Visiting an art museum usually means confronting a kaleidoscope of works. Paintings, objects, and installations can flash past like meteorites.<\/p>\n
But a Harvard Art Museum<\/a> lecture series this year invites art lovers to pause and focus on single works. During the \u201cIn-Sight\u201d discussions, an art expert shows the audience how one example can open a window onto the culture, society, and history of an age. (The next lecture is March 3.)<\/p>\n The first lecture last fall centered on the left hand of a Japanese Buddha figure. The lacquered wood remnant was an entry point into understanding the sculpture, architecture, and religious traditions of 13th century Japan.<\/p>\n The second lecture looked at an Edward Burne-Jones<\/a> watercolor. Set in context, it revealed the romantic temper of 19th century England, along with the materials, collecting habits, and reproduction techniques that informed art in that age.<\/p>\n This semester, audiences at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum<\/a> lecture hall have been guided so far through two disparate works from the 20th century: one an iconic religious image and the other a photograph that documented a social trend.<\/p>\n On Jan. 13, curator and historian Ivan Gaskell<\/a> led the audience through a nuanced look at \u201cJesus Christ as the Divine Mercy,\u201d a 1934 oil-on-canvas by Eugeniusz Kazimirowski, an obscure landscape painter and Polish veteran of World War I. That painting today is \u201camong the most widely venerated images in contemporary Roman Catholicism,\u201d and the object of cult-like adoration worldwide, said Gaskell, who is the Margaret S. Winthrop Curator at the Harvard Art Museum.<\/p>\n The shimmering, romanticized image \u2014 inspired by a nun\u2019s vision \u2014 depicts a robed Jesus, right hand raised in blessing. Two rays, one red and one pale, emanate from his breast. Below, in Polish, is the legend: \u201cJesus, I trust in You.\u201d<\/p>\n Though art and religion \u201chave parted ways\u201d in the modern West, Gaskell said, \u201cDivine Mercy\u201d is a fine case study on the power and durability that an image may command despite having limited aesthetic value.<\/p>\n In the Feb. 17 lecture, curator Michelle Lamuni\u00e8re used a gelatin silver print from around 1908 to explore how early photography could document social ills. Such pictures had many uses. They were pleas for change, and devices to underscore contrasting middle-class values such as thrift, order, and good hygiene.<\/p>\n \u201cTwins When They Began to Take Modified Milk,\u201d by an unidentified photographer, depicts an impoverished mother holding her scrawny babies. Behind her is a cramped, messy room. The picture was taken for the Starr Centre Association, a social reform society in Philadelphia. It was intended to advertise the benefits of pasteurized milk for infants.<\/p>\n \u201cTwins\u201d is one of about 4,500 photographs and 1,500 graphical illustrations on deposit at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts<\/a>, remnants of a Harvard Social Museum collection started in 1903. By 1907, it was housed in Emerson Hall as an exhibition arm of the new Department of Social Ethics, which in the 1930s was absorbed into Harvard\u2019s sociology program.<\/p>\n