Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime

Elizabeth A Kessler

Puts famous HST images like the “Pillars of Creation” in the context of the Romantic sublime in general, and the exploration and depiction of the American West in particular. There are plenty of interesting details along the way: the ambivalent attitude of academic astronomers towards images aimed at public consumption (“pretty pictures”), the history of the space telescope and how it was promoted, and the convergence of the Western and astronomical sublime which took place when great American observatories were established in beautiful and (at the time) remote mountaintop locations.

The heart of the book is the account of how aesthetically-pleasing HST images are generated from raw data. The colour scheme of “Pillars of Creation” came from assigning red, green and blue to particular sulfur, hydrogen and oxygen ionization states and doesn’t correspond to what the Eagle Nebula would look like if you were close to it: but this image was so popular that its palette has become part of the standard vocabulary for other pictures of nebulae. Imaging artifacts such as the diffraction spikes around bright stars are now so familiar that they’re not removed, or even enhanced.

The style is a little plodding at times, reflecting the book’s origin as a dissertation, but it’s definitely worth a read if you’re interested in the intersection of art and science, and the reproductions of HST images are beautiful.

Requiem for a Heavyweight

He was a voice in the wilderness, a lion among cheese-nibbling gallery mice, a firm and gristly presence in a world of limp phantoms. One of his reviews was so pugnacious that a fist emerged from the artist’s copy of Time and bloodied his nose while he was reading it on the subway, an event attested by witnesses. “He was a man’s man,” recalls an acquaintance, “with none of the latent homosexuality which that phrase is often taken to imply, an implication he would personally resent by grasping the coat-lapel of the implicator and pushing him with force against the handiest and most abrasive architectural feature… excuse me, I need to go and lie down.”

Hughes, again

On Hughes’ literary ancestors: I’ve read more than one post attributing his  style to his Catholic education. I think he owed much more to the English satirists and essayists of the 18th century. His SoHoiad, a transposition of the Dunciad to the 1980s NYC art scene, is a brilliant exception to the rule that no Jesuit can become Pope.

Robert Hughes 1938-2012

This is more sad news. When young, my admiration for Hughes’ art criticism was immoderate – I used to tote around my copy of Nothing If Not Critical like a relic – and I can still remember the moment when I read this sentence (from a review of an exhibition of Renaissance drawings, I believe, and I’m quoting from memory, because my copy of the book is in the garage somewhere [ed. Not any more: it was a review of an exhibition of Hans Holbein the Younger, and the quote is corrected]):

No-one, we may confidently predict, will ever draw this well again.

Nobody, one may morosely predict, will ever draw the human face as well as this again.

…and realised that Hughes’ rhetorical talent allowed him to say things which were unfounded or silly (ever again? Why? And how could we possibly know?) but which would slide past the distracted reader while his ego was being stroked by that tone of magisterial complicity.

An early disappointment, well remembered, and I was never able to fully trust Hughes afterwards: agreeing with him is too delicious.

Hitchens, Vidal, Hughes: all authors who aimed at a patrician hauteur, with varying degrees of success; all known as contrarians; all safely members of the Establishment. There’s a somewhat tacky book on the twilight of the neo-Augustans in the offing.