The Flat Hat
Vol. 107, Iss. 14 | Tuesday, April 25, 2017 | The Weekly Student Newspaper of The College of William and Mary
New students marched through Wren and joined the College of William and Mary Aug. 30 2017. page 4 AMELIA LUCAS / THE FLAT HAT
Harvey spurs student response Students from Houston share personal experiences MEILAN SOLLY // FLAT HAT CHIEF STAFF WRITER As a lifelong resident of Houston, Texas, Dani Greene ’20 is used to extreme weather — but Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm that displaced tens of thousands and ravaged communities across Texas and Louisiana after making landfall Aug. 25, was different than anything she had ever experienced. “We assumed Harvey would be like any other storm,” Greene said. “The same houses that always flooded would flood, school would be cancelled for a day or two, and then life would resume as normal.” Instead, Greene woke up to an Aug. 27 text message from her parents saying that their home had begun to flood and the water was still rising. Soon, her parents told her that the house was submerged in almost four feet of water. Greene is one of the many College of William and Mary students affected by Harvey, and her story of unprecedented destruction is echoed by those who witnessed the storm firsthand or heard about it from family and friends in impacted areas. Harvey evolved from a tropical depression to a Category 4 hurricane before making landfall near Corpus Christi, Texas, the night of Aug. 25. Over the following days, Harvey continued to batter the southern United States, making
landfall by Copano Bay, Texas, as a Category 3 storm before concluding as a tropical storm in Louisiana. Some communities experienced wind gusts upwards of 130 miles per hour and weekly rainfall totals exceeding 50 inches. In comparison, the average annual rainfall at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport is 49.77 inches. Overall, Harvey dropped 27 trillion gallons of water on Texas and Louisiana and caused an estimated $70 to $108 billion in economic damages. Houston resident Corinne Nordt ’18 said she underestimated Harvey, believing that warnings would be more severe than the actual storm. As she notes, Houston is designed to flood: when torrential rain threatens the city, flood control systems direct excess water out of metropolitan areas and even use interstate freeways as back-up reservoirs. “The pictures you see of roads with [water] rushing down them is an example of our city planning doing what it’s meant to do, just being overwhelmed,” Nordt said. “But never have I seen entire neighborhoods under water … before. My childhood neighborhood was under nine feet of water, and you can see alligators swimming by roofs.”
In the immediate aftermath of the storm, Greene said that ensuring family and friends’ safety was a top priority. Her parents evacuated their home just in time — her father, who had initially opted to stay in the the house, joined her mother at a family friend’s home one day before the flooding began. Relief over her family’s safety soon turned to panic, however, as Greene realized the extent of the storm’s devastation. Every time she checked Facebook, Greene saw neighbors’ photographs of their flooded homes and knew that the water in her own home was steadily rising. “As the water rose, my mother put on a brave face and would joke around and stay positive about everything, but I know that it was killing her inside [to watch] her home and everything in it get destroyed,” Greene said. Nordt shared similarly harrowing stories of her family and friends’ experiences. One elderly family member was rescued by boat from the second story of her flooded home, and other friends were pulled off of their roofs by helicopters. Additionally, Nordt said that she heard about See HOUSTON page 3
WILLIAMSBURG
Previously unknown Cezanne painting discovered, displayed at Muscarelle ‘The Miracle of the Slave’ painting identified using in-depth art history knowledge, particle analysis NIA KITCHIN FLAT HAT NEWS EDITOR
In 2013, an unattributed Paul Cezanne work stood for auction in Vienna, Austria. The painting is a copy of Tintoretto’s masterpiece “The Miracle of the Slave,” and was procured by the Muscarelle Museum of Art after Muscarelle Assistant Director and Chief Curator John Spike recognized it as an early work by Cezanne. The painting was displayed in the Muscarelle as part of the “Art and Science of Connoisseurship” exhibit that ran through Aug. 13, 2017. When Muscarelle Director Aaron De Groft heard that Spike had discovered a Cezanne, it took him a moment to fully comprehend what Spike was saying. “I fully believed him based on that and my own experiences as an art historian and curator for almost 30 years,” De Groft said. “He was totally right and he had the exacting and previous experience [to] identify an early Cezanne …” De Groft traveled to Vienna under the guise of already being in Europe and wanting to see a couple different works for sale. He had to be secretive about his real reasons for visiting the auction house because he believed he had discovered something no one else had. “We had to develop a strategy to look at several of the paintings for sale, because as John put it, if we recognize it as what it is, someone else may as well,” De Groft said. “So we arrived
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from New York to [Vienna] specifically and only to see this painting with the backstory, or lie, that we were already in Europe.” Once in the auction room De Groft and Spike hurried to find the Cezanne amongst many other paintings. The auction house had previously told them that this was a sale of fairly unremarkable paintings, so they were sure not to reveal their true purpose, De Groft said. Later that night they pretended to discuss buying several paintings to throw others off their track. “They let us in, left us alone as they went to turn on the all the lights, and we scrambled to find the painting hanging amongst about 300 other paintings so we could see it just ourselves,” De Groft said. “When the lights came on we just acted as if we were just there waiting for them to return.” Once back in Williamsburg, the secured Cezanne hung next to a print of the Tintoretto in the Muscarelle, showcasing the paintings’ obvious differences. The Tintoretto is complete and masterfully done, while the Cezanne is a loose interpretation of the scene that “The Miracle of the Slave” depicts. Cezanne painted this copy when he was a student, but even then he was making stylistic choices that allowed Spike to confidently assert that this is, in fact, a Cezanne. “He has all these peculiar ways of doing things and that’s what I recognize. The thick strokes, knobby knees, the bunchiness,” Spike
said. “The purpose of a copy is usually to give us another one … but this is an interpretation, an interpretation with a purpose.” The Cezanne is a smaller and clearly less physically realistic work. Spike emphasized that this is Cezanne’s student work, but that his style is already starting to emerge. He said that Cezanne is looking to represent the scene in the painting in a different manner. “If you’re new to this and don’t have a lot of experience you might say, ‘I don’t like it so much it seems so crude,’” Spike said. “Well, he doesn’t care that people will think he’s crazy.” Spike said that Cezanne wanted to show all the facets of things and to see the world in terms of the cone, the cylinder and the sphere. In order to do that, he dramatized and exaggerated, making it easier to identify that the painting is his if you know what to look for. “When he’s making this he says, ‘I’m trying to make art that is monumental, like the art of the museums,’” Spike said. “So, rather than these lovely effects of light, he’s trying to make them all solider and doesn’t care that he exaggerates.” Spike was also able to identify a clue hidden in the painting that instantly revealed to him that it was, in fact, a Cezanne. Cezanne’s uncle, Dominic, is painted as one of the figures in this painting. Cezanne often used his uncle as a model, so his presence in the painting was a dead giveaway, Spike said.
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“What you actually begin to realize is that this guy here is his uncle Dominic,” Spike said. “That was a big help, though, like, ‘thanks for putting him in.’” Associate professor of Chemistry at the College of William and Mary Kristin Wustholz helped to further prove that “The Miracle of the Slave” is indeed a Cezanne through her work in the lab. “Cezanne has been one of my favorite artists since college, so I was thrilled that we might be working on one of his paintings!” Wustholz said in an email. Wusholtz used surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy to identify various colorants in the work in her lab in the Integrated Science Center. The SERS process entails administering a drop of metal nanoparticles onto a very small sample of the artwork. Wustholz’s students treated a sample from the painting with the nanoparticles and measured its SERS spectrum in the lab; however, Wustholz said that they were surprised when they could not identify one specific colorant. “SERS gives a fingerprint of each colorant, so we were surprised when a microscopic sample from the turban area gave a spectrum that had no matches in our library,” Wustholz said. “Former M.S. student Kristen Frano looked at libraries of historic and modern colorants and found no matches.”
Lydia Funk ‘19 discusses the importance of a high energy freshman welcome despite student differences and the emotional and physical challenges orientation presents. page 5
College falls 28-10 against Virginia The Tribe’s opening game of the 2017 season saw the debut of junior quarterback Tommy McKee. page 10