The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an expansive exhibition in its revamped Flight and the Arts Center, showcasing how artists have captured space travel. The museum, among the most visited in the world, houses over 8,000 artworks, including pieces by Alexander Calder, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell, and Alma Thomas. A selection is on display to mark the milestone.
Art and Space: A Historical Connection
According to Carolyn Russo, curator of the art collection, 'Flight originated from the imagination. It originated from the hands of artists. Whereas we have artefacts 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 about it.' The art programme began when James Webb, then NASA administrator, saw a 1961 portrait of astronaut Alan Shepard by Bruce Stevenson and was inspired to start NASA's own art programme, believing artists could bring a unique perspective to exploring the cosmos.
Norman Rockwell's Vision of the Moon Landing
Norman Rockwell, renowned for his Saturday Evening Post covers, was hired by Look magazine in 1964 to document NASA's space programme. His painting Man's First Step on the Moon (1967) was based on a full-size model of a lunar module provided by NASA, painted about three years before Neil Armstrong's moon landing. The painting contains charming inaccuracies, such as the spacecraft's colour being slightly off and an astronaut standing on top of the module, but in 1967 it was the closest the public had come to seeing the future. However, after the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, Rockwell questioned the space programme, asking in a 1969 speech draft: 'Is the space program a lunatic idea now, when we in America are confronted with the problems of poverty, racial injustice, national security and the Vietnam war?' Despite this, he painted Apollo and Beyond (1969), which included not only astronauts but also the vast unsung workforce and their families.
Alma Thomas: Abstracting Space
Alma Thomas, who taught art in a Washington public junior high school for 35 years, was motivated by watching rocket launches on her colour TV. Her 1970 painting Launch Pad uses vertical lines of vivid colours to evoke the gantry structure at Kennedy Space Center. In Blast Off (1972), she captures the Saturn V rocket's power with a grey dab atop a cone-like flame. Her 1974 piece Astronauts' Glimpse of the Earth recalls the 'blue marble' photograph from Apollo 17, with intricate blue dashes and bright pops of colour, suggesting a 'wish for diverse societies living in harmony within a colorful world,' according to the gallery.
Other Artists and the Rauschenberg Exhibition
Georgia O'Keeffe's Blue A (1959) was inspired by her first commercial flight, transforming the geography below into an abstract vision. Catherine Stewart's 2020 fabric piece Katherine Johnson Dress pays tribute to the mathematician whose calculations were vital to NASA's first human spaceflights. The gallery also features a temporary exhibition, The Ascent of Rauschenberg: Reinventing the Art of Flight, with 30 works by Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg's Moon Museum, a small ceramic wafer with drawings by six artists including Andy Warhol, was reportedly attached to the Apollo 12 lunar module in 1969 and remains on the lunar surface. Russo says of Rauschenberg's contribution—a single pencil line: 'What does that line mean? From here to eternity. But also, when Rauschenberg approached his empty canvasses, he often just started with a pencil line.'
