National Maritime Museum,
London, to 5 January 2020
WHEN Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders returned to Earth after orbiting the moon in 1968, he came back with a new perspective. The newspapers were full of the eerily beautiful colour photograph we now know as Earthrise.
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Taken by Anders on Christmas Eve, the image shows a fragile and lonely Earth rising above the horizon of the moon’s pocked surface. Almost as iconic was his remark at the time: “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”
Perspective is key to a new exhibition, The Moon, at London’s National Maritime Museum (NMM), the biggest of its kind in the UK during the anniversary year of the first moon landing. As its lead curator Melanie Vandenbrouck says, the moon is “a mirror for humanity. When we look at the moon, we are really looking at ourselves.”
She is right in a literal sense, given prevailing theories about the moon’s origins as a piece of Earth that broke off in a collision some 4.5 billion years ago. But Vandenbrouck means more than that. The landing anniversary provides the occasion, but the remit is wider, offering an aesthetic, cultural, artistic and scientific exploration of our relationship with our neighbour.
Organised in four parts, ranging from the ancient to the modern and beyond, it starts aptly with a delightful image from Romantic artist and poet William Blake. In a black and white illustration, a figure stands on the first rung of a ladder to the moon, reaching up, with the words “I want! I want!” underneath – a yearning that runs throughout the exhibition.
The first section concentrates on the historical, emotional, spiritual and practical ties with the moon. Researching the context makes you appreciate the moon’s universality, says Louise Devoy, a senior curator at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, the NMM’s partner museum.
“The moon is a great unifier. Everyone who has ever been born will live under the moon”
That ubiquity is clear in many artefacts, from a Babylonian cuneiform tablet dated to 172 BC, which recorded rituals associated with lunar eclipses, to moon masks worn by First Nations peoples of Canada. It has permeated our belief systems, says Devoy, while gods appear and disappear like the waxing of lunar phases. The Hindu moon god Chandra and China’s moon goddess Chang’e both have space missions named after them.
With the advent of telescopes, our relationship with the moon started to change. The earliest surviving drawing of the moon made using a telescope is on display: Thomas Harriot’s 1609 sketch relied on a telescope with just 6× magnification.
While Harriot may not be well known now, Galileo Galilei is, and his book Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger) is on show. His telescope viewings caused a sensation in 1610 when they were published with his recording of surface features: craters, valleys and hills. This contradicted the idea that the stars, the moon and planets were unchanging bodies.
In everyday life, the moon was at the heart of all sorts of things, from the annual harvest to medicine, literature and art. There is a very effective “moon walk” of paintings, prints and photographs from different cultures and times. Prints from Japan and Korea of the harvest moon sit alongside small, beautiful paintings by J.M.W. Turner and John Constable.
Of course, an exhibition like this must offer the full space race and Apollo 11 experience. The NMM has managed to get hold of key artefacts. There is a portrait of Neil Armstrong by Paul Calle, who had special access to the astronauts on the morning of Apollo 11’s launch. It captures Armstrong’s famous cool.
There is also Buzz Aldrin’s “Snoopy cap”, or communications headset; the Apollo 11 flight plan; and the magazine that held the film used to take the iconic photo of Aldrin on the moon with Armstrong reflected in the visor of his helmet. Oh, and there are pieces of moon rock.
Space enthusiasts may well get goosebumps, but this exhibition will please others too, with its thoughtful, multi-faceted exploration. As Vandenbrouck says: “The moon is a great unifier. Whenever you are on Earth, you will look at the moon – everyone who has ever been born will live under the moon.”
