Thomas S. Davis

In October 2019, The Getty Center in Los Angeles opened its “Manet and Modern Beauty” exhibit, a major reappraisal of Manet’s late work. The directors believed these canvases would reveal how “Manet’s growing fascination with contemporary fashion and femininity coincided with a steep decline in his health and mobility, a confrontation with his own human frailty.” [1] If the emphasis of the exhibition fell on his less familiar works, the narrative of the modern artist as a suffering genius sounds...

Austral summer on the Antarctic Peninsula. Eight of us climb out of our zodiac onto the shore of Petermann Island. This place dazzles and overwhelms the senses. The luminous blue icebergs, granite streaked pink with penguin guano, the weakly green cryoplankton spread across the snow. Antarctica is not the white continent of popular imagination. And it isn’t quiet either. The plangent groans of glaciers crawl across the landscape, reverberating through our bodies. Gentoo penguins squawk atop their stone nests, staring helplessly skyward at the skuas eying their young. We are unwelcome, unneeded guests.