HAROLD EDGERTON

Solid lead is heated until molten, poured through a copper sieve and allowed to fall down the length of a tower. The surface tension experienced in its decline forces the fragments into perfect spheres which are caught and called by a pool of water, and the lead shots go on to be used as projectiles for shotguns, ballasts, and shields for radiation. The process is beautiful in its simplicity, rigorously scientific in development and yet wildly raw, almost naive in its process yet to watch it with the human eye would be to see little but a wall of falling heat. It took Harold Edgerton, the man who stopped time as he became known, to demystify the process and turn it into aesthetic beauty. Edgerton developed stroboscope, and with it the entire field of high-speed photography. Where the camera had long been used as a way to capture the world around us, Edgerton used it as a scientific instrument to reveal the unseeable. Edgerton, using strobe lights and high sensitive film, turns a process that harnesses nature for violent ends into something ethereal, sublime, and deeply human.

FEDERICO CASTELLÓN

A self-taught artist and young prodigy, Castellón moved from his native Spain to Brooklyn, New York with his family at the age of seven. He was, even at this age, a gifted draughtsman and sketched relentlessly, and he spent his childhood taking advantage of the new city he lived in by visiting museums and exhibitions constantly. By the time he was a teenager, Castellón’s inspirations ranged from the Old Masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the burgeoning, contemporary Surrealist scene he had witnessed at small galleries. Before he had even graduated high school, he had caught the attention of Diego Rivera, who by this point was internationally acclaimed with public murals across the country. It was with Rivera’s help that Castellón travelled across Europe in his early twenties, taking in the emerging avant-garde and, on his return to New York, laid his claim as the very first American Surrealist. His etchings and sketches circulated the country and contributed to the rise of one of the most consequential movements of the century.

CLAUDE MONET

In the suburb of Le Havre, a wealthy suburb of Northern France, Claude Monet saw the world changing. He had grown up by the seaside, on beaches just like the one depicted here, and knew well the rural life of the areas, small towns serving locals and dominated by a thriving fishing industry. Yet as industrialism took over the nation, train services connected these once self-sustaining communities to the major cities and brought with them an influx of tourists escaping metropolis for weekends by the sea. In his depiction of Saint-Andresse, Monet captures this duality. The foreground is dominated by fishermen, their boats resting on the sand as they mill around and smoke their pipes, wearing hardy and utilitarian garb. Yet behind them, sitting on the beach, a couple look out to sea, the woman in a flowing white dress with an accent of red below here. These are the city folk, representing modernity itself that is slowly encroaching on traditional, rural life. Monet makes no moral judgement, but the work is one of quiet conflict between two types of life, learning to exist together.