polychromy of its buildings could be attributed to his championing of Turner’s vision of Venice.

Dickinson focuses on Ruskin’s Elements of Perspective, particularly the figure of the window. To see in perspective is to literally sit at this window and see through a glass picture. The artist or the reader inhabits a liminal space that offers the opportunity of an inner as well as an outer gaze. Not only does the window figure as a reconciliatory device between the constrained domestic world and the exhilarating and unexpected public realm in Ruskin’s autobiographic accounts but it also features in his architectural discussions. This method of seeing is of relevance to twentieth century culture, in which the individual must occupy the liminal space to encounter as well as negotiate the communal. The technique of seeing is also explored by Hull, who argues that Ruskin’s work was simultaneously science, literature, sociology, and art. It was an “alternative geography” that was imbued with echoes of his personal life; a personal insight into the natural world that was meant to encourage readers to develop a personal perspective to the world; and suggestions about ethical ways of reading nature.

The essays are short, clear, well illustrated, and solidly substantiated. Despite the constrained space, the authors have managed to present new and interesting interpretations of Ruskin. In addition, the anthology is ambitious in its overall scope. It takes on the challenge of tying together twelve multidisciplinary essays. It achieves this aim by using perspective as an intellectual framework and a methodological strategy, which allows a consideration of Ruskin’s writings as a spatio-temporal corpus of works. Despite the obvious strengths of the anthology, the relationship between the eloquently written introductory chapter and the twelve essays remain tenuous. The introductory chapter is incredibly compelling, and a re-emergence of the editors’ voices in a concluding chapter would have helped reiterate the theme of the perspective in the context of the essays and helped provide a stronger philosophical overview. There is a minor flaw in the introductory chapter. In The Stones of Venice, III Ruskin condemned perspective because it was a hallmark achievement of the Renaissance science and because it denied tactile and sensory experience of the world. This omission is significant because Ruskin was one of the few thinkers in the Victorian age who undertook a fervent dismantling of the ideas of academic learnedness and systematization that emerged out of the Renaissance age. Instead of occluding these paradoxes, it might have been productive to engage with them. Having said that, I would like to recommend this book to Ruskin scholars in all fields of research. It covers a wide range of topics and it is fresh and original in the way it is structured.