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Space, the Artistic Frontier


While their styles and interests may sometimes bear little in common, Alexander Calder, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Rockwell, Andy Warhol, Jamie Wyeth and some 200 other artists have shared not only the same subject but employer as well—NASA.

Yes, as in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which has been commissioning art for the better part of half a century, and which recently put some of its vast collection on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. "NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration" is an exhibit of more than 70 pieces (from a total of roughly 3,000) that the space agency has paid artists to create on programs and launches dating back to the days of the Mercury missions of the early 1960s. With the landing of the space shuttle Atlantis last week, however, and an end to America's manned space program, there probably won't be any more for a while.

NASA | Art: 50 Years of Exploration

National Air and Space Museum
Through Oct. 9

The styles range from the photorealistic to the purely abstract. As for subjects: "Some of the artists loved to do people, like astronauts or engineers. Some loved doing hardware, like the rockets or launch pads. Others just searched for their own vision," says Tom Crouch, the museum's art curator. Emotions and atmospheres evoked run from the excited and awe-struck to the whimsical and playful to the solemn and contemplative, even the mournful.

You might wonder, though, why an agency that's been photographed and filmed extensively almost since its founding in 1958 would feel a need for artists. "Photography was going to be great for the factual account of what we were doing, but photography was missing the excitement," says James Dean, the first curator of the NASA art program. "Excitement would fall within the province of the artist."

James E. Webb, NASA administrator during the Mercury missions, saw an oil portrait of astronaut Alan Shepard wearing a space suit and was struck by the image. "Important events can be interpreted by artists to give a unique insight into significant aspects of our history-making advances into space," Mr. Webb wrote in a 1962 directive initiating art commissions.

Mitchell Jamieson's 'First Steps' (1963). ENLARGE
Mitchell Jamieson's 'First Steps' (1963). Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

The following year NASA invited eight accomplished artists to document the final Mercury flight. "The idea was to let them do what they want, go wherever they want, and we would take whatever they gave us," Mr. Dean says. All eight accepted the invitation and its accompanying $800 honorarium. Seven artists, including Lamar Dodd, Peter Hurd and George Weymouth, went to Cape Canaveral, while an eighth, Mitchell Jamieson, traveled with an aircraft carrier in the Pacific to capture the splash-down of the capsule. Several of the resulting works are part of the exhibit, including Jamieson's "First Steps" (1963), a portrait of astronaut Gordon Cooper standing on the carrier deck after returning from 22 orbits of earth.

With the ensuing Gemini and Apollo programs more artists participated, and some left indelible memories. "Bob Rauschenberg came for Apollo 11, the moon landing, and I took him around," Mr. Dean says. The artist wanted to sit on a bunker outside the fence surrounding the launch pad and the Saturn V rocket. "When it got dark, lights started coming on around the pad, you could hear voices and some hissing sounds, and Bob said to me, 'It's like the thing is coming alive!'"

Alligators and exotic creatures in a nearby wildlife preserve began making noises, too. "Bob thought the juxtaposition of this extremely high technology with basic animal life was fascinating," Mr. Dean recalls. That fascination is apparent in some of the 30 hand-pulled lithographs Mr. Rauschenberg eventually made.

Paul Calle, perhaps best known as the artist who later designed the Apollo 11 commemorative postage stamp, was allowed to visit with the Apollo 11 crew the morning of the historic launch. As Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins ate breakfast, Calle, wearing a white antibacterial suit and booties, sat nearby sketching them. He also drew them as they donned their gear to leave for the launch pad. Several sketches are on display.

One of Norman Rockwell's paintings shows the heads of the Apollo 11 astronauts along with many unidentified engineers, technicians and other support personnel together in a group profile. Rockwell initially photographed the subjects individually as they came to his room at a nearby Holiday Inn in the days before the launch. The artist also wanted to include in the portrait an average citizen to stand in for the U.S. public. "He was so pleased with how the Holiday Inn treated him, he used the hotel manager," says Mr. Crouch.

Photographers with a distinct eye and sensibility were eventually invited to participate. In 1999, Annie Liebowitz shot a portrait of Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot a space shuttle. Two years later, NASA art-program director Bert Ulrich offered William Wegman the loan of a space suit, and Mr. Wegman, known for his whimsical photographs of his Weimaraner dogs, jumped at the chance.

"One of my dogs is spectacular wearing lots of stuff," Mr. Wegman says by phone. "I found a way to fit him inside the suit and took lots of pictures." He photographed another of his dogs looking out the portal of a mock spacecraft.

Artists have continued to gravitate—logically, in some cases—toward space. In 2004, Barbara Ernst Prey attended a test flight of an experimental high-speed NASA aircraft above the California desert. "In many ways it [was] a natural progression of what I paint, as I am a landscape painter and watercolorist," Ms. Prey wrote by email. "Watercolor lends itself to fragility, freshness, saturated colors and, in this case, speed." Her painting shows the aircraft streaking across a vividly blue sky.

In the aftermath of the tragic loss of space shuttle Columbia, NASA asked the sculptor Chakaia Booker to create a memorial or tribute piece and provided her with raw material in the form of one of the shuttle's tires. Ms. Booker, who has specialized in abstract or symbolic sculptures made from tires, describes space as "an unknown, un-interpreted abstract environment." She produced "Remembering Columbia"—thin slices of destroyed tread forming what looks like a large black bow that might accompany a wreath of flowers.

Currently, the NASA art program is moribund. "The budget situation is a little bleak," says Mr. Ulrich. But he's optimistic that, given the relatively small $2,500 honorarium the agency has offered in recent years, the budget will at some point be able to accommodate perhaps one commission a year.

Meanwhile, the public can view "NASA | ART" at the National Air and Space Museum. "We all have our own memories of the space age and various events and moments," says Mr. Crouch. "But the exhibit shows a variety of artistic takes on those moments, and they really captured the human experience."

Mr. Triplett was the head of the Washington bureau of Variety from 2005 to 2008.

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