REVIEWS

Image credit: Palgrave

Heinrich, Anselm, Katherine Newey, and Jeffrey Richards, eds. Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Reviewer: Tracy C Davis, Northwestern University

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman’s 2007 book Performing the Victorian portrays John Ruskin not as a crusty and outmoded Victorian with a taint of perversion but as a visionary. This establishes the case that however idiosyncratic Ruskin’s regard was for mass market theatrical genres it bears an important relationship to his high-minded advocacy of educational reform and investigation of the natural world. Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture takes up the crucial connection between Ruskin’s catholic enjoyment of the stage and his insistence that art be both moral and useful, based on observation of life. This volume of a dozen essays arises from a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Board project (headed by Katherine Newey and Jeffrey Richards) that sought to draw Victorian theatre studies into a more comprehensive theory of culture by incorporating Ruskin’s aesthetic and social theories. The book’s first section, titled “Ruskin and the Theatre,” substantiates the direct relevance of Ruskin’s philosophical views to his views on the stage, while in the second section – “The Theatre and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century,” which contains contributions only from art and theatre historians rather than Ruskin scholars – the connection is sometimes tenuous and, in one case, refuted. Despite the nominality (and perhaps dispensability) of these distinctions and some unevenness in quality, the book offers some intriguing polemics and worthy essays.

Newey’s introduction demonstrates the applicability of Ruskin’s practice of “reading” pictures to theatrical attendance: verbal and visual cues are united to create “sensation and emotional appeal” (5). Newey refutes both the teleology of triumphant realism and theatre historiography that recognizes the Victorian aesthetic’s culmination only in the apotheosis of cinema, and instead characterizes popular theatre as part and parcel of both instruction and pleasure in a visually-oriented culture. This emphasis on visuality has guided Victorian theatre studies since the early-1980s, when work by Michael Booth and Martin Meisel definitively overturned the earlier biases for literary quality or elite patronage. Ruskin fits easily into the newer paradigm. His role as the granddaddy of Pre-Raphaelitism affiliates him with painters who narrate through arresting images of antique as well as contemporary scenes. The other great shift in theatre historiography accomplished by Booth and Meisel’s generation (with due credit particularly to David Mayer) is the recognition of a wide array of genres beyond the orthodoxy of tragedy and comedy: melodrama, extravaganza, pyrodrama, hydrodrama, burlesque, farce, pantomime, and the many other hybrids that attracted Victorians in great numbers to a vibrantly populist theatre. This accords with Ruskin’s taste as a theatergoer, for he appreciated not only the historicism of tragedy but also the antiquarianism of extravaganza, while allowing for expressions of contemporaneous British life – as in comedy – and its juxtaposition with faerie – as in pantomime – to round out his palate. These theatrical niches all have counterparts in fine art specialties, whether genre painting, satiric caricature, history painting, nautical, fantasy, or what have you. Ethically speaking, the righteousness of poetic justice, invariably dispensed in the popular theatre, may not have improved morals but it relentlessly advocated the imperative to be moral. This served Ruskin’s purpose while leaving the commercial stage untainted by associations with industrial mass production, labour alienation, or any of the other realities Ruskin chose to ignore from his vantage as an entranced playgoer.

Thus, for Ruskin, the theatre enabled a vicarious experience of a better-ordered and gorgeously-decorated, infinitely diverse universe. A succinct primer connecting Ruskin’s philosophy to his theatre-going practice is located in Rachel Dickinson’s contribution to Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture, “Ruskinian Moral Authority and Theatre’s Ideal Woman.” She takes as her text Ruskin’s essay in Fors 39, which begins: “On a foggy forenoon, two or three days ago, I wanted to make my way quickly from Hengler’s Circus to Drury Lane Theatre, without losing time which may be philosophically employed; and therefore afoot, for in a cab I never can think of anything but how the driver is to get past whatever is in front of him” (59-60). His “physical” and “pedagogical” destinations are identical: Drury Lane Theatre’s pantomime Jack in the Box. His starting point – where he had seen Cinderella five times in the previous three weeks – forms the other locus of his reflective leisure. Each experiential terminus is better than the streets that lie between; they are more beautiful, vibrant, and innocent than the route that he strives to negotiate as efficiently and rationally as possible in order to travel from one haven to the other. But that is not to say either that what occupies the spaces that lie between the theatres, or the time it takes to make the journey is irrelevant to one’s experience at the pantomimes. Ruskin’s view that “the theatre is a whole experience” comprising not only the production on stage but also “the architecture of the building, what products are being advertised, what products are for sale, how the interval is handled, and even the aesthetic appeal of the rest of the audience” (62) anticipates the semiotic methodologies that I associate with Marvin Carlson and Ric Knowles: sensible and wholistic approaches that recognize more than the make-believe of performance but the gestalt of what precedes, coincides, and multiply frames the performance per se. The juxtaposition of Westminster’s soot-stained buildings, tumultuous street life, and commercial hurly-burly with the feminized, childlike, and untainted realm of the pantomimes delineates two realities. The letters that Dickinson quotes from Ruskin to his cousin and ward Joan Severn on this subject are hardly recognizable as coming from the master prose stylist: lisping, pocked with pet names, phonetic baby-talk, and idiosyncratic patois. This is his language of delight when shared with a fellow initiate. The distance between Hengler’s and Drury Lane becomes the drear interval of waiting between the resumption of a more juvenile and wholesome world-logic, but one which bears upon how Ruskin wants his readers to think and behave.

Other essays take up Ruskin’s enthusiasm for Shakespeare, Moliere, and toga plays (the muscular Christianity of Wilson Barrett). Jeffrey Richards’ contribution on “John Ruskin, the Olympian Painters and the Amateur Stage” is especially instructive (following the lead of Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh’s Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660-1914). Richards contrasts Ruskin’s and the Pre-Raphaelites’ devotion to beauty in nature with the later school of aesthetic painters for whom beauty resided in art. Productions of ancient plays (such as the 1880 Balliol College Agamemnon, in Greek) and efforts such as Tale of Troy and Story of Orestes characterize a minor but high-minded fad for classics that were never broached by the professional stage. College productions drew upon Laurence Alma-Tadema, Frederic Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, and G.F. Watts for scenic and costume expertise. They brought the next generation of actor-managers to the fore – Frank Benson, H.G. Irving, and Arthur Bourchier – suggesting that Ruskin’s “mission for the stage – education in the classics and demonstrations of great painting” (39) were achieved. In Ruskin’s view, Richards argues, this corrected fine artists’ lack of propriety by giving them a more worthy template to animate.

One of the most ingenious essays takes up the question of how pervasive Ruskin’s ideas had become among the public by postulating W.S. Gilbert’s operettas (especially Patience, The Gondoliers, Pirates of Penzance, and Princess Ida) as registers of public awareness of Ruskinian ideas. J.A. Hilton provides a refreshing exegesis on how satire and homage demonstrate the permeation of the aesthetic movement into iconic recognizability. Whereas several essays elucidate pairings of Ruskin and something else (the dramatic monologue, advocacy for a national theatre, Moliere, etc.) Hilton’s approach studies Ruskin at one (or more) remove by positing measures of influence in the cultural zeitgeist, attributable to him by specialists yet not tagged as such for the theatre-going public.

This collection rethinks Ruskin as relevant to the later Victorian stage, not as a public advocate or reflective theorist but as an experiential link between practices of fine art and theatrical spectatorship. David Mayer’s essay on supernumeraries provides an important caveat on the other contributors’ enthusiastic advocacy for Ruskin. As cheap labour to flesh out stage spectacles, supers’ bodies lent plasticity and sculptural depth. It need not be thus, and indeed it never had been on the British stage until the touring Meininger company showed British producers what reactive, lively crowds added to dramatic tension, narrative complexity, and the illusion of dynamism within theatricalised conflicts. These effects were achieved by specific techniques for training and managing supernumeraries, and so the results could be replicated by others. This contributed to the professionalization of supernumeraries without mitigating their function as industrial cogs in spectacle-making entities such as the Lyceum Theatre under Henry Irving. Ruskin, a devoted admirer of Irving (as Shearer West demonstrates in her contribution), remained impervious to the reality of labouring workers, efficient as “extras” yet hardly functioning as creative artists with unique insight. Holding to his naïve belief in theatrical magic, Ruskin enjoyed the effects of theatrical machines and massed bodies while overlooking what it took to give him these pleasures. Rationalized labour management and a more technological theatre building deepened spectators’ experience of immersion in spectacles, even for Luddites such as Ruskin.

Markowitz, Yvonne J. and Elyse Zorn Karlin. Imperishable Beauty: Art Nouveau Jewelry. Aldershot, Hampshire: Lund Humphries, 2008. .

Reviewer: Dr. Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Comparative Literature Department, Stanford University

Imperishable Beauty: Art Nouveau Jewelry makes me wish I could have seen the accompanying exhibition to this short but visually exquisite catalogue, held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2008. The show presented 120 objects from a private American collection of spectacular art nouveau jewelry, assembled over nearly five decades by a pair of anonymous collectors. The book’s title is taken from a phrase by Henry Clemens van de Velde, one of art nouveau’s premier painters, designers, and architects: “a new, imperishable beauty” was van de Velde’s phrase for the revolutionary art nouveau style in the 1890s. It captured perfectly the movement’s wish to improve upon and immortalize forms first observed in nature, made forever beautiful by the skilful hands and imagination of human artisans and artists. Art nouveau jewellery became famous for its rebellion against the orthodox naturalism and mimetic impulse of reigning jewellery designs by heightening and distorting Nature in favour of the artificial and imaginative. Inventing new techniques and boldly combining materials in new ways, it offered spectacular imagery in pastel and bold colours that often combined scenes of wild and untamed nature with erotic presentations of the human form, especially the female form. In art nouveau jewellery, dazzling gems are combined with semi-precious or cheap materials such as glass and enamel, sporting flamboyant colours, sinuous curves, and meandering lines. It reinvigorated the decorative arts with its fantastic universe of the imagination, and successfully rebelled against the rigid naturalism and the “tyranny of the diamond” that dominated previous 19th-century jewellery design and craftsmanship (as could be observed in a recent San Francisco exhibition of masterworks by the French master jewellery house Cartier, which displayed a dazzling array of jewellery centred on the diamond).

Although the number of individual pieces of jewellery presented in the catalogue is relatively small (72), and over half of these were made by art nouveau’s unrivalled master jeweller René Lalique, they present a surprisingly comprehensive range of materials, techniques, and motifs. Virtually all of the major designers of this international movement (which started in France and Belgium and spread as far as Russia and the Americas), are represented, from René Lalique to Georges Fouquet, Philippe Wolfers (whose dragonfly pendant-brooch is one of the highlights of the catalogue), Victor Gérard, Emmanuel-Jules-Joseph Descomps, and Henri Vever. The book also highlights and explains the large variety of new materials and innovative techniques, virtuoso craftsmanship, and popular design motifs that made art nouveau jewellery such a success in the 1890s and beyond. In addition, there are 34 figure illustrations of comparative materials such as paintings by Burne-Jones. Odilon Rédon, and others, William Morris’s fabrics and tapestries, Japanese woodblock prints, art nouveau posters, Louis Majorelle’s furniture, Josef Hoffmann’s and Emile Gallé’s household objects, and architectural gems such as Hector Guimard’s Paris metro station entrances, Victor Horta’s staircases, and Henry van de Velde’s foyers, often arranged side by side with the jewellery to give context and trace sources of influence. Gorgeously photographed and attractively presented with 132 colour illustrations, the book also contains two substantial essays, by experts Yvonne J. Markowitz (who curated the Museum of Fine Arts exhibition) and Elyse Zorn Karlin (a jewellery scholar) that usefully place art nouveau jewellery in its cultural and artistic contexts and explain its most important technical and thematic features.

The first of these essays, Markowitz’s “”Art Nouveau Jewelry: An Overview” lays out the most important sources of inspiration for this type of jewellery, from Pre-Raphaelitism to the Symbolist movement and the arts of Japan. Of particular interest to readers of The Eighth Lamp will be Markowitz’s brief discussion of the inspiration provided by the philosophy of John Ruskin (as well as by William Morris), who championed and nurtured the new movement indirectly with his critique of the mechanical, industrialized, despiritualized nature of late Victorian society, which he saw as contributing to the decay of art and craftsmanship in general, and his defence of Pre-Raphaelitism, one of the major influences on art nouveau jewellery. As Markowitz points out, René Lalique, the French master jeweller and founding father of art nouveau jewellery, had been exposed to Ruskin’s writings while studying in London in the late 1870s, and was influenced by the sensuous and organic lines he observed in William Morris’s designs. Markowitz also highlights the interesting role of art dealers such as Siegfried Bing played in bringing Japanese art and culture to the attention of the art nouveau artists and designers, who picked up the flat planes, asymmetrical features, and nature topics found in Japanese woodcuts, fabrics and other objects; indeed, Bing often displayed art nouveau jewellery along with Japanese art and with another major influence, French Symbolist paintings—featuring mythical scenes, dreamy landscapes, and enigmatic hybrid creatures composed of animal and human features—in his Paris gallery, designed by Henry van de Velde.

Markowitz also gives a useful overview of the large range of features of German Jugendstil, Vienna Sezessionsstil, and international variations of the art nouveau style in Scotland, Spain, and the U.S., but I found her final section on materials and techniques the most compelling for a deeper understanding of the truly revolutionary place of art nouveau within the history of jewellery design. Lalique and his followers radically departed from previous jewellery-makers’ priorities and focus on precious materials. Low-cost materials such as pastel-coloured enamel, glass, irregularly shaped (rather than perfectly round) pearls, semi-precious stones, and new favourite gems such as the opal, were boldly combined with more traditional, expensive gems and diamonds, resulting in visually compelling, highly fantastic and colourful creations reminiscent of a painter’s palette. Markowitz writes, “From a technical point of view, Art Nouveau jewellery represents the most innovative and sophisticated jewellery ever created” (22). New enamelling and glass moulding techniques complemented the new availability of non-traditional jewellery materials such as horn and elephant ivory (especially plentiful in Belgium after the Belgian annexation of the Congo in 1885). Horn was particularly suited for use in the wings of dragonflies and moths, favourite motifs at the time, and the soft ivory could be carved into imaginative, low-relief landscape scenes, flower petals, human faces, and more. Lalique also innovated the use of powdered and enamelled glass that could be moulded into landscapes and finished with attractive matte or soft gloss. One lasting result of the art nouveau’s jewellers' masterful innovations in materials and techniques was the general opening up of the best of jewellery design and craftsmanship to a larger, non-traditional range of materials and techniques, as exemplified by the studio jewellery movement of the 1940s and 50s.

The second essay, Karlin’s “Symbols and Motifs in Art Nouveau Jewelry,” then turns to the fascinating iconography of art nouveau jewellery, highlighting the omnipresence of the sensuous whiplash line, the fantastic reinterpretation of forms and motifs observed in nature (particularly delicate plants, leaves, and waterscapes around lily pond imagery), and art nouveau’s obsession with the erotically charged female body. Karlin observes correctly that the latter thematic knot echoed the stereotypical cultural binary of the morally pure Angel in the House on the one hand (the angelic, delicate type of beauty championed by the Pre-Raphaelites and celebrated by poets such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, Tennyson and others), and the dangerous temptress and man-devouring femme fatale on the other, often taking Burne-Jones’ dreamy, languorous females as an inspiration for the presentation of the nude female body. The dramatic symbolism of dragonflies, serpents, Sphinxes, beetles, peacocks or other mythical and symbolic animals symbolism combined with decoratively arranged female faces or the nude female body highlighted Woman’s dangerous and fascinating allure, portraying her as part of a mythical, dreamy, sinister or ecstatic symbolic world populated by mythical creatures and reigned by sinister threats and alluring adventures. As Karlin points out in her essay, the stereotypical fin-de-siècle obsession with the binary of the femme fatale and femme fragile, the man-devouring vamp and the Angel in the House, Eve and Mary, was found in art nouveau jewelry as well as in the culture at large, and even powerful and successful women such as Sarah Bernhardt took advantage of these images to increase their own mystique for the adoring public.

The visual section of Imperishable Beauty is divided into three parts that make it easy to discern Karlin’s lessons about major themes and motifs in art nouveau jewellery. “Flora” contains pieces that showcase the jewellers' representation of colourful leaves, stems, branches, and flowers, using colored enamel, glass, horn, opals and other gems to form breathtakingly delicate, elaborate interpretations of natural forms, whose artificiality and heightened realism mimicked the well-known mantra of Aestheticism, Symbolism, and Decadence: that Art was superior to Nature. “Fauna” with its animal and insect imagery (swans, peacocks, moths, dragonflies , bats, and serpents abound) and “The Human Figure” with its focus on female beauty and eroticism (often shown in poses reminiscent of dance or sensuous swooning) illustrate the striking relationship between nature and the human body and between realism, fantasy and myth in art nouveau. Imperishable Beauty concludes with an appendix containing brief artist biographies (assembled by Susan Ward), an extensively documented list of notes on the illustrations (with basic information about the artist, materials used, or precise dimensions of a particular piece of jewellery, as well as the other), and a glossary of jewellery terms by Toni Strassler.

Past exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues about art nouveau as a movement and an international style have been more comprehensive and informative because of the breadth of their approach to the topic of art nouveau, and their sheer size. By comparison, the National Gallery of Art’s Art Nouveau, 1890-1914 exhibition in Washington, DC (previously at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London) was quite large and included a whole range of design objects that included not only spectacular jewellery but also furniture, architecture, and a broad spectrum of household items and other design objects that together formed a spectacular overview of the movement’s aesthetic goals and main motifs in context and comparison across various areas of culture and design. In its specialization on art nouveau jewellery of one particular American collection, however, Imperishable Beauty does an exquisite job in presenting a mouth-watering introduction that poignantly illustrates the sheer spectacle and beauty of art nouveau jewellery.