‘Aeroplane came from imagination’: how artists captured space travel | Art

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

James Webb, who was the administrator of NASA at the time, saw this image and was inspired to start an art gallery for the space agency, believing that artists could bring a unique perspective to space exploration. From 1962 to 1974 it was headed by James Deanwho later became the first art director at Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Dean moved nearly 2,000 NASA paintings to the museum, whose collection now swells to more than 8,000, including pieces by Alexander Calder, Henry Casselli, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell and Alma Thomas. The option is displayed in its settings Flight and Arts Center to celebrate the museum’s 50th anniversary.

The museum and museum is one of the largest museums in the world. Notable exhibits include the Wright brothers’ flyers and Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis, as well as the Apollo 11 Columbia command module and Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacesuit. Many types of airplanes and rockets are to be expected; the presence of art comes as a surprise.

“Why do we collect art?” he asked Carolyn Russocurator of art collections. “The airplane came from the mind. It came from the hands of artists. Although in our museum there are artifacts that tell us what they did and how they fly, art shows us how people fly and how we act, how we feel.”

There are some interesting juxtapositions here. Rockwell responds to the Apollo space program with realism and respect in unadulterated colors; Thomas is doing it figuratively with fear and the light of glory.

Rockwell was famous for his Saturday Evening Post cover photos showing the good life of a small town. In 1964, Look magazine hired him to write about NASA’s expansion, drawing on his true nature to make the unfamiliar, terrifying prospect of space travel appealing to millions of ordinary Americans.

Rockwell is First Man on the Moon (United States SpaceShip on the Moon) represents a fascinating blend of research and speculation. Artist about three years before Neil Armstrong’s giant leap, Rockwell placed his paintings on the moon’s color photographs provided by NASA.

To the modern eye, hindsight is the benefit of hindsight, the painting has some interesting flaws – the color of the spaceship is a little too small, and the astronaut is shown standing casually above the surface. But in 1967 it was when people were very close to seeing the future.

However, Rockwell was not just a space age celebrant. After the tragic death of three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, his excitement ended. In a speech written in 1969, shortly before the moon landing, Rockwell asked his audience: “Is the space program now a crazy idea, when we in America are facing the problems of poverty, racial injustice, national security and the Vietnam War?”

He asked himself: “Would it be good to put all this thought, energy, and money to change things on Earth?”

Despite this controversy, Rockwell still found respect for the work of the people behind the machines. A few months after he spoke, he took a photo Apollo and Beyond (Apollo 11 Space Team). Along with Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins in white hard hats, Rockwell filled the screen with many non-working people: astronauts, engineers, program managers such as Wernher von Braun and the worried wives of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. They all look up at the moon, united in the desire of the group.

Thomas, painter who spent 35 years teaching art at a public high school in Washington, D.C., was inspired by watching a rocket launch on his color TV. The exhibition quotes him as saying: “The amazing evolution of 19th century machines and the space age… launched my creativity.”

His photo from 1970 Launch pad he uses clear lines, vivid colors, nature to evoke the spectacular view of the Kennedy Space Center, combining the wonder of rocket technology with the natural landscape and waters of Florida In Blast Off, Thomas captures the violent power of the Saturn V rocket with gray sitting on top of a long flame, orange and yellow. Its shape is reminiscent of the Egyptian pyramids.

Its 1974 episode Astronauts’ View of Earth recalls the famous “blue” photo taken during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Thomas filled a large circular canvas with intricate blue lines, painted with pops of bright orange, pink, red and green. A fascinating expression, this graphic design expresses “the desire of different people living in harmony in a beautiful world”.

Elsewhere, the building harkens back to the early years of the commercial jet. Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe Blue A (1959)) was inspired by his first business trip. Looking down from an airplane window, O’Keeffe captured vivid blue rivers and the shifting landscape below, transforming the world into a vast, blurred vision. The museum chose to be the opening post in 1976.

Catherine Stewart’s 2020 piece of clothing, Katherine Johnson Dressit pays tribute to the brilliant Black mathematician whose orbital mechanics calculations were crucial to NASA’s first space flight. Covered in celestial links and equations, the artist envisioned the outfit as something Johnson might have worn to a fictional NASA celebration celebrating the 1969 moon landing.

Even occultists were fascinated by the moon’s journeys. Man Ray’s interpretation of the first moon landings appears at first glance to have a misguided record. But Russo said: “If you think about it, right after we got to the moon with a hurricane, it looked like a hurricane.”.”

Nowhere is the marriage of art and science more evident than in a gallery’s temporary exhibition, The Rise of Rauschenberg: Reclaiming the Art of Flight. Featuring 30 works by the famous pop artist Robert Rauschenberg – many of which have never been exhibited before – this exhibition is an extensive exploration of his deep, almost mesmerizing interest in everything that flies.

When asked what work of art, other than his own, he wished he had created, Rauschenberg once replied: “I wish I could have been there to help the Wright brothers express their ideas about art.” flying bikes.”

He fostered a close, cooperative relationship with Dean, who gave him NASA equipment and visited his studio. In a 1969 letter shown in the exhibition, Dean wrote to Rauschenberg, whom he affectionately called “Bob”, and praised the new perspective on his work: “Everything was beautiful.

Rauschenberg’s creations were complex, meditative journeys. In the Trust Zone, a piece of it Stoned Moon seriesRauschenberg depicts a modern aerial photograph with a map of Cape Canaveral and fragile structures, the first of the Wright brothers’ flyers.

Russo points to Rauschenberg’s use of discarded aircraft materials and his preference for abstract maps. The piece using bicycle wheels pays direct homage to the Wright brothers, who were bicycle designers before they became aviators. Even the cardboard storage boxes that once contained turkeys were transformed by Rauschenberg into flying birds.

In Star QuartersRauschenberg restores the night sky not with the ancients of mythology but with the giants of American culture. The winged horse Pegasus is comically dressed in real airplane wings, while the constellation Hercules is represented by boxer Muhammad Ali. When the artist depicts the Gemini twins, he places them in the exact order of the stars in the sky, proving that his “hodgepodge” art was, rooted in deep research, quantifiable.

Yet perhaps Rauschenberg’s most remarkable painting on display is not a large canvas but one that resembles a portrait. It is a small piece of ceramic known as Moon Museum. Designed by sculptor Forrest Myers, these small tiles contain miniature paintings by famous artists of the time: Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Myers himself.

Rauschenberg’s contribution was a single straight pencil line. Russo said: “What does that line mean?” From now to eternity.

In 1969, another copy of the small tile was said to have been included with the lunar module of Apollo 12. It remains on the surface of the moon to this day – stored there, as Rauschenberg said, “for future access”. It is the smallest, and most distant, piece he has ever made.