Life and Death Issues at the Art Museum

South Hadley third graders exercise their artistic skills by drawing a child-oriented "vanitas" still life created specially for their visit.

The fleeting nature of life's pleasures may seem an odd theme for an elementary school outing, but South Hadley third graders enjoyed their visit to the vanitas exhibition at the College art museum. The vanitas is a form of still-life painting intended to remind viewers that fame, beauty, fortune, power, and other earthly delights fade and that death is inevitable.

The exhibition, Hendrick Andriessen and the Vanitas Still Life: Reality and Metaphor, focuses on a recently acquired still life by seventeenth-century Netherlandish painter Hendrick Andriessen, which uses flowers, a watch, a burned- out candle, a jeweled crown, soap bubbles, and a skull to evoke the passage of time. Surrounding the painting are twenty works of art that help to explain the artist's metaphorical images and put the piece into social, economic, philosophical, and historical context.

Because today's youngsters might not understand Andriessen's imagery as a seventeenth-century viewer would have, museum education coordinator Amy Dane created a modern version of the vanitas for the children. Her still life included up-to-date metaphors of life's pleasures and the passing of time: a teddy bear, a watch, a model airplane, beach toys, flowers, and a blow-up skeleton. After touring the exhibition and learning about the vanitas idea, the third graders created their own versions by drawing Dane's assemblage.

The exhibition--minus Dane's contemporary interpretation--continues through June 30.