Wearing a shiny silver spacesuit, Alan Shepard clutches his helmet and looks like an archetypal blue-eyed American hero. The 1961 portrait by Bruce Stevenson paid tribute to the first US astronaut in space. It also planted a seed.
James Webb, the then administrator of Nasa, saw the painting and was inspired to start the space agency’s own art programme, believing that artists could bring a unique perspective to exploring the cosmos. From 1962 to 1974 it was led by James Dean, who then became the first art 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 swollen to more than 8,000, including pieces by Alexander Calder, Henry Casselli, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell and Alma Thomas. A selection is on display in its revamped Flight and the 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’ flyer and Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis, as well as the Apollo 11 command module Columbia and Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 spacesuit. The array of planes and rockets is to be expected; the presence of an art gallery comes as more of a surprise.
“Why do we collect art?” asked 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.”
There are thrilling juxtapositions here. Rockwell responds to the Apollo space programme literally and solemnly in muted colours; Thomas reacts to it figuratively with awe and in a blaze of glory.
Rockwell was renowned for his Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations depicting wholesome small-town life. In 1964, Look magazine hired him to document Nasa’s burgeoning space programme, banking on his realistic style to make the unfamiliar, terrifying prospect of space travel palatable to millions of ordinary Americans.
Rockwell’s Man’s First Step on the Moon (United States SpaceShip on the Moon) represents a fascinating blend 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 the modern eye, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, the painting features charming inaccuracies – the colour of the spacecraft is slightly off, and an astronaut is depicted standing precariously on top of the module. But in 1967 it was the closest the public had come to seeing the future.
However, Rockwell was not merely a cheerleader for the space age. After the tragic deaths of three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire of 1967, his excitement waned. In a draft of a 1969 speech delivered just before the first successful moon landing, Rockwell asked his audience: “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?”
He pondered: “Would it be better to put all of this thought, energy, and money to improving conditions here on Earth?”
Despite this conflict, Rockwell still found reverence for the human labour behind the machinery. A few months after his speech, he painted Apollo and Beyond (Apollo 11 Space Team). Along with Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins in white bubble helmets, Rockwell populated the canvas with the vast, unsung workforce: backup astronauts, engineers, programme directors such as Wernher von Braun and the anxious wives of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. All gaze upward toward the moon, bound together by a collective aspiration.
Thomas, an artist who spent 35 years teaching art in a public junior high school in Washington, was motivated by watching rocket launches on her colour TV. The exhibition quotes her as saying: “The phenomenal changes of the 20th-century machine and space age … set my creativity in motion.”
Her 1970 painting Launch Pad utilises vertical lines of vivid, natural colours to evoke the gantry structure at the Kennedy Space Center, blending the technological marvel of the rocket with the natural landscape and water of Florida In Blast Off, Thomas captures the violent power of the Saturn V rocket with a dab of grey sitting atop a towering, cone-like flame of orange and yellow. The shape is evocative of an Egyptian pyramid.
Her 1974 piece Astronauts’ Glimpse of the Earth recalls the celebrated “blue marble” photograph taken during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Thomas filled a big circular canvas with intricate, woven dashes of blue, punctuated by bright pops of orange, pink, red and green. The vibrant accents, the gallery suggests, signal a “wish for diverse societies living in harmony within a colorful world”.
Elsewhere, the gallery steps back to the dawn of the commercial jet age. Georgia O’Keeffe’s Blue A (1959) was inspired by her first commercial flight. Looking down from a plane window, O’Keeffe sketched the vibrant blue rivers and shifting landscapes below, transforming the geography into a sweeping, abstract vision. The museum selected it for a grand opening poster in 1976.
Catherine Stewart’s 2020 fabric piece, Katherine Johnson Dress, serves as a tribute to the brilliant Black mathematician whose orbital mechanics calculations were vital to Nasa’s first human spaceflights. Covered in celestial coordinates and equations, the artist imagined the garment as what Johnson might have worn to a hypothetical Nasa celebration marking the 1969 moonwalk.
Even surrealists were captivated by the lunar missions. Man Ray’s interpretation of the first landing on the moon appears at first glance to be a chaotic range of scribbles. But Russo comments: “If you think about it, when we first landed on the moon and that emotional storm, it looks like the vortex of a tornado. Each artist interprets air and space differently and through their own experience and through their own eyes.”
Nowhere is the marriage of art and science more apparent than in the gallery’s temporary exhibition, The Ascent of Rauschenberg: Reinventing the Art of Flight. Featuring 30 works by the pioneering pop artist Robert Rauschenberg – many never displayed before – the exhibition is a sprawling exploration of his deep, almost obsessive fascination with all things that fly.
Asked what work of art, other than his own, he wished he had created, Rauschenberg once replied: “I would have liked to have been around 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 featured in the exhibition, Dean wrote to Rauschenberg, whom he affectionately called “Bob”, and praised a recent viewing of his work: “Everything was just beautiful. You are exactly right for today (and tomorrow, too).”
Rauschenberg’s resulting creations were intricate, layered meditations on flight. In Trust Zone, a piece from his Stoned Moon series, Rauschenberg juxtaposes the ethereal outline of a modern spacesuit and a map of Cape Canaveral with the fragile, pioneering architecture of the Wright brothers’ flyer.
Russo points to Rauschenberg’s use of discarded airplane parts and his penchant for clever visual puns. A piece utilising bicycle wheels pays direct homage to the Wright brothers, who were bicycle mechanics before they were aviators. Even 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 giants of contemporary American culture. The winged horse Pegasus is humorously outfitted with actual airplane wings, while the constellation Hercules is represented by the boxer Muhammad Ali. When the artist depicted the Gemini twins, he laid them out in alignment with true astronomical star charts, proving that his artistic “hodgepodge” was, in fact, grounded in deep, calculated research.
Yet perhaps the most astonishing Rauschenberg artefact on display is not a huge canvas but something the size of a thumbnail. It is a small ceramic wafer known as the Moon Museum. Organised by sculptor Forrest Myers, this tiny 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. Russo says: “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. It’s almost like the same thing here.”
In 1969, another edition of the tiny tile was reportedly attached to the lunar module of Apollo 12. It remains on the lunar surface to this day – stored there, as Rauschenberg once noted, “for future discovery”. It is the smallest, and most distant, piece of art he ever made.
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The Art of Air and Space: Interpretations of Flight is now on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC
