Van Gogh museum opens display on animals, evolution
The Netherlands museum, which will display the exhibit through Feb. 5, will have interactive displays and visual jokes about Darwin's theory of evolution.By TOBY STERLING
The Associated Press
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, Oct. 4 -- The Van Gogh Museum has opened a new exhibition that explores people's changing view of animals during the period when Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution.
A woman is dwarfed by a stuffed giraffe as she looks at paintings at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong) "Fierce Friends," on view through Feb. 5, 2006, displays paintings by Vincent van Gogh and other 18th and 19th century artists, including William Hogarth, James Audubon and William Turner.
The works chart themes such as the advance of science and alienation of people from the wild, and the beginnings of the animal rights movement.
One interactive display allows viewers to "create" sea animals in a virtual aquarium, which then swim around and breed or eat each other.
Louise Lippincott, a curator at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art, which collaborated with the Van Gogh Museum, said the child-friendly exhibits will "raise questions about what is human, what is animal, what is our place in nature, and what do we teach our children?"
The show contains plenty of visual jokes about Darwin's theory, including a sculpture of a chimpanzee gravely regarding a human skull, perhaps pondering whether man really descended from apes.
A painting by William Turner called "The Evening of the Deluge" depicts Noah's Ark and a dinosaur-like lizard that apparently missed the boat. It dates from 1843, before the publication of Darwin's theory, when naturalists were struggling for an explanation for fossil findings.
Other paintings challenge people to consider whether animals have humanlike feelings, such as Edwin Landseer's 1839 "Dignity and Impudence," which shows a bloodhound and a terrier peering out of a doghouse _ but puts the viewer at eye level with the dogs.
Hogarth was an earlier dog lover and his 1751 prints, "The Four Stages of Cruelty," show the moral degeneration of a man who begins by abusing dogs for entertainment. The man moves to flogging horses and eventually becomes a murderer. The man is caught and hanged, his body dissected for scientific research. The series may also be a swipe at scientists' willingness to unflinchingly carry out experiments on animals.
Story Produced by: Jenn Beckett
