November 30, 2019
If Walt Whitman, whose bicentenary all New York has been celebrating, can come across as absolutely contemporary — a big-bearded hipster tipping back Pabst Blue Ribbons and spouting poetry in some Brooklyn dive bar — John Ruskin, also 200 this year, seems stubbornly and remotely Victorian. The Yale Center for British Art’s Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin aims to assert Ruskin’s contemporary relevance while firmly retaining his 19th-century context.