‘Flight originated from imagination’: How artists captured space travel | art

WAlan Shepard wears a shiny silver spacesuit, holds his helmet and looks like a typical blue-eyed American hero. The 1961 portrait by Bruce Stevenson paid tribute to the first American astronaut in space. It also planted a seed.

James Webb, then NASA administrator, saw the painting and was inspired to start the space agency’s art program, believing that artists could offer a unique perspective on exploring the universe. From 1962 to 1974, it was headed by James Dean, who then became the first curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Dean transferred about 2,000 NASA artworks to the museum, whose collection has now swelled to more than 8,000, including pieces by Alexander Calder, Henry Cassilly, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell and Alma Thomas. A selection is on display in the renovated Aviation and Arts Center to celebrate the museum’s 50th anniversary.

The Air and Space Museum is among the most visited museums in the world. Popular exhibits include the Wright Brothers’ Bulletin and Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, as well as the Apollo 11 Columbia command module and Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacesuit. A group of aircraft and missiles is expected. The presence of an art gallery is an even bigger surprise.

“Why do we collect art?” asked Caroline Russo, the collection’s curator. “Flight arose from the imagination. It arose from the hands of artists. While we have artifacts in our museum that tell us what they did and how they flew, art shows us the human dimension of flight and how we experience it, how we feel.”

There are interesting juxtapositions here. Rockwell responds to the Apollo space program literally and formally in muted tones; Thomas reacts to it figuratively with awe and a blaze of glory.

Rockwell is best known for his Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations depicting healthy, small-town living. In 1964, Look magazine hired him to document NASA’s burgeoning space program, relying on his realistic style to make the unfamiliar and terrifying prospect of space travel acceptable to millions of ordinary Americans.

Rockwell’s Man’s First Step on the Moon (America’s Moon Spacecraft) represents a fascinating mixture of research and speculation. Painted about three years before Neil Armstrong’s giant leap, Rockwell based his painting on a full-size model of a lunar module provided by NASA.

To a modern eye, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, the painting features charming errors – the spacecraft’s color is slightly off, and an astronaut is depicted standing precariously atop the module. But in 1967 this was the closest the public came to seeing the future.

However, Rockwell was not just a fan of the space age. After the tragic deaths of three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, his enthusiasm waned. In a draft of a 1969 speech before the first successful moon landing, Rockwell asked his audience: “Is the space program a crazy idea now, when we in America face the problems of poverty, racial injustice, national security, and the Vietnam War?”

He asked: “Would it be better to devote all this thought, energy and money to improving conditions here on Earth?”

Despite this conflict, Rockwell still finds reverence for human labor behind machines. A few months after his speech, he sketched Apollo and beyond (the Apollo 11 space team). Along with Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins in white bubble helmets, Rockwell filled the canvas with a vast, anonymous workforce: reserve astronauts, engineers, program managers like Wernher von Braun, and the anxious wives of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. Everyone looks up at the moon, bound together by a collective ambition.

Thomas, an artist who spent 35 years teaching art at a public middle school in Washington, was motivated by watching rocket launches on her color television. The exhibition quotes her as saying: “The tremendous changes in the machine and space age of the twentieth century… set my creativity in motion.”

Her 1970 painting Launch Pad uses vertical lines of bright, natural colors to evoke the gantry structure at the Kennedy Space Center, blending the technological marvel of the rocket with the landscape and waters of Florida. In Blast Off, Thomas captures the violent power of a Saturn V rocket with a touch of gray above a towering cone-shaped flame of orange and yellow. The shape evokes the Egyptian pyramid.

Her 1974 piece “A Glimpse of Earth for Astronauts” recalls the famous “Blue Marble” photo taken during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Thomas filled a large circular canvas with intricate, woven lines of blue, interspersed with bright splashes of orange, pink, red and green. The exhibition notes that the vibrant accents indicate “the desire for diverse communities living in harmony within a colorful world.”

Elsewhere, the exhibition goes back to the dawn of the commercial aircraft era. Georgia O’Keeffe’s Blue A (1959) was inspired by her first business trip. Looking down from the plane window, O’Keeffe painted the vibrant blue rivers and changing landscapes below, transforming geography into a sweeping, abstract vision. The museum selected it for its grand opening poster in 1976.

Katherine Stewart’s 2020 piece, Katherine Johnson Dress, is a tribute to the brilliant Black mathematician whose calculations in orbital mechanics were vital to NASA’s first human spaceflights. Covered in celestial coordinates and equations, the artist imagined the garment that Johnson might have worn for a hypothetical NASA ceremony marking the 1969 moonwalk.

Even the Surrealists were fascinated by lunar missions. At first glance, Man Ray’s explanation of the first moon landing appears to be a messy collection of scribbles. But Rousseau comments: “If you think about it, when we first landed on the moon and that emotional storm, it seemed like the vortex of a hurricane. Every artist interprets air and space differently and through their own experience and through their eyes.“.

Nowhere is the marriage of art and science more evident than in the gallery’s temporary exhibition titled “The Rise of Rauschenberg: Reinventing the Art of Aviation.” Featuring 30 works by pioneering Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg—many of which have never been shown before—the exhibition is a sprawling exploration of his profound, almost obsessive fascination with all things that fly.

When asked what work of art, other than his own, he wished he had created, Rauschenberg once replied: “I wish I had been there to help the Wright brothers work on their concept of flying bicycles.”

He fostered a close collaborative relationship with Dean, who provided him with NASA materials and visited his studio. In a 1969 letter shown in the gallery, Dean wrote to Rauschenberg, whom he affectionately called “Bob,” and praised recent viewings of his work: “Everything was beautiful. You are well suited for today (and tomorrow, too).”

Rauschenberg’s resulting creations were complex, multi-layered meditations on the fly. In Trust Zone, a piece from his Stoned Moon series, Rauschenberg combines the ethereal outline of a modern spacesuit and a map of Cape Canaveral with the crisp, avant-garde architecture of the Wright Brothers’ flyer.

Russo points out Rauschenberg’s use of discarded airplane parts and his penchant for clever visual puns. The piece using bicycle wheels is a direct tribute to the Wright Brothers, who were bicycle mechanics before becoming pilots. Even the cardboard storage boxes that once held turkeys were transformed by Rauschenberg into birds in flight.

In Star Quarters, Rauschenberg reinvents the night sky not with ancient mythological figures, but with giants of contemporary American culture. The winged horse Pegasus is equipped with real flying wings, while the boxer Muhammad Ali represents the constellation Hercules. When the artist painted Geminis, he placed them in line with real astrological charts of the stars, proving that his artistic “mix” was in fact based on deep and calculated research.

However, perhaps the most surprising Rauschenberg artifact on display is not a massive canvas, but a thumbnail-sized object. It is a small ceramic flake known as the Museum of the Moon. Curated by sculptor Forrest Myers, this mini-tile features small drawings by prominent artists of the era: Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Myers himself.

Rauschenberg’s contribution was a single straight pencil line. “What does this line mean? From here to eternity,” Russo says. “But also, when Rauschenberg approached his blank canvases, he often started with a pencil line. It’s almost the same here.”

In 1969, another version of the tiny tiles was reportedly attached to the lunar module of Apollo 12. It remains on the moon’s surface to this day — stored there, as Rauschenberg once noted, “for future discovery.” It is the smallest and most remote piece of art he has ever made.