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For decades, scores of paintings by 20th-century masters shared shelf space with family photos, books, and knickknacks in the Cambridge home of Arthur and Marny Solomon. Works by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Paul Cézanne hung on their walls. And in a carriage house turned gallery in the backyard, more contemporary works by abstractionists such as Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitzky, and Larry Poons shone.

Now, those works are on display for the public to enjoy in Harvard Art Museums’ exhibition “The Solomon Collection: Dürer to Degas and Beyond.”

“We are deeply grateful to Arthur and Marny Solomon for their careful stewardship of these artworks over many years, and for their generous impulse to share them with the Harvard Art Museums, a place in the community that was always near and dear to their hearts,” said Micha Winkler Thomas, deputy director of the Harvard Art Museums.

The Solomons were both lifelong art collectors with intricate ties to Harvard. Arthur was a professor of biophysics at Harvard Medical School, while Marny worked throughout her life as a teaching fellow for various Harvard professors after earning her A.B. in art history from Radcliffe in 1958. In 1985, after collecting both individually and as a couple for decades, the Solomons promised their collection to the Art Museums. It wasn’t until after Marny’s death in 2020 that the acquisition was made final. Arthur had passed away in 2005.

From the beginning

Arthur K. Solomon was born in 1912 in Pittsburgh into a tight-knit and wealthy Jewish family. His childhood, according to Marina Kliger, the Rousseau Curatorial Fellow in European Art and one of the curators of the Solomon exhibition, was filled with art and aesthetics. The Solomons’ crowd, including influential department storeowner Edgar J. Kaufmann, were “cultural leaders in Pittsburgh.”

Kaufmann’s son, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., would later become curator of industrial design at the Museum of Modern Art, while another neighborhood boy, A. James Speyer, would become curator of 20th-century art at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Arthur, on the other hand, would go on to study chemistry at Princeton. But he still held onto his more artistic interests, taking New York-based photographer and modern art promoter Alfred Stieglitz as a mentor. Stieglitz introduced Arthur to the New York art scene and the popular realist paintings of American artists at the time.

In 1934, Arthur came to Harvard to pursue his Ph.D. in chemistry. While there, he made the first two purchases in his collection — watercolors by American artists Edward Hopper and Charles E. Burchfield that he had first seen with Stieglitz.

Harvard helped his collection grow when he audited courses in the fine arts department. One of those was the famous “Museum Work and Museum Problems” seminar that met at both the Harvard Art Museums and in Professor Paul Sachs’ home. According to Kliger, Sachs arranged student visits to the homes of distinguished collectors in New York and Philadelphia.

“I think that was probably the most important part of my becoming a collector — seeing these great collections,” Arthur was recorded saying in a series of interviews by the Oral History Committee of Harvard Medical School.

His art collection grew throughout the ’30s, when he went to Cambridge, England, for postdoctoral work and was introduced to German art dealer Justin Thannhauser. Through Thannhauser, Arthur collected works by Van Gogh, Degas, and Cezanne.

In the 1950s and ’60s he made most of his acquisitions through the New York and London-based dealer Julius Weitzner. Arthur then took a brief hiatus from collecting after the death of his first wife, Jean, in 1963.

That was until he met Marny — a collector in her own right.

The earliest documentation of Marny collecting was in July 1962, 10 years before her marriage to Arthur. According to Kliger, it’s documented that Marny brought two works to the Department of Conservation at Harvard’s Fogg Museum: a drawing of an unspecified subject by 17th-century Italian painter Pietro Francesco Mola and a print by 17th-century Italian printmaker Stefano della Bella.

Marny was close friends with Marjorie “Jerry” Cohn — curator emerita and former acting director of the Harvard Art Museums. They met in the early 1960s, when Cohn was a conservation assistant at the Fogg. Marny would send works directly from dealers to Cohn at the museum, where she would mat and frame them. Cohn also served as a confidant on Marny’s subsequent acquisitions.

Marny mostly collected prints. When she met Arthur, however, the two began collecting a new form of art.

“When they met in the late 1960s both were already serious collectors. Arthur focused on 19th- and early 20th-century European art, while Marny was a dedicated print collector,” Kliger said. “After they married in December 1972, the Solomons experienced what they would come to describe as a ‘contemporary awakening.’”

One of their first joint purchases was in 1974, when they bought a 10-ton, 10-foot-long steel sculpture by Michael Steiner called “Betonica.”

“The Solomons installed their new acquisition in their spacious yard at 27 Craigie St., where the sculpture weathered years of New England winters and became part of the Solomons’ lives.” Kliger said

Their other purchases were displayed in their 19th-century Italianate revival home. In the early 1980s, the Solomons began running out of showing space and converted the historic carriage house on the property into a two-story art gallery.

Kliger calls the collection “three collections in one.” Between the two individual collections, and the Solomons’ joint purchases, more than 260 of their prints, paintings, and sculptures were donated to the Harvard Art Museums.

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Many of the works will be on display through Aug. 17. The galleries are free every day, and open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

There’s a new trending nail motif in town—and it’s just on the dot for summer (pun intended). Meet the polka dot manicure, recently spotted on celebrities like Dua Lipa, Hailey Bieber, and more.

For keen observers, the evidence of an imminent polka dot resurgence was visible in the fall/winter collections. From Isabel Marant to Fendi and Conner Ives, the ’80s print was spotted across dresses, bags, and even veils. Then the stars got involved. Singers Raye and Dua Lipa were sporting the sweetest polka-dot dresses by spring, while Katie Holmes stepped out in navy and white polka dot heels.

Now, polka dots are popping up in the beauty sphere by way of our manicures. Celebrities such as Sabrina Carpenter and Addison Rae have been decorating their nails with dots in recent weeks.

Los Angeles-based pop star Lydia Night has also joined in on the fun, donning a contrasting polka dot set to attend Ascot. “I usually go for plain manicures because I play guitar. These nails are cute, funky, and classic—the perfect way to jazz things up,” she tells Vogue.

WASHINGTON — Filmmaker Peter Jackson owns one of the largest private collections of bones of an extinct New Zealand bird called the moa. His fascination with the flightless ostrich-like bird has led to an unusual partnership with a biotech company known for its grand and controversial plans to bring back lost species.

On Tuesday, Colossal Biosciences announced an effort to genetically engineer living birds to resemble the extinct South Island giant moa – which once stood 12 feet (3.6 meters) tall – with $15 million in funding from Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh. The collaboration also includes the New Zealand-based Ngāi Tahu Research Centre.

“The movies are my day job, and the moa are my fun thing I do,” said Jackson. “Every New Zealand schoolchild has a fascination with the moa.”

Outside scientists say the idea of bringing back extinct species onto the modern landscape is likely impossible, although it may be feasible to tweak the genes of living animals to have similar physical traits. Scientists have mixed feelings on whether that will be helpful, and some worry that focusing on lost creatures could distract from protecting species that still exist.

The moa had roamed New Zealand for 4,000 years until they became extinct around 600 years ago, mainly because of overhunting. A large skeleton brought to England in the 19th century, now on display at the Yorkshire Museum, prompted international interest in the long-necked bird.

Unlike Colossal’s work with dire wolves, the moa project is in very early stages. It started with a phone call about two years ago after Jackson heard about the company’s efforts to “de-extinct” – or create genetically similar animals to – species like the woolly mammoth and the dire wolf.

Then Jackson put Colossal in touch with experts he’d met through his own moa bone-collecting. At that point, he’d amassed between 300 and 400 bones, he said.

In New Zealand, it’s legal to buy and sell moa bones found on private lands, but not on public conservation areas – nor to export them.

The first stage of the moa project will be to identify well-preserved bones from which it may be possible to extract DNA, said Colossal’s chief scientist Beth Shapiro.

Those DNA sequences will be compared to genomes of living bird species, including the ground-dwelling tinamou and emu, “to figure out what it is that made the moa unique compared to other birds,” she said.

Colossal used a similar process of comparing ancient DNA of extinct dire wolves to determine the genetic differences with gray wolves. Then scientists took blood cells from a living gray wolf and used CRISPR to genetically modify them in 20 different sites. Pups with long white hair and muscular jaws were born late last year.

Working with birds presents different challenges, said Shapiro.

Unlike mammals, bird embryos develop inside eggs, so the process of transferring an embryo to a surrogate will not look like mammalian IVF.

“There’s lots of different scientific hurdles that need to be overcome with any species that we pick as a candidate for de-extinction,” said Shapiro. “We are in the very early stages.”

If the Colossal team succeeds in creating a tall bird with huge feet and thick pointed claws resembling the moa, there’s also the pressing question of where to put it, said Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm, who is not involved in the project.

“Can you put a species back into the wild once you’ve exterminated it there?” he said. “I think it’s exceedingly unlikely that they could do this in any meaningful way.”

“This will be an extremely dangerous animal,” Pimm added.

The direction of the project will be shaped by Māori scholars at the University of Canterbury’s Ngāi Tahu Research Centre. Ngāi Tahu archaeologist Kyle Davis, an expert in moa bones, said the work has “really reinvigorated the interest in examining our own traditions and mythology.”

At one of the archaeological sites that Jackson and Davis visited to study moa remains, called Pyramid Valley, there are also antique rock art done by Māori people – some depicting moa before their extinction.

Paul Scofield, a project adviser and senior curator of natural history at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand, said he first met the “Lord of the Rings” director when he went to his house to help him identity which of the nine known species of moa the various bones represented.

“He doesn’t just collect some moa bones – he has a comprehensive collection,” said Scofield.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The summer season is officially here and thriving—and model Kendall Jenner has wasted no time heading out on a lavish vacation. This month, Jenner (and sister Kylie Jenner) headed to Saint-Tropez in France for a little R&R. Earlier this week, the siblings were spotted living their best lives, swimming in the ocean in their chic little day dresses. Today, however, Kendall was spotted doing a little shopping at the Chloé store with some friends, and her choice of a bright red minidress brought back one of the biggest trends of summer 2023: Tomato girl summer.

A few seasons back, tomato-themed looks was all of the rage on the runways and with celebrities. The aesthetic revolved around wearing shades of tomato red and earthy greens and browns; you could say it was all about dressing as though you were growing on a tomato vine in some chic, well-manicured garden. Today, in Saint-Tropez, Jenner revived the look yet again, pairing a red shift dress with red flip-flops. (Someone loves a monochromatic moment.)

Jenner on vacation in Italy in 2022.

Photo: Getty Images