In “Unto This Last and Other Essays on Art and Political Economy” (1860), which gives the exhibition its title, Ruskin “sees” interconnected social injustices. He attacks economic inequality. Later, he sets out to establish a utopian community in working-class Sheffield, England. In one gallery we see his influence on “progressive thinkers worldwide.” Gandhi said that reading “Unto This Last” in 1904 transformed his life and ideas.
The novelist Charlotte Brontë exclaimed after reading that first volume, “I feel now as if I had been walking blindfold[ed]—this book seems to give me eyes.”
‘If you can paint one leaf,” John Ruskin once declared, “you can paint the world.” And in “Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin”—the hypnotically potent (though flawed) exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art marking the bicentennial of his birth—we see how wonderfully he kept trying.
A Booklover’s Guide to New York, by Cleo Le-Tan, with drawings by Pierre Le-Tan (Rizzoli): As Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons, some New Yorkers measure theirs in departed bookstores. I weep most for Crawford Doyle, which in 2017 closed after twenty-one years in stately residence on Madison Avenue at Eighty-first Street. But there have been compensations among the heartaches. In 2014, Albertine opened at the French Embassy, on Fifth Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street. The gorgeous store cheekily asserts on billboards that “The best bookstore in France is in New York City.” And Rizzoli, which lost its lease in its double-front townhouse on Fifty-seventh Street in 2014, later reopened on Broadway and Twenty-sixth Street, in a space nearly as grand as the original. Cleo Le-Tan’s A Booklover’s Guide to New York is expressly made for those who view the city’s bookstores as integral to its being. Documenting the shops, sellers, libraries, and bibliophiles of the city, the illustrated book is a worthy addition to any personal collection.
In “Unto This Last and Other Essays on Art and Political Economy” (1860), which gives the exhibition its title, Ruskin “sees” interconnected social injustices. He attacks economic inequality. Later, he sets out to establish a utopian community in working-class Sheffield, England. In one gallery we see his influence on “progressive thinkers worldwide.” Gandhi said that reading “Unto This Last” in 1904 transformed his life and ideas.
‘If you can paint one leaf,” John Ruskin once declared, “you can paint the world.” And in “Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin”—the hypnotically potent (though flawed) exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art marking the bicentennial of his birth—we see how wonderfully he kept trying.
A Booklover’s Guide to New York, by Cleo Le-Tan, with drawings by Pierre Le-Tan (Rizzoli)
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