Today’s long-awaited full solar eclipse will give many Americans the first chance see the phenomenon in their lifetimes. But artists have captured eclipses from their own perspectives through the centuries.
At the Princeton Art Museum, a new exhibition shows one artist’s representation of the 1918 total eclipse–the last full eclipse whose path crossed the continental U.S. The landscape painter Howard Russell Butler’s paintings are a serene but powerful perspective that photographs can’t quite capture–the moment when the moon passes directly in front of the sun, revealing the glorious rays of the sun’s corona.
Fast forward centuries to 20th century France. One of the earliest filmmakers, George Méliés, used the eclipse as inspiration for a film with a title that translates to, The Eclipse: The Courtship of the Sun and the Moon. The nine-minute film shows astronomers gawking over the eclipse, then zooms in to show the moon and sun making comically flirty faces at each other. The moment of the eclipse itself is tinged with eroticism.
Other artists have far more abstract approaches. The American artist Alma Thomas’s graphic painting The Eclipse is a colorful abstraction of the natural phenomenon, turning the sun’s corona into mosaic-like bricks. Roy Lichtenstein has two paintings entitled Eclipse of the Sun, and both use the artist’s signature comic-book graphical style to depict a bold vision of the sun and moon. And the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui’s sculptural tapestry from 2014 entitled Solar Eclipse abstracts the event even further, with multiple spherical shapes possibly representing the evolution of the sun and moon, but remaining just out of grasp.
Check out more artists’ representations of solar eclipses in the slideshow above.