Science & Knowledge
Mon. June 12, 7:00PM
Jean-Pierre Luminet : when Cosmos meets art
Van Goghs Starry Nights as seen by the award-winning astrophysicist
Do the stars in Van Gogh's paintings match a real configuration of the sky?
Cosmologist, black hole specialist, novelist, poet and painter, Jean-Pierre Luminet has never ceased to embrace beauty, to question the links between astronomy and art, and to highlight their correspondences.
Let’s explore the Universe through an astronomical analysis of Vincent Van Gogh’s representation of the Provençal sky with astrophysicist and renowned black hole specialist Jean-Pierre Luminet.
Following the publication of Les Nuits étoilées de Vincent Van Gogh (Editions Seghers), astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet looks back at his astronomical, artistic and exceptional personal journey.
“I was always fascinated by the close relationship that various forms of artistic expression share with the celestial sciences, by the way artists create their own vision of the sky… When I discovered Van Gogh’s works, I was immediately struck by the way the painter conveyed his vision of the night sky.”
Jean-Pierre Luminet shows us that the painter not only managed to merge specific observations with the products of his imagination and of his memory, but that he also knew how to anticipate the extraordinary images that were later captured by the great telescopes, turning them into symbols of a link between earth and sky, life and death, the finite and the infinite.
Cosmologist, black hole specialist, novelist, poet and painter, Jean-Pierre Luminet has never ceased to embrace beauty, to question the links between astronomy and art, and to highlight their correspondences.
Let’s explore the Universe through an astronomical analysis of Vincent Van Gogh’s representation of the Provençal sky with astrophysicist and renowned black hole specialist Jean-Pierre Luminet.
Following the publication of Les Nuits étoilées de Vincent Van Gogh (Editions Seghers), astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet looks back at his astronomical, artistic and exceptional personal journey.
“I was always fascinated by the close relationship that various forms of artistic expression share with the celestial sciences, by the way artists create their own vision of the sky… When I discovered Van Gogh’s works, I was immediately struck by the way the painter conveyed his vision of the night sky.”
Jean-Pierre Luminet shows us that the painter not only managed to merge specific observations with the products of his imagination and of his memory, but that he also knew how to anticipate the extraordinary images that were later captured by the great telescopes, turning them into symbols of a link between earth and sky, life and death, the finite and the infinite.
speaker
Jean-Pierre Luminet
Jean-Pierre Luminet is a French astrophysicist, an emeritus research director at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille and a leading expert on black holes and cosmology. Luminet has been awarded many prizes including the Georges Lemaître Prize (1999), the European Prize for Scientific Communication (2007), the Kalinga prize and the Einstein medal of UNESCO (2021). The asteroid 5523 Luminet, discovered in 1991 at Palomar Observatory, was named after him.
Luminet is also a prominent figure in art and literature. As a writer he has published more than thirty books including essays, novels and poetry collections, translated into fifteen languages. He is also an engraver and a musician.
