The article reviews two biographies, highlighting Albert C. Barnes's mission to democratize art through the Barnes Foundation and Benjamin Franklin's innovative yet environmentally costly inventions during the Little Ice Age. Gopnik details Barnes's contradictions, balancing high ideals with personal flaws, while Chaplin illustrates Franklin's technological advancements and their impacts, touching upon themes of equity and environmental sustainability relevant today. Both works underscore how historical figures attempted to offer solutions to societal issues, albeit with complex, often unintended consequences.
Gopnik's animated biography chronicles Barnes's lifelong campaign to make art accessible to the working class, a democratizing impulse that found its greatest expression in the Barnes Foundation.
In the mid-eighteenth century, during a period of cooling known as the Little Ice Age, Benjamin Franklin began designing a heating device that would be more efficient than the traditional fireplace.
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