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‘The War’ on Blu-ray

For the nearly 15-hour, seven-episode 2007 PBS documentary, previously available on DVD, directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick opted not to rely upon re-enactments or historians and experts to consider World War II. Instead, they interviewed the people who lived it in four American towns: Mobile, Ala.; Luverne, Minn.; Waterbury, Conn.; and Sacramento, Calif. Familiar voice-over narrators include Tom Hanks.

‘Hell on Wheels’: Season 1

Anson Mount stars as former Confederate soldier Cullen Bohannon, who spends this season seeking revenge against the Union soldiers who murdered his wife and son. He moves West to work on the Union Pacific Railroad, overseeing track workers, including emancipated slave Elam Ferguson (hip-hop musician and actor Common). Colm Meaney portrays corrupt entrepreneur Thomas Durant. The violent, steamy western will return on AMC later this year.

‘Flashpoint’: Season 4

The Canadian cop drama aired on CBS before switching over to ION early into this season. The show’s “Strategic Response Unit” is inspired by Toronto’s Emergency Task Force, handling high-intensity cases like finding a criminal who streams his robberies on the Internet. Stars include Toronto native Enrico Colantoni (who starred in the 1997-2003 series “Just Shoot Me!”) and Amy Jo Johnson. ION has renewed the show for a fifth season.

Note: DVDs are released Tuesday.

—Monika Anderson

Getty Images

Sergio Aguero of Manchester City scores his team’s matchwinning goal during the Barclays Premier League match on Sunday.

When the final day of the English Premier League season kicked off on Sunday, two teams from Manchester topped the table, with City ahead of United on goal differential. A victory would be enough for City to win the title. United had to hope for a slip-up.

And as United dispatched Sunderland, it looked like a City slip-up was on the cards. Manchester’s men in blue were trailing Queens Park Rangers 2-1.

Then, in one of English soccer’s most stunning comebacks, City scored twice in stoppage time to win 3-2 and claim it’s first top-flight crown in 44 years. United, meanwhile, became the first team in Premier League history to post 89 points and not win the title.

But United knows all about inflicting late heartbreak. With two injury time goals, it overturned a 1-0 deficit in the 1999 Champions League final against Bayern Munich.

As far as thrilling finishes go in England’s domestic league, only the conclusion of the 1989 season can compare. Arsenal visited Liverpool on the last day of the season trailing by three points. Liverpool only needed a draw, while Arsenal needed to win by two goals to claim the title on goals scored, the second tiebreaker. The Gunners made it 2-0 in the 90th minute. Which, by Manchester City’s new standard, seems downright early.

—Joshua Robinson

Por RUTHIE ACKERMAN

Quando os casais vêm pela primeira vez consultar Bruce Helmer, do Wealth Enhancement Group (Grupo para Aumentar a Riqueza), em Minneapolis, no Estado americano de Minnesota, ele costuma dar a eles um baralho de cartas. Cada carta tem uma palavra que representa um valor, como família, espiritualidade ou aventura, e Helmer pede a cada cônjuge que selecione entre as 50 cartas as 15 que julga mais importantes para si. Por fim, cada um deve reduzir sua seleção para 10 e depois para 5 cartas. Nesse ponto, os dois mostram suas cartas.

Os resultados muitas vezes surpreendem os casais, pois um dos cônjuges talvez nunca tenha imaginado que o outro tem o sonho de escalar o Monte Evereste ou fundar uma ONG. E também indicam uma das maiores dificuldades do planejamento financeiro: conseguir que marido e mulher conversem e expressem o que é mais importante para cada um.

O trabalho do assessor financeiro é fazer com que a conversa passe de objetivos vagos, como “economizar o suficiente para a aposentadoria”, a metas bem reais e concretas, como definir qual o legado que o casal quer deixar na vida. Não é uma tarefa fácil, e exige muito planejamento — e às vezes criatividade — por parte do assessor.

Kimberly K. Maez, consultora particular para gestão de fortunas na Ameriprise Financial Inc., em Colorado Springs, no Estado do Colorado, dá uma tarefa aos clientes: criar o que ela chama de “livro dos sonhos”, usando uma série de perguntas para ajudá-los a desenvolver uma visão para as suas vidas. As perguntas incluem: Como você quer que a sua vida seja daqui a cinco anos? O que é importante para você em relação à família? O que você quer que o seu dinheiro faça para você, para a sua família ou para o legado que você vai deixar?

Cada cônjuge responde a essas perguntas individualmente e depois conversa sobre o que escreveu. “Eu digo aos clientes que é realmente importante que eles saiam da roda-viva do cotidiano e conversem um com o outro”, diz Maez. “Se essas conversas não acontecem ao longo do relacionamento, quando os filhos vão para a universidade a relação tem uma tendência maior a se desintegrar.”

Um casal com quem Maez trabalhou chegou à conclusão de que suas vidas estavam indo em direções diferentes: ele queria viajar para a China e ela queria trabalhar para uma organização de caridade, prestando assistência médica gratuita a pessoas de baixa renda. Antes de discutir de que forma eles poderiam financiar esses objetivos, Maez primeiro pediu ao casal que pensasse se cada um poderia dar apoio ao outro nesses caminhos separados.

Não foi fácil. No início, ela notou que a mulher ficava de braços cruzados e o homem parava de se envolver na conversa. Mas Maez continuou a fazer perguntas e deixou o casal passar por momentos incômodos de silêncio. Ela então lhes disse para voltar para casa e pensar sobre seus objetivos, individualmente. “Eles perceberam que estão juntos há 25 anos e nunca conversaram sobre a visão de cada um para essa fase da vida”, diz Maez.

Um mês depois, o casal voltou e teve uma conversa aberta, onde cada um teve permissão de dizer o que queria, sem que o outro ficasse na defensiva.

A mulher, de 60 anos, agora trabalha para uma organização sem fins lucrativos. O marido, de 62 anos, faz periodicamente viagens de duas semanas para o exterior. “Foram as conversas que surgiram a partir do livro dos sonhos que lhes permitiram compreender que cada um tinha que fazer o que queria”, diz Maez. Isso, por sua vez, lhes permitiu chegar a um planejamento financeiro mais realista, diz ela.

Stacy e Barry Johnson, que trabalham juntos em uma consultoria financeira em Casper, no Estado de Wyoming, dizem que o fato de serem um casal os ajuda a entender melhor o funcionamento interno de um relacionamento, quando o assunto é o planejamento das finanças.

As mulheres muitas vezes se sentem inclinadas a trabalhar com Stacy, e os homens com Barry. “Como casal, temos dois pares de olhos e ouvidos distintos e perspectivas diferentes, o que ajuda os casais a quebrar essas barreiras”, diz Stacy, consultora de gestão de investimentos na firma Raymond James Financial Services Inc.

Os assessores financeiros se lembram de um casal cujo marido tinha guardado muito dinheiro e havia separado as economias em diferentes categorias: viagens e diversão, despesas mensais e despesas para a educação futura dos netos.

O problema era que a esposa não havia sido envolvida no processo de planejamento financeiro. “Ele sempre pensou em economizar para suas próprias categorias de atividade e não tinha levado as necessidades da mulher em consideração”, diz Johnson. “Pedimos que ela expressasse seus desejos.”

Foi a primeira vez que alguém lhe perguntou sobre seus próprios planos de aposentadoria e serviu para lembrá-los que o casamento é uma parceria, na qual ambos os cônjuges merecem ser ouvidos.

By JONATHAN LOPEZ

Philadelphia

In June 1882, Vincent van Gogh learned that the great German painter Albrecht Dürer had used a perspective screen—an empty picture frame strung with a series of crosshairs—as an aid to composing images from nature. Van Gogh soon acquired one, employing adjustable poles to stabilize it in the sand as he sketched along the beach at Scheveningen, outside The Hague. Guidelines corresponding to the perspective screen’s divisions can be seen in his drawings from later years, when he was living in France, suggesting that he still relied on the device to work out the spectacular foreshortening effects that characterized some of his best pictures of that period, such as “The Harvest” (1888), painted near Arles. Sun-drenched stalks of wheat dominate the foreground, while distant fields recede in a geometric quilt of greens and yellows to the high horizon, near the very top of the canvas. Writing to his brother Theo, Van Gogh compared this image to ones by the 17th-century Dutch painter Philips de Koninck, who often composed landscapes from an unconventional, downward-tilted viewpoint.

“Van Gogh Up Close,” an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, focuses on the artist’s mature tendency to push landscape and still-life motifs dramatically forward in the picture plane, yielding images cropped and arranged in radical, often miraculously unexpected ways. Room after room of sumptuous paintings from Van Gogh’s French years, ablaze with the most brilliant colors of nature, offer endless visual fascination. But the show, which unfortunately does not include “The Harvest,” has little to say about the perspective screen or De Koninck; instead, it presents abundant material on 19th-century nature photography’s possible influence on Van Gogh—a peculiar issue to emphasize, given that the painter expressed outspoken disdain for photography. The result is the Paris Hilton of art exhibitions—extremely attractive but not especially noteworthy for its intellectual insights.

Cincinnati Art Museum

‘Undergrowth with Two Figures’ (1890), by Vincent van Gogh.

The exhibition—organized by Philadelphia Museum curators Joseph J. Rishel and Jennifer A. Thompson, in collaboration with Anabelle Kienle, a curator at the National Gallery of Canada, and Cornelia Homburg, a Van Gogh scholar—opens with two small rooms of still lifes, most of them luscious pictures, although many have little to do with the theme of the show. “Sunflowers” (1888 or 1889), from Philadelphia’s own collection, is a virtuoso performance in color harmony, showing a ceramic vase of perky yellow blossoms against a swirling cerulean background, but it is entirely orthodox from a compositional standpoint, as the vase sits squarely in the middle distance at eye level. More aptly chosen is a second sunflower image of 1887 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicting two slightly wilted blossoms lying on a rich ultramarine blue tablecloth. The artist’s point of view is elevated and extremely tight, so that the flowers appear much larger than life-size; the thick, springy yellow brushstrokes of the petals seem almost to leap off the canvas.

The still lifes are a warm-up for the exhibition’s main event: four large galleries of landscapes, the best of which give a splendid impression of Van Gogh’s mercurial, impassioned genius. It is here that one really sees the artist applying the lessons of Dürer’s screen, stretching and bending perspectives to isolate details like sheaves of wheat, underbrush on the forest floor or raindrops pelting a freshly tilled field. The exhibition includes pictures lent by museums from around the world—Britain, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland—as well as select private collections. But perhaps the greatest star of the show comes from the Cincinnati Art Museum, “Undergrowth with Two Figures” (1890), a stunning work that has been cleaned for the occasion and looks just as fresh as if it had been painted yesterday. Rhythmic starbursts of green, white and yellow brushstrokes race across the horizontal canvas, punctuated by the silver-gray verticals of evenly spaced tree trunks. The strolling man and woman mentioned in the title are easy to miss, but once seen they add an unmistakable note of foreboding to the composition.

Where the show falls down is in the largest of the landscape galleries, flanked on two sides by alcoves containing background material. One alcove displays a dozen 19th-century nature photographs marketed to artists as source images; there’s no evidence that Van Gogh used these, and the curators’ argument that he would still have been influenced by them is too speculative to merit the outsize presentation. The other alcove is filled with Japanese prints, most by Utagawa Hiroshige, an apt point of reference for Van Gogh, as he collected such items. Hiroshige’s high viewpoints, abrupt croppings and keen interest in the changing seasons influenced Van Gogh, as well as Claude Monet and other artists of the era. But it is unclear why so many prints are needed to demonstrate this fairly simple and well-known connection.

These alcoves would have been a good place to introduce additional issues: the perspective screen, which would be a nice item to display and fairly easy to reconstruct based on Van Gogh’s drawings of it from his letters; the precedents for Van Gogh’s compositional strategies in commercial illustrations, a question discussed in the show’s catalog but not represented in the exhibits; and the inspiration Van Gogh drew from earlier European art. That last subject receives brief attention in a narrow hallway at the end of the show, leading to the gift shop, but the few prints on view seem to have been chosen as much for their familiar names—Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Jacob van Ruisdael—as for apposite formal comparisons.

The curators don’t do a particularly good job teaching art history, but this is nonetheless a very handsome show, installed with great sensitivity to harmonious visual groupings. While it would be preferable to have brains and beauty in one package, the exhibition is worth seeing for the beauty alone. The pictures, after all, speak for themselves.

Mr. Lopez is editor-at-large of Art & Antiques

A version of this article appeared February 15, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Matter Of Perspective.