Curio Cabinet

Title: Mature Age
Artist: Camille Claudel (1864 -1943)
Created: 1893
Medium: bronze sculpture
Dimensions: 51.57 x 76.77 x 30.7 in (131 x 195 x 78 cm)
Current location: Rodin Museum, Paris, France
 

Behind every great man is a tangled mess left in his wake. At least, that's one interpretation of the bronze sculpture Mature Age by French artist Camille Claudel, a companion in art and love of Auguste Rodin. Critics often see the patina figures as autobiographical representations: Claudel is the young woman pleading on her knees as Rodin is led away by his older wife. Claudel—who passed away on December 8, 1684—often had difficulties securing patronage for her work because of the sensual nature of her pieces, though Rodin himself was said to have reacted angrily upon seeing the Mature Age, and may have complained to the French ministry of fine arts to cancel funding she had received from them. Jealous, maybe? Of course, in spite of sabotaging some of her work and taking credit for others, Rodin, as a dominant male figure in the art world, was hardly the center of Claudel's universe. Other interpretations of Mature Age reflect on the allegorical nature of aging and loss among the three figures. Maybe we should change the phrase to "in front of every great woman lies an unforeseeable set of difficult circumstances"?

 

Image credit & copyright: Rodin Museum
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Check out Sol in the sky with diamonds! This photo, taken by Czech astrophotographer Petr Horálek, recently won the grand prize in 2019 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition. Beautiful, if not menacing, Three diamonds in the sky shows the sun and moon engaged in a hybrid eclipse. Exceedingly rare, these appear like total eclipses in some parts of the world, but annular, or incomplete in others. Luckily for Horálek, the photographer happened to be in Pakwero, Uganda, which was treated to a mixture of the two types—and also an extraordinary three-part "diamond ring" (the bright bursts of light). The term refers to when solar flares from the sun's photosphere peek out from behind the moon's shadow; the hairline band of the sun's corona, paired with a solar flare, appear like rings of fire in the sky. Three diamonds was up against some beautiful and downright captivating scenery, but the gem nevertheless ran rings around the competition!
 

Below: more photos from the competition, including Baby on board by Anton Sorokin, Courting Royals: two Royal Terns in courtship display by Kristian Bell, and Waxwing and Rowan berries in the snow by Alwin Hardenbol.
 

Image credit & copyright: Petr Horálek / Anton Sorokin / East Carolina University / Kristian Bell / Deakin University / Alwin Hardenbol / University of Eastern Finland / Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition 2018
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Title: The Sea of Ice
Artist: Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)
Created: 1823
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 38 x 50 in (96.7 x 126.9 cm)
Current location: Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
 

Brrrr! It's hard to imagine a colder and more desolate landscape than that depicted by Caspar David Friedrich in his painting, The Sea of Ice (also called The Polar Sea or The Wreck of the Hope). In this majestic work, the shattered carcass of a ship is being swallowed by the frigid sea: the heaving ice slabs and shipboards are gradually being transformed into an ice floe. In his work, Friedrich tried to infuse natural landscapes with spiritual meaning, and to contrast the grandeur and power of nature with human frailty. The sculptor Pierre-Jean David d'Angers argued that Friedrich had created a new artistic genre: "the tragedy of landscape." Friedrich himself never traveled to the Arctic, but he was clearly influenced by William Edward Parry's polar expedition in 1819-20. Some critics say his artistic vision was also shaped by Napoleon's hubristic rise and ultimate defeat when his troops were beaten back by the Russian winter. But in the Sea of Ice, where the ice is vanquishing all signs of life, one can't help but detect echoes of Friedrich's boyhood tragedy: the loss of his brother when he fell into a frozen lake and drowned.
 

Image credit & copyright: WikiArt
 

Whatever lies at the end of this vibrant, red path of fallen pine needles is surely something magical. Path in the Woods by American photographer Eliot Porter, born December 6, 1901, is just one example of his dedication to capturing nature in living color. During the 1940s, when most serious photographers still worked in black and white, Porter became known for his color photographs of landscapes, trees, and birds. In Path in the Woods, color plays the vital role of making a bare pine forest seem warm and inviting, beckoning the viewer to explore vivid reds, greens, and browns. Porter certainly did his fair share of wilderness exploration: he not only captured images of America's disappearing wilderness, but also the Galápagos Islands, Antarctica, and East Africa. His widely-published work was a powerful tool in promoting conservation, particularly of wild birds. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941 to photograph several threatened avian species, which led to his famous Birds in Color series. The latter was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art two years later. It goes to show that the power of color photography was no pigment of Porter's imagination!
 

Below: more of Porter's nature photos.
 

Image credit & copyright: Eliot Porter
 

Why be camera shy when you're this adorable? The silver-backed chevrotain pictured above was recently captured on camera by conservationists in Vietnam—and is the first of its kind to be photographed in 30 years. Commonly called the Vietnamese mouse-deer, this hooved mammal is neither a mouse nor a deer. Chevrotains are the world's smallest hoofed mammals, or ungulates, with silver-backed chevrotains being about the size of a rabbit. It had been so long since scientists had spotted a silver-backed chevrotain that they feared the species was extinct. To find out for sure, they placed hidden cameras in the Vietnamese wilderness, and what they captured was astonishing. At least two silver-backed chevrotains, identifiable by their distinctive grey rumps, were caught on film. Footage showed the animals rummaging for food, with their long muzzles, on the forest floor. Conservationists were excited by the footage, which quickly went viral online, and stated that immediate protections should be put in place to ensure the species' survival. Shy or not, there's no denying that the rabbit-sized, deer-like chevrotains have become overnight stars.
 

Below: a video and more photos of the silver-backed chevrotains spotted in Vietnam.
 

Image credit & copyright: Southern Institute of Ecology / Global Wildlife Conservation / Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research / NCNP