In the next gallery, visitors are invited to compare the high-definition video that Skarnulyte used in “Aphotic Zone” with earlier underwater films by Jean Painlevé, whose cinematic portraits of octopuses and sea horses are every bit as astonishing as they were nearly a century ago, and by the popular deep-sea diver and explorer Jacques Cousteau. The footage from the pioneering aquatic filmmakers that is in the show suggests that contemporary deep-sea video would be unthinkable without their innovations.
From there the show dives further back in time, with a stunning display of 19th-century glass models of marine invertebrates, among them sea slugs and cephalopods. They are the painstaking work of the father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, master glass artisans from Dresden, Germany. They made their menagerie largely for research purposes and with meticulous scientific observation, mechanical precision and a dash of creativity.
These exquisite, fragile objects, whose wild colors, astounding detail and high degree of verisimilitude make them look like psychedelic pastries, are among the most dazzling works in “Ocean.” But even the more conventional presentations contain surprises.
In a room dedicated to the sublime, a key motif in Romantic art, violent depictions of the sea abound. The first item in that gallery, however, is a poster for the 2000 disaster film “The Perfect Storm” by the German director Wolfgang Petersen, starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. The poster unmistakably revisits the iconography of 19th-century paintings of shipwrecks, with a beleaguered vessel surfing the wave of a digitally rendered squall.
With this somewhat cheeky choice, the exhibition makes the point that our imaginations are still as riveted by the overwhelming violence and passion of the sea as they were over two centuries ago, when Caspar David Friedrich painted “After the Storm” (1817), which also features in the exhibition.
“Ocean” also reckons with painful narratives, including the legacy of colonialism and slavery.
The Ghanaian artist El Anatsui’s haunting sculpture “Akua’s Surviving Children” (1996) evokes historical crimes and traumas through driftwood sculptures made with wood collected from a beach roughly a dozen miles north of this museum. The artist assembled the work, a group of standing figures that recalls Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais,” at a nearby former arms factory that produced long-barreled flintlock muskets known as Dane guns, weapons that played a key role in the Danish slave trade in Ghana.
