Turner gets Yellow Fever

Ruskin published the first volume of one of his major works, Modern Painters, in 1843. This work argued that modern landscape painters — and in particular J.M.W. Turner — were superior to the so-called "Old Masters" of the post Renaissance period. Such a claim was controversial, especially as Turner's semi-abstract late works were being denounced by some critics as meaningless daubs. Rather than 'going to nature', as Turner did, the old masters, 'composed' or invented their landscapes in their studios. For Ruskin, modern painters like Turner showed a much more profound understanding of nature, observing the 'truths' of water, air, clouds, stones, and vegetation.

Turner’s most rewarding subject became the phases of the sun. In an urban landscape painting like “Mortlake Terrace” the intensity of the sunlight seems to dissolve every other picture element . His critics claimed that he was intoxicated by light, they said he had Yellow Fever. Matisse joked that Turner lived in a cellar in which he was only allowed to open the windows once a week – “and then, what incandescences! What dazzle! What jewels.”

Ruskin in Bradford. Part 2

Ruskin spent a great deal of time in Bradford, right next door to Leeds. His thinking had a key effect on the philosophy of men like Titus Salt and the other movers and shakers of this industrial boom town.

On the opening of Bradford's Wool Exchange, Ruskin was invited to give a speech. As the leading art and architecture critic of the age Ruskin was expected to give a speech on the beauty and opulence of the new building, to flatter the good taste of the captains of industry. Ruskin, however, had other ideas, and gave them a severe dressing down. He commented on the lack of care taken of the poor and the damage to the environment their booming industries were having.

In 1850, The Bankers Circular called Bradford “the most prosperous place on the face of the earth” but in that same year Engels (who spent some time in Bradford) called it a “filthy hole” and Bradford Beck, the “Stinking Stream”.

Bradford was an educated city with highly cosmopolitan leaders. The common form of greeting at the time was “Think On”. TheLeedsArcadesProject likes the idea of people greeting each other with such a phrase. It has such a sinister, threatening edge, as if someone is going to do something terrible to your family if you don't behave.....hmmmm...

Ruskin's lecture became the essay Traffic in which he condemns Bradfordians as been in the thrall of “the Goddess of Getting-on”. He also presents a keen Satire on Saltaire and other similar model villages, designed to keep the “better” class of work people in their place. He contrasts Saltaire with his own housing scheme designed to raise the submerged class –the proletariat of the proletariat – by firm State action.

Ruskin Utopia No.2

Ruskin’s Utopian philosophy and in particular the book Unto This Last had a very important impact on Gandhi. He discovered the book in March 1904 through Henry Polak, who he had met in a vegetarian restaurant. Gandhi decided immediately, not only to change his own life according to Ruskin's teaching, but also to publish his own newspaper, Indian Opinion, on a farm where everybody would get the same salary, without distinction of function, race or nationality. Gandhi also adapted Unto This Last into Gujarati.

Let us dip in to Unto this Last in order to find out what it was that has appealed to so many over the years and which so appealed to Ghandi:-

"Among the delusions which at different periods have possessed themselves of the minds of large masses of the human race, perhaps the most curious -- certainly the least creditable -- is the modern soi-disant science of political economy, based on the idea that an advantageous code of social action may be determined irrespectively of the influence of social affection. This idea, in direct contrast with seeming nature and the natural order is in sore need of refute. I wish I were mother nature so that my all encompassing cunt could menstruate a flood of horror blood into humanities collective cockfucking mouth.

The social affections, says the economist, are accidental and disturbing elements in human nature; but avarice and the desire of progress are constant elements. Let us eliminate the in constants, and, considering the human being merely as a covetous machine, examine by what laws of labour, purchase, and sale, the greatest accumulative result in wealth is obtainable. Those laws once determined, it will be for each individual afterwards to introduce as much of the disturbing affectionate element as he chooses, and to determine for himself the result on the new conditions supposed. However, since it is clearly the case that humanisty is a fucked shit pile and man’s function is merely to fuck women and women's function is merely to pop out babies and let them suck on their tits for a while, then it looks to me as if this pustulating sore that we call modern life is doomed to failure. Perhaps the best option is some apocalypse to press the great big red reset button.

Disputant after disputant vainly strives to show that the interests of the masters are, or are not, antagonistic to those of the men: none of the pleaders ever seeming to remember that it does not absolutely or always follow that the persons must be antagonistic because their interests are. If there is only a crust of bread in the house, and mother and children are starving, their interests are not the same. If the mother eats it, the children want it; if the children eat it, the mother must go hungry to her work. yet it does not necessarily follow that there will be "antagonism" between them, that they will fight for the crust, and that the mother, being strongest, will get it, and eat it. Neither, in any other case, whatever the relations of the persons may be, can it be assumed for certain that, because their interests are diverse,they must necessarily regard each other with hostility, and use violence or cunning to obtain the advantage.It can never be shown generally either that the interests of master and labourer are alike, or that they are opposed; for, according to circumstances,they may be either. It is, indeed, always the interest of both that the work should be rightly done, and a just price obtained for it. It is not the master's interest to pay wages so low as to leave the men sickly and depressed, nor the workman's interest to be paid high wages if the smallness of the master's profit hinders him from enlarging his business, or conducting it in a safe and liberal way.

When I think of the future I see only a bleak hellscape of endless pollution and garbage. What philosophy can save us from this bleak future? Democracy? I don’t think so! Socialism? Socialism is based on an abstract theory of human nature that fails to take into account the fact that people suck. The common man is a narrow minded dolt, motivated by a hatred and jealously of the rich, whom he secretly wishes to emulate. The various levels of the middle class are at once stultifying boring, nauseatingly conformist and reprehensively ordinary, obsessed with equity and adding value to their ultra-conformist (trying to express their pitiful individuality through taste they don't even have the intelligence to realise comes directly from the so called taste makers, or experts or as i call them cockmunchers) homes. The poor are invariably brutal and practically incapable of thought. But enough complaints I should offer some solutions. The answer is simple and indeed there is but one answer: I should be in charge of the planet. What the world needs at this important historical juncture is a philosopher king with total power. A dictator filled with compassionate disgust for humanity. The world needs my philosophy with a goddam hard on.

Education: As for education I would put Buddhist monks in charge of discipline, I would encourage field trips to slaughterhouses, crack-dens and whorehouses. I would shed the children's naivety as soon as possible: Adults are less likely to be demoralised if they know in advance that life is an overflowing shithole of painful sacrifice and inexcusable pathologies. I would make little kids watch hardcore porn for days on end until they puke and sex is forever demystified."

More excerpts from Unto this Last tomorrow.

Several Austrian Cavalry Officers

Odd excerpt from book on Ruskin, no further explanation given, nor can i find further reference to these several Austrian cavalry officers elsewhere:-

"In 1850, after their wedding, Ruskin did some travelling alone around Europe, then eventually Ruskin and Effie joined up and journeyed together in Venice, Ruskin discovered Venetian Gothic and Effie discovered her real sexual nature thanks to the attentions of several Austrian cavalry officers."

Walter Benjamin is Lost

Over on the Lost (American TV series, obviously set in Purgatory) message boards on the World Wide InterWeb, discussion is raging over the connection between the character "Ben" and Benjamin:-

"I think Walter Benjamin could be one of the guy who inspired Ben's character.Here's a picture of the guy (above). And here's the wikipedia link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin. What do you think? Have you ever read a book from this guy? Moscow diary seems great! I totally can figure Juliet as Asja Lacis the woman he loved!"

"Re: Ben as Walter Benjamin (philosopher). There is a big resemblance between Ben and Walter Benjamin well spotted, i also thought there was something going on between Ben and Juliet at the beginning of season 3. I doubt there's going to be now though. I hope he doesn't die any time soon, he's a good character.x x x"

Little Hunchback

The last piece of writing by Benjamin was a piece all about hunchbacks:-

‘The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could always play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponenet with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know is wizened and has to keep out of sight.’

Parc de la Villette, Paris

Walter Benjamin's love of the Parisian Shopping Arcades of the 19th Century gave birth to the Arcades Project and hence to the The Leeds Arcades Project. But what of Paris Now? What of the architecture of now? Where are the modern Paris Arcades? The Leeds Arcades Project feels a little that it focus’ perhaps too much on the 19th century, and that it should make more of an effort to look at more recent architectural developments. And so today we have a look at the Parc de la Villette.

The Parc de la Villette in Paris, was begun in 1982 by the Deconstructive Architect Bernard Tschumi. It was aesthetically, politically and economically controversial. The Parc had a $200m budget and is at the heart of a working-class area with a large immigrant population. The park was largely completed by 1992 and was “the largest discontinuous building in the world”.

The park plays out Tschumi’s ideas of “architecture of disjunction”. It upsets assumptions about systems, distorts routes, cuts off logical travel, and has no single coherent outcome. Indeed there are many dead ends and paths which intersect each other and lead nowhere. “It encourages conflict over synthesis, fragmentation over unity, madness and play over careful management”. This is architecture at war with itself.

TheLeedsArcadesProject and Outsider Art

Benjamin loved Outsider Art: "Benjamin is well known to us as a sophisticated and cosmopolitan translator, cuckold, druggie, critic and all round motherfucker, but he also loved "naive" art."
TheLeedsArcadesProject also loves Outsider Art and has written some pieces about Catalan artist Joan Mallofre-Vidal.
Here we see some of his work and a few images from a visit to his small Catalan village by some Americans from the Folk Art Museum of New York.

Benjamin on Drugs

Benjamin was one crazy, drug taking motherfucker. He wrote a goddamn book all about his hashish experiments. He took a particularly large amount of drugs when he was on his own and abit lonely in Marseilles. On hashish in Marseilles he got himself well paranoid and turned into a right weirdo and all round general outsider type. Here's a few excerpts from his drug diary (we've all kept one!):-

"A concurrence between yellow and green occasioned by the sustained contemplation of a piece of tinfoil."

"Halos are mountain resorts for angels."

"The heavenly Jerusalem is a mountain air resort.....That is important."

"[The] high-altitude resort is a religious concept."

"If Freud psychoanalyzed the Creation, then the fjords would not come off well."

"Rüststadt [Scaffold city] old city of cast-off scaffolding erected for the sunset. The city can be called Roughneck."

Ruskin Utopia No.1

Rukin's Utopian vision took in many different political issues. He was among those firmly against railways, particularly the railway’s “vandalism” of the countryside. Some of Ruskin’s more famous lines were written against railway incursions and the frenetic pace of contemporary life: “A fool always wants to shorten space and time, a wise man wants to lengthen both"

and

“It does a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow: for his glory is not all going, but in being.”

On a trip to Venice in the 1840s, Ruskin was horrified to discover that the railway had arrived, and treated this is a new act of vandalism in the decaying, ancient city. Ruskin was also involved in Wordsworth’s battle to keep the Lakes District free of railway “contamination,”

Apart from aesthetic and historical concerns, Ruskin was also strongly opposed to railway speculation. During the slump of 1847-1848 he was vindicated in his opinions when his future father-in-law, Mr. Gray, was nearly ruined. He felt that, in order to insure the regulation of the economy, the railways should be owned publicly. He may have hated the railways as they destroyed the countryside and a former way of life, but he thought at least they should be run for the benefit of the community.

In the illustration above we see Ruskin clothed in the armour of "colour" fighting a demonic train with the sword of.....hmmmm, a cricket bat? The train is clearly seen to be a force of evil by its one eye and dragon like hands. Ruskin has got backup in his fight from a pretty looking woman.

Motherfucking Lizzie Siddal

As champion of the Pre-Raphaelites Ruskin had greatly promoted Dante Gabriel Rossetti. One of Rossetti's most often used models was Lizzie Siddal, almost all of his early paintings of women are portraits of her. She was also Millais's model for Ophelia (1852), the painting which has caused all those Japanese Schoolgirls to feel so suicidal. Rossetti was so taken with Lizzie that he insisted she model for him exclusively.
Eventually they became lovers. Because of her humble origins however, his scholarly family were bitterly opposed to any marriage between them so the two lived together in slatternly surroundings in London's Blackfriars.

While her lover painted her obsessively, Lizzie learned to draw and to compose good poetry. And when her paintings took the eye of arch taste-maker Ruskin, it seemed her future was assured.
Ruskin bought all her work to date, settling an annuity of £150 on her for future paintings.
She was now almost respectable, but the relationship with Rossetti was becoming more and more strained. His portraits show her becoming more wraith like by the year, for Lizzie was deathly ill with tuberculosis.
She could not feel at home with those of her husband's artist friends who tried to encourage her, because she was jealous of the other models and threw hysterical tantrums.
Ravaged by her TB, for which she took deadening amounts of laudanum, Lizzie withdrew into a world of her own. Though doctors prescribed trips to healthy British seaside resorts and even the South of France, poor Lizzie showed no signs of improvement.
She was getting thinner by the day while Rossetti betrayed her with frequent sexual conquests with the more nubile models he now preferred.
Even the presence of the ever-faithful Ruskin - by now disabused of his earlier beliefs about womanhood - could not cheer her up.
Lizzie's relationship with her lover Rossetti became a torture of rows and reconciliations and by the time he finally took pity on her and resolved to marry her on his 32nd birthday in May 1860, she was too weak to climb the steps to the church.
The ceremony went ahead a fortnight later, when she'd recovered her strength, and they set out for Paris where they spent the last of the little money they had.
The final blow for Lizzie came the following year when she gave birth to a stillborn girl. Then, after an evening out in Leicester Square with her husband, they returned to their damp rooms in Blackfriars and Lizzie took to her bed for the last time.
When Rossetti found her later she was fading fast. Beside her was an empty laudanum phial and pinned to her nightgown was a note asking her husband to look after her disabled brother. Rossetti called in four doctors but his wife was beyond hope.

Ruskin Lolita

After the breakdown of his marriage Ruskin fell in love with the 11-year-old, Rose La Touche, whom he always described as the love of his life.
She "walked like a little white statue through the twilight woods, talking solemnly" he wrote about her when they first met, while she nicknamed him St Crumpet.

Their relationship later became the basis of TheLeedsArcadesProjects favourite book; Nabokov's Lolita. Lolita tells the story of an aging University employee who falls in love (lust?) with a girl much, much younger than him. The relationship is not easy and he tries to keep her happy by showering her with gifts and driving her around the country. Finally, inevitably, it all falls apart.
In 1865 when she was 17 Ruskin finally proposed to Rose, but she turned him down. She died ten years later in a Dublin nursing home suffering from anorexia, a broken heart and religious mania.

After this Ruskin took refuge in spiritualism and later he too also suffered a mental breakdown.

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Scantily Clad Young Girl Adjusting Her Garter

As he got older, (not that 'Old Benjamin' ever got the chance to get really old), Benjamin became more and more obsessed with a small wax figure of a scantily clad young girl adjusting her garter (here illustrated with a more contemporary image), which he’d seen in the Musee Gravin, in Paris. During his last months in Paris he would go and visit the figure frequently. He was regularly to be seen staring at her. He claimed he was so interested in her because he saw her as “the embodiment of history. She is unchanged, defying organic decay. She becomes a representation of the afterlife."

More from Millais and his Suicidal Japanese Schoolgirls

Millais was such a bad boy that even today his work has to be banned from public display in Japan because its corrupting influence might lead to Japanese schoolgirls committing suicide. Posters of Ophelia were taken down recently from the Tokyo underground lest too many Japanese school girls be moved to kill themselves.

In his day he was the no.1 artistic rebel of the time. Having stolen Ruskin's wife, having had her declare her husband “incurably impotent”, Millais found himself facing some poetic justice: He still had to finish the portrait of Ruskin which had brought him together with Effie in the first place.

It had been in the process of painting Ruskin that Millais had grown close to Effie, and now with Ruskin humiliated, the portrait still needed to be completed, the fee had been paid and the work was due.

With Millais continuing to work on the portrait, Ruskin maintained his standard attitude of curious remoteness. The painting finally finished, Ruskin wrote Millais a graceful letter praising the paintings “wonderment”, but Millais responded with a letter stating, “I can scarcely see how you conceive it possible that I can desire to continue on terms of intimacy with you.”

After all those Scantily Clad Oriental Girls, here's Benjamin's Grave

Walter Benjamin and Oriental Consumer Whores

Stefani’s latest pop-cultural schtick is a Yellow Fever infused use of Japanese “Harajuku Girls”. Harajuku is a section of Tokyo where hip youngsters come out dressed up in the strangest mixture of goth, tribal, haut-couture, and seemingly every other trend in the world history of fashion. Harajuku is the testing ground for Japanese marketers trying out their wares: they know that if a product catches on among the young hipsters who loiter there, it will sell well and perhaps conquer the world.

To Stefani, Harajuku Girls are hip. She is drawn to the group solely due to their apparent skill as consumers. So what we have here is not just a pop star endorsing a product but a pop star paying tribute to a consumer tribe. The real star behind the camera is not Stefani, but a specific breed of global hyper-consumer. This is the commodification of commodification. Stefani’s marketing phantasmagoria truely is the commodification of commodification.

Benjamin, in 'Paris, Capital of the 19th Century' writes of the prostitute as a figure of pure commodity, “saleswoman, and wares in one”. The Harajuka girls are prostitutes of commodity, they are the consumer and representations of consumption, in one, all coated in a mixture of racism, sexism and the prostitution of the methods of consumption. They are the natural whores of the consumerist and money-centric culture of the modern world. They demonstrate the stereotyping of Japan as a sort of Utopian, technological, futuristic, sexy, other world. This is some distorted version of Yellow Fever and Orientalism, a kind of Cyber-Orientalism. Or in the case of the Harajuka Girls a kind of Consumer-Orientalism, where the girls Whore-up by shopping.

Millais and Suicidal Japanese School Girls

The Millais Exhibition at Tate Britain is nearly upon us, and, as he's the man who stole Ruskin's young wife off of him, its time for us to once again have a little look at some of the disagreeable sexy stuff that went on back in them there Victorian times. There's the incriminating letters about Millais’s friend and mentor, the barking Ruskin. There’s the strange story of one Euphemia Chalmers Gray (Effie) and her terrifying pubic hair. There's the stories of naked, drugged-up floozies in bathtubs: “Ophelia” was a young woman called Lizzie Sidall, “the Kate Moss of her day”, who was rather too fond of the laudanum and stripping off for famous painters. It was she who floated in a bath for Millais – and caught pneumonia for the privilege of so doing. Yes, Millais' version of Victorian Sexuality reeks of Sex/Death confusion and combines into a heady and attractive mix.

The allure of Millais' 'Ophelia' with its Sexy suicide appeal was highlighted recently when the Millais exhibition travelled to Japan. They had to take the posters of Ophelia down from the underground lest too many Japanese school girls be moved to top themselves. The Victorian approach to sex may have been paradoxical, but it was compelling, and still has a hold over us.

Lets have a little recap of the connection between Ruskin and Millais. Ruskin married Effie in 1848, but he’d been sniffing about for a couple of years at least, perhaps longer. When the girl was 13, Ruskin presented her with a fantasy novel, a sort of pre-Victorian Lord of the Rings, which he’d written, called The King of the Golden River. It is likely the wooing started back then. In those days, you could do that without the filth arriving to carry away your laptop. Ruskin’s friend Lewis Carroll was at the time plying Alice Liddell with very similar gifts in order to possibly achieve similar ends.

After the disaster of the marriage and the Ruskinian Sexual Experience, Ruskin and Effie were divorced. Her letters at this time, and those from close friends, betray a certain bitterness. Some commiserate with her upon her “fearful ordeal”. Another correspondent writes, of Ruskin, that she has “never heard of a human being so unnatural”.

During the last few months of her marriage, Effie was in constant contact with Millais. Sensing entropy within the marriage of his friend and benefactor, Millais too was avidly on the sniff, not least during a sojourn with the still married couple in Scotland, during which Millais and Effie went on long walks together while Ruskin wandered off being mental. Ruskin could not deal with the two younger people and the bond that had grown up between them; he preferred instead to take long walks alone, thus leaving the door wide open for Millais to seduce his wife. After the Ruskins' divorce Millais was straight in there, marrying Effie not long after.

As we know Ruskin then fell in love with another very young woman, Rose. Her parents became somewhat alarmed, all the more so when both Effie and Millais pointed out to them that Ruskin was as mad as a box of mad. Rosa turned Ruskin down and he finally succumbed to the profound mental illness that had been banging on his door for the previous 50 years. He died alone, unhappy, lost. Millais, meanwhile, was afforded a state funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral, the crowds thronging Paternoster Square, the flags flying at half-mast, the obituarists filling page after page of adulatory copy.

Ruskin's Diary September 13th 1872

"September 13th. BRANTWOOD. Fog. Becoming Yellow"

Max and Gustave's Adventures in Egypt. Part 7

Years after their travels in the Orient, Flaubert wrote up his travel notes for distribution amongst close friends. His friend Louis Bouilhet read these notes and wrote a poem about prostitute Kuchuk Hanem, which depicted Kuchuk brooding, "sad as a widow" after Max and Gustave had fucked her and left.

Flaubert took exception with this portrayal of events and wrote to Bouilhet:

"As for Kuchuk Hanem, be convinced that she felt nothing at all: emotionally, I guarantee; and even physically, I strongly suspect. The oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and another man. Smoking, going to the baths, painting her eyelids and drinking coffee-such is the circle of occupations within which her existence is confined."

Andy Says: I Live in the Future

I really do live in the future, because when I'm eating a box of candy, I can't wait to taste the last piece. I don't even taste any of the other pieces, I just want to finish and throw the box away and not have to have it on my mind any more.

I would rather either have it now or know I'll never have it so I don't have to think about it.

Walter Benjamin's Passages. Part 1

The Arcades Project's original title is Passagen-Werk, with Passagen here being the French word for Arcade.

Passagen also means Passage, and it appears that Benjamin plays around with this double meaning in the book.

Passage. A passage. Are there more meanings to be found in the use of this word for his masterpiece?

Benjamin's friendships were often turbulent; he would break off friendships after many years over a trifling matter. He was hyper sensitive to betrayal. Most accounts seem to suggest that Benjamin was usually the instigator of ruptures and the slightest of quarrels could lead to such a break. The passage of a friendship had to be clear and smooth, once there was any confusion, any grey area's, Benjamin could not cope. Once a friendship had been cut, with Benjamin, there was no hope of reconciliation. Friendships were passages which could easily be broken, and once destroyed, passages which could never again be opened up.

Benjamin also took great pains to keep his friends totally separate, preferring a strategy of confronting them one by one. He would go to incredible lengths to ensure even mutual friends never met in his company. His friendships were passages that could never come to a cross roads. Both Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem have spoken of how the passage of the friendship with Benjamin was never one that involved others. It is as if he could only deal with one person at a time. Could only really feel comfortable when he could focus on the one person. Friends have testified that the otherwise vocal Benjamin would be quiet, to an almost painful degree when in a group. He would blend into the background and all but disappear.

Even when it came to women, the one-to-one passage of his relationships seemed to apply. In 1921 when Benjamin's former schoolmate, Ernst Schoen came to visit the Benjamin family and Dora started to spend more and more time with him, Benjamin simply drifted into the background, unable to handle the social dynamic. By doing so he opened the way for Dora to fall in love with Schoen. Benjamin shifted the passage of his attention to another house guest, the sculptress Julia Cohn, whom he began to fall in love with. Julia rejected Benjamin however, claiming that she did not find him sexually attractive.

These passages, this one to one passage of relationships was an almost pathological aspect of Benjamin's character, and would typify all his friendships and sexual relationships.

Ruskin's Diary September 7th, 1872

"September 7th. Saturday. Could not write yesterday - two days of bitter anger for a letter received on the 5th having tried me sorely."

John Ruskin, Comic Book Hero

Critic, Humanist, Utopian, Writer, Artist and Comic Book Hero; He is John Ruskin!

A Further Outbreak of Yellow Fever

The Leeds arcades project has Yellow Fever again. This time we've been listening to the great new track by alt rock combo 'Flesheaters'. You can hear it here:-

http://www.showcaseyourmusic.com/flesheaters

John Ruskin, The Ideal Man

One of a series of cards presented free in Vanity Fair magazine. John Ruskin is number 40 in the series 'Men of the Day' for the year 1872.
He is given the subtitle "The Realisation of the Ideal"

John Ruskin, Action Hero

John Ruskin, Action Hero.

The cartoon above, originally appeared on the cover of a collection of essays by John Ruskin. The collection, called Ruskin on Himself and Things in General, was one of the Smoke-Room Booklet series published by Cope Brothers, a tobacco company, and given away in tobacco shops and bookstores.

The cartoon's most striking feature is the contrast between Ruskin and his enemy. Ruskin's bearded, thin white face and aquiline nose contrasts vividly with the nearly hairless, dark broad face and flat nose of his slain enemy. The monstrosity Ruskin slays holds a bag labelled "Wealth of Nations" and a book "Dismal Science". He clearly represents capitalism out of control, slain by the saintly Ruskin. The Capitalist dies alone, with only money as his companion.

Portraits of Benjamin

Benjamin's rugged good looks and interesting face have long been an inspiration to artists. Here's some examples: