![\"Martin](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/WC3ULWJEHBGQ3NFFOYM5FN5KVQ.png\")
Martin Karplus, “Women in Traditional Dress (Near \u010ca\u010dak, Serbia [Yugoslavia]),” 1955.McMullen Museum of Art<\/p>\n\u201cMartin Karplus: Memories and Monuments\u201d presents 55 of that chemist\u2019s photographs. It also has a display case with Karplus\u2019s equipment. A 35mm Leica was his camera of choice. The show runs through Dec. 7 at Boston College\u2019s McMullen Museum of Art. Karplus, who died last December, donated 134 digital prints to the McMullen shortly before his death.<\/p>\n
Born in Vienna, in 1930, Karplus fled the Nazis with his parents and brother in 1938. The Karpluses were, to use a term currently disreputable in certain quarters, refugees. The family ended up in Newton. Yes, even then its public schools were attracting educationally aspirational families. <\/p>\n
Karplus went on to Harvard, Caltech (urged to go there by no less a figure than J. Robert Oppenheimer), and Oxford. Then began a career of teaching and research that took him to the University of Illinois, Columbia, Harvard, and, eventually, an awards ceremony in Stockholm. <\/p>\n
Martin Karplus, “Women in Traditional Dress (Near \u010ca\u010dak, Serbia [Yugoslavia]),” 1955.McMullen Museum of Art<\/p>\n
Nobelists write a biographical sketch for the prizes\u2019 website. Karplus\u2019s<\/a> is well worth reading. One sentence is pertinent to the McMullen exhibition. \u201cDuring my two years in Oxford as a postdoctoral fellow, I spent much of the time traveling throughout Europe and taking photographs.\u201d Many are in the show \u2014 from England, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Austria, France. His absences from Oxford would seem to have been time very well spent.<\/p>\n There are also photographs from Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Hong Kong \u2014 yes, Karplus got around \u2014 as well as, closer to home, the American Southwest, Illinois, New York, and Sudbury (the Martha-Mary Chapel).<\/p>\n Karplus used Kodachrome slide film. This is notable because Kodachrome produced a particularly rich, even saturated color. This lends these images a real vibrancy. Multiplying that vibrancy is the fact that back in the 1950s and early \u201960s, when Karplus took these pictures, color photography was rarely employed by \u201cserious\u201d photographers. Among the reasons for that were the instability of color, making it dubious in one way, and the association of color with advertising, making it dubious in another. So seeing color images of scenes like these is novel, even slightly exotic, and lends them a rare sense of immediacy and vividness. Memories fade. These colors haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s that word \u201cserious.\u201d Karplus, for all his obvious enthusiasm for the medium and his subjects, was an amateur, literally so; and these are tourist pictures \u2014 again, literally so. Along with that enthusiasm, though, there was real skill. The first photograph in the show announces his artistic ambitions. It\u2019s a self-portrait Karplus took on a Danish ferry, his image reflected in an MG hubcap as if it were a convex mirror. He uses a more subtle version of automotive trickeration with a photograph of three Serbian women in traditional dress. Look very carefully and you can see that he took it through his car\u2019s windshield.<\/p>\n Every once in a while, Karplus gives in to theatricality (a look down at the showily lit lobby of the Guggenheim Museum), a touch of the cutes (a toddler\u2019s tininess juxtaposed with the massiveness of Vienna\u2019s Sch\u00f6nbrunn Palace), or touristiness (a view of Chinese junks in Hong Kong harbor).<\/p>\n Those pictures stand out because Karplus is so consistently artful and consistently unobtrusive in that artfulness. One notices certain stylistic preferences. He likes presenting people in frieze-like arrangements, as in a marvelous 1960 shot from Rio de Janeiro (which is also a very elegant study in horizontal picture planes) or one of schoolgirls walking down a Roman street. Note the chromatic juxtaposition of lavender skirts and Creamsicle-colored facade. Sometimes he takes this frieze approach to objects, too, as with a set of deck chairs on a French ocean liner.<\/p>\n Karplus has a happy penchant for placing blocks of color within the frame. Next to the line of open deck chairs is a stack of folded ones, the stacking and folding accentuating their being red. There\u2019s the way the skirt of one of those Serbian women is a rectangle of orange-red. Or there\u2019s the red coat of a woman standing in front of the Grand Canyon, though that\u2019s easy enough to overlook at first since it\u2019s the Grand Canyon she\u2019s standing in front of.<\/p>\n These are photographs of both people and places, but people matter to Karplus more. He clearly responds to them. He also responds to there being a lot inside the frame. A shot of Brasilia under construction is striking but feels anomalous because of the empty space surrounding Bruno Georgi\u2019s famous \u201cOs Candangos\u201d<\/a> sculpture and Brazil\u2019s Supreme Federal Court Palace in the background. <\/p>\n Many of the hangings being nicely complementary, it should be noted that the McMullen\u2019s John McCoy curated. <\/p>\n MARTIN KARPLUS: Moments and Monuments<\/p>\n At McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2101 Commonwealth Ave., through Dec. 7. 617-552-8587, artmuseum@bc.edu<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Martin](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/4T3SQR4H7FBMHHTEUZ3CBFSFYU.png\")
Martin Karplus, “Sch\u00f6nbrunn Palace with Toddler (Vienna, Austria),” 1955.McMullen Museum of Art<\/p>\n![\"Martin](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/JBUUHT7HM5DUNDRZW7GY6ILTB4.png\")
Martin Karplus, “Crowd in Lobby, Guggenheim Museum (New York City),” 1962.McMullen Museum of Art<\/p>\n![\"Martin](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/EOVX3DLJSVGBHCTLWJXM5THVGI.png\")
Martin Karplus, “Schoolgirls near San Pietro in Montorio (Rome, Italy),” 1954.McMullen Museum of Art<\/p>\n