Label Text: Peterdi travelled to Alaska in 1961. Afterward, he created a series of prints evoking the vastness of the unchanging two-season ecosystem of the arctic north. In this landscape, Peterdi superimposes the seemingly endless expanse of glacial ice and the interchanging lights of the aurora borealis over a heavily textured black-ground, dark, murky, and reflective of the global threat of the nuclear arms race.
“In Alaska my main interest was the Arctic region,” he has said. “Now I know what cold is and I have seen the ice turn from blinding blue through saffron yellow into olive green . . . And I have seen the Arctic light fan out like a peacock’s tail. I have all of this in me. All the miracles of nature and behind it all the lingering terror of the atomic age.”
Link to share this object record: https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+2002.338 |