Word: ruskins
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...scaly truth is that taste changes; and an anthology of writings on Reni at the end of the catalog charts his fall. You see the first puff of feathers detach itself from the wing of the Angelic Limner in 1846, when John Ruskin lets fly in Modern Painters: "A taint and stain, and jarring discord . . . marked sensuality and impurity." In 1895 Romain Rolland downed him: "He was able to deceive two entire centuries . . . Guido's laborious conscientiousness is void of thought and true feeling." Two years later, Bernard Berenson wrung his neck: "We turn away from Guido Reni with disgust...
...seeing a phantom light over his bed) and timid to the point of paranoia (he refused any food sent to him as a gift for fear that it was poisoned), he was a compulsive gambler. It was his only vice. His sex life should certainly have appealed to prudish Ruskin, for it did not exist: he shunned women in the fear that they might be witches. But gambling debts led him to churn out hack paintings, with predictable results for his reputation...
Hammered copper, hand-thrown pottery, "honest" furniture even when machine-made -- these were the tenets that created the spare yet homey Treasures of the American Arts and Crafts Movement: 1890-1920, handsomely surveyed by Tod M. Volpe and Beth Cathers (Abrams; 206 pages; $49.50). Founded in Britain by John Ruskin and William Morris as an antidote to the shoddy wares of the Industrial Revolution, the movement was brought to the U.S. by Gustav Stickley. Its principles have blurred, but the work produced by its philosopher-practitio ners endures. Example: the incised birds that flit across the flowers on Mary Frances...
Middle-aged married female readers will be unsympathetic and even gleeful about Sherman's downfall. He is driving his young mistress Maria Ruskin home from Kennedy International Airport and feeling on top of the world when he mistakenly turns off the highway and gets lost in the South Bronx. There is a confrontation with two black youths, a scuffle, a hasty escape with the girlfriend now behind the wheel of his black Mercedes sports car. There is also a suspicious thok! against...
...like short- order disapproval, whipped up automatically for predictable occasions. The computer is born, the computer is pilloried. An oil rig goes up, conservationists marshal their forces. Nineteenth century minds may have planted the seeds of our deterioration alongside our advancement, but they also--in people like Freud, Carlyle, Ruskin and Arnold himself--taught us how to worry. At the same time, critics, grown somewhat more compromising, are no longer certain that science and technology signal the end of the world. Thomas Pynchon wrote in the New York Times Book Review last year that modern Luddites seem to be adjusting...