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Ruskin the radical: why the Victorian critic is back with a vengeance

He believed life should be beautiful, inequality was an outrage and that capitalism lead to aesthetic degradation. No wonder the quintessential Victorian speaks so powerfully to our times

It is a familiar tableau of urban Britain. Labourers dig a tunnel, a porter delivers goods, a man swigs beer, there are young children and dogs, police and aristocrats look on; there is dirt and beauty and life all thrown together. Ford Madox Brown’s pre-Raphaelite painting Work (c 1852-63) has been reworked many times. In the latest effort, the comic artist Hunt Emerson gives it a knockabout cartoon feel, but with a distinctly current edge: the cast is multicultural, the tools more hi-tech and there are allusions to social dysfunction, the gig economy and the housing crisis.

Emerson’s update also alludes to the social critiques of Brown’s contemporary and friend, John Ruskin: a writer, artist, social critic, polymath and aesthete. Emerson’s illustration is the central image of A World of ... Work, an exhibition at Brantwood, Ruskin’s former home in Cumbria. It also figures in How to Work, a comic made in collaboration with writer Kevin Jackson, and one of three in their recent collection , Bloke’s Progress, a playful re-examining of Ruskin’s ideas through the eyes of a modern everyman, Darren Bloke.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2C7HstQ
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