- Email: [email protected]
New impressions
DISSECTING ROOM
New impressions
Life on Mars Mars: the Inside Story of the Red Planet Heather Couper, Nigel Henbest. London: Headline, 2001. Pp 218. £25.00. ISBN 0747235430.
Impressionist Still Life An exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA, until June 9, 2002. hat is the best exhibition so far this year in the USA? In my view the answer is easy: Impressionist Still Life, a superb selection of 90 oil paintings by 16 artists active in France during the second half of the 19th century. Whether you are a connoisseur, scholar, or weekend gallery-goer you will find much to admire. Almost every work on display is beautiful, heartfelt, and thought provoking. The subjects are traditional; their rendering, avant garde. It will be a long time before another show is so finely tuned in terms of exceptional canvases, great artists, and a fresh perspective on a theme that has never before seemed especially challenging.
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums/Gift of Walter E Sachs
W
outdoor scenes. They found myriad ways to arrange and then depict manmade and natural objects on tabletops. You will never see Courbet, Monet, Caillebotte, Renoir, Degas, or Van Gogh in the same light again. Now you will be able to picture game birds, peaches à la Chardin, and plates of food and fruit. There are also Gauguins that resemble Cezannesque still lifes. Having work by Gustave Courbet and Henri Fantin-Latour anchor one end of the show may be the pivotal decision that sets this show apart from so many other surveys of Impressionism. The meaning of the phrase “continuity and change” could not be more clearly displayed. An unlikely pairing of two artists still rooted in tradition, but innovators nonetheless, leads to the core of the show and a subsequent generation of artists who boldly initiated new practices while still not disavowing their past. Pictures by Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne close the exhibition and reveal how radically this trio treated colour, texture, and form. The intelligent hanging of the pictures also calls more attention than usual to the contributions of Eva Gonzales, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt. Gonzales’s lovely pair of lady’s slippers on a patterned rug, Morisot’s enchanting bird cage, and Cassatt’s shimmering tea service also expand notions of Impressionism’s parameters. Still lifes can be worn, heard, and handled. Fantin-Latour once explained, “I tried to make a painting representing things as they are found in nature; I put a great deal of thought . . . into the idea of making it look like a natural arrangement of random objects. This is an idea that I have been mulling over a great deal: giving the appearance of a total lack of artistry.” We know better.
Paul Gauguin, Still Life with Peaches (1889)
If you thought you knew the history of Impressionism, you will be pleasantly surprised by the way curators George Shackelford and Eliza Rathbone have taken familiar material and clarified and expanded previous assumptions and interpretations. Instead of presenting a broad panorama of serene seascapes, bustling cityscapes, portraits of wives, children, and patrons, the organisers honed in on the expressive possibilities of the seemingly neutral genre of stilllife painting. These exceptional canvases tend to be not as large as those devoted to supposedly grander themes; yet within the confines of smaller dimensions, colours are more radiant and the brushwork even more bold. It turns out that flowers in a vase or apples in a compote dish intrigued rather than bored this group of artists, whose work is usually associated with
Phyllis Tuchmann e-mail: [email protected]
THE LANCET • Vol 359 • April 27, 2002 • www.thelancet.com
he subtitle of Mars: the Inside Story of the Red Planet is misleading. This book has less to do with Mars than with the people who study Mars and the possibility of life on our nearest planetary neighbour. Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest focus on work undertaken in the 1990s, when evidence started to mount that Mars might once have been alive. Ambiguous pictures taken from orbit seemed to show that Mars had once had rivers, lakes, and oceans— and if the planet had once been warm enough to support liquid water, perhaps it had supported life. Then, in 1996, NASA announced that it had discovered fossilised bacteria in a meteorite from Mars. Despite the media storm that surrounded the story, the proof was far from conclusive—although other experiments have backed up the claim. And Couper and Henbest, two of the most prominent media astronomers in the UK, clearly believe that the fossils are truly Martian. This is a peculiar book, which feels more like the transcript of a television series. The authors narrate in the first person and record their journeys around the world in a style more suited to travel journalism than science writing. Indeed, when we hear from the scientists themselves, it is one soundbite at a time. This style means that there is little hard information, and the meat of the chapters is difficult to find. But there are some advantages. Few books before have conveyed the excitement of planetary science, and the sense of adventure that the researchers felt as the first images came in from the surface of an alien world. As a coffee-table book, Mars is excellent. Even NASA’s own publications do not do as good a job of depicting Mars for a casual reader. But if you want to find out details about any aspect of Mars or Mars exploration, this book is not for you—it does not live up to its promise of providing the inside story of a fascinating planet.
T
Alexander Campbell e-mail: [email protected]
1533
New impressions
Life on Mars Mars: the Inside Story of the Red Planet Heather Couper, Nigel Henbest. London: Headline, 2001. Pp 218. £25.00. ISBN 0747235430.
Impressionist Still Life An exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA, until June 9, 2002. hat is the best exhibition so far this year in the USA? In my view the answer is easy: Impressionist Still Life, a superb selection of 90 oil paintings by 16 artists active in France during the second half of the 19th century. Whether you are a connoisseur, scholar, or weekend gallery-goer you will find much to admire. Almost every work on display is beautiful, heartfelt, and thought provoking. The subjects are traditional; their rendering, avant garde. It will be a long time before another show is so finely tuned in terms of exceptional canvases, great artists, and a fresh perspective on a theme that has never before seemed especially challenging.
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums/Gift of Walter E Sachs
W
outdoor scenes. They found myriad ways to arrange and then depict manmade and natural objects on tabletops. You will never see Courbet, Monet, Caillebotte, Renoir, Degas, or Van Gogh in the same light again. Now you will be able to picture game birds, peaches à la Chardin, and plates of food and fruit. There are also Gauguins that resemble Cezannesque still lifes. Having work by Gustave Courbet and Henri Fantin-Latour anchor one end of the show may be the pivotal decision that sets this show apart from so many other surveys of Impressionism. The meaning of the phrase “continuity and change” could not be more clearly displayed. An unlikely pairing of two artists still rooted in tradition, but innovators nonetheless, leads to the core of the show and a subsequent generation of artists who boldly initiated new practices while still not disavowing their past. Pictures by Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne close the exhibition and reveal how radically this trio treated colour, texture, and form. The intelligent hanging of the pictures also calls more attention than usual to the contributions of Eva Gonzales, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt. Gonzales’s lovely pair of lady’s slippers on a patterned rug, Morisot’s enchanting bird cage, and Cassatt’s shimmering tea service also expand notions of Impressionism’s parameters. Still lifes can be worn, heard, and handled. Fantin-Latour once explained, “I tried to make a painting representing things as they are found in nature; I put a great deal of thought . . . into the idea of making it look like a natural arrangement of random objects. This is an idea that I have been mulling over a great deal: giving the appearance of a total lack of artistry.” We know better.
Paul Gauguin, Still Life with Peaches (1889)
If you thought you knew the history of Impressionism, you will be pleasantly surprised by the way curators George Shackelford and Eliza Rathbone have taken familiar material and clarified and expanded previous assumptions and interpretations. Instead of presenting a broad panorama of serene seascapes, bustling cityscapes, portraits of wives, children, and patrons, the organisers honed in on the expressive possibilities of the seemingly neutral genre of stilllife painting. These exceptional canvases tend to be not as large as those devoted to supposedly grander themes; yet within the confines of smaller dimensions, colours are more radiant and the brushwork even more bold. It turns out that flowers in a vase or apples in a compote dish intrigued rather than bored this group of artists, whose work is usually associated with
Phyllis Tuchmann e-mail: [email protected]
THE LANCET • Vol 359 • April 27, 2002 • www.thelancet.com
he subtitle of Mars: the Inside Story of the Red Planet is misleading. This book has less to do with Mars than with the people who study Mars and the possibility of life on our nearest planetary neighbour. Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest focus on work undertaken in the 1990s, when evidence started to mount that Mars might once have been alive. Ambiguous pictures taken from orbit seemed to show that Mars had once had rivers, lakes, and oceans— and if the planet had once been warm enough to support liquid water, perhaps it had supported life. Then, in 1996, NASA announced that it had discovered fossilised bacteria in a meteorite from Mars. Despite the media storm that surrounded the story, the proof was far from conclusive—although other experiments have backed up the claim. And Couper and Henbest, two of the most prominent media astronomers in the UK, clearly believe that the fossils are truly Martian. This is a peculiar book, which feels more like the transcript of a television series. The authors narrate in the first person and record their journeys around the world in a style more suited to travel journalism than science writing. Indeed, when we hear from the scientists themselves, it is one soundbite at a time. This style means that there is little hard information, and the meat of the chapters is difficult to find. But there are some advantages. Few books before have conveyed the excitement of planetary science, and the sense of adventure that the researchers felt as the first images came in from the surface of an alien world. As a coffee-table book, Mars is excellent. Even NASA’s own publications do not do as good a job of depicting Mars for a casual reader. But if you want to find out details about any aspect of Mars or Mars exploration, this book is not for you—it does not live up to its promise of providing the inside story of a fascinating planet.
T
Alexander Campbell e-mail: [email protected]
1533