Tag Archive for 'art'

A Face in the Crowd

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on April 9, 2010 in History and space.
0 Comments Tags: , , .

In addition to the “Apollo 11 Codices”, the National Air and Space Museum holds approximately 150 works by the artist Mitchell Jamieson (1915 – 1976). The “Apollo 11 Codices” exemplify Jamieson’s journalistic style of painting, which was one reason NASA brought him into its Fine Art Program. Aboard the U.S.S. Hornet, Jamieson sketched the seamen working to recover the capsule and crew from the successful Apollo 11 mission. Jamieson was known for his depictions of the onlookers at major events rather than the events themselves. This style allows the viewer to believe that they are there as part of the crowd, feeling the energy and excitement.

Three of Jamieson’s works are traveling as part of the exhibition “NASA Art: Fifty Years of Exploration” organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) in cooperation with NASA and the National Air and Space Museum. Two of his paintings hang on the third floor of the Museum, including “There!” near the Director’s office. A painting on board, “There!,” shows the seamen aboard the U.S.S. Hornet pointing to the sky, seeing the Columbia command module descending on its parachute. As with his sketches in “Apollo 11 Codices,” he allows us to join in the excitement of this great moment of human achievement.

There!

There! by Mitchell Jamieson

 

Before World War II, Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes commissioned Jamieson to paint a mural for the new Interior Building depicting the Marian Anderson concert on the National Mall entitled “An Incident in Contemporary American Life”. Ickes and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had organized this concert after Marian Anderson was denied singing at Constitution Hall due to the color of her skin. In the mural, Jamieson concentrates on the crowd— even giving us portraits of individuals that we would be standing next to—straining to hear the concert which inaugurated the use of the Lincoln Memorial as a sight for civil rights protests.

An Incident in Contemporary American Life by Mitchell Jamieson

An Incident in Contemporary American Life by Mitchell Jamieson Courtesy of the U.S. General Services Administration, Fine Arts Program

 

Jamieson, who was born in Kensington, Maryland and studied at the Corcoran School, was an official combat artist for the U.S. Navy during World War II, where he depicted the invasion of Sicily, the invasion at Normandy, as well as the Japanese surrender on board the U.S.S. Missouri. Jamieson was awarded the Bronze Star by the U.S. Navy for his work. In addition to his renderings for NASA of Apollo recoveries, Jamieson covered Mercury missions as well as a Saturn launch.

Jamieson volunteered as a civilian artist for the U.S. Army in Vietnam. This effort took an enormous toll from which he was not to recover. In 1976 he took his own life.

Sources: biographies from the Archives of AskArt and the Navy Museum.

Hunter Hollins is Loan Manager for the Space History Division of the National Air and Space Museum.

Remembering Robert McCall

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on March 9, 2010 in Behind The Scenes, space and Stories.
3 Comments Tags: , , .

One of my first major projects as a young exhibition designer at the National Air and Space Museum was planning a one-man show for the Museum’s Flight and the Arts gallery, called simply “The Art of Robert McCall.” The Museum owned several McCalls, in addition to the great mural in the lobby, but we needed a few more to fill Flight and the Arts. So, in the summer of 1984 I flew to Scottsdale, Arizona, where I was welcomed into the McCall home by Bob’s lovely wife Louise.

Mary and Barb

Mary Henderson and Barbara Brennan installing “The Art of Robert McCall" in 1984.

Bob was out of town that week, but Louise, also an artist, assured me that he trusted us to select the right works from the many available. It was an honor to have access to Bob’s studio and difficult to remain focused on the task at hand—measuring and photographing works for the show—with so many distractions: works in progress that revealed his careful meticulous process, finished artwork stacked against the wall, and objects collected as models and inspiration for his space paintings.

When our work was finally done in Bob’s studio, Louise showed me her own beautiful watercolors of bright flowers and sun-drenched still-lifes. “Bob paints space, and I paint Earth,” she explained. We drove to see a stained glass window they had designed together for a chapel in Scottsdale. It was a perfect blend of their styles: an Earth- and space-scape, with her colorful flowers sprinkled across the bottom and his glowing stars in the heaven above. I basked in the glow of their great talent, their love for each other, and their commitment to their art, and I thought, what a remarkable couple they are.

Bob McCall

Robert McCall working on The Space Mural -- A Cosmic View, in 1976, before the opening of the National Air and Space Museum.

Bob’s show ran from September 1984 to August 1985, and I saw Louise and him several more times throughout that year and off and on for decades during their frequent visits to the Museum. They always greeted me warmly, like an old friend. In my 30 years at the Museum, I have seen millions of visitors of every age and nationality pose to have their pictures taken in front of the huge astronaut figure in Bob McCall’s mural in the lobby. It makes me happy to think that his work is in photo albums around the globe, associated with fond vacation memories. I send my heartfelt condolences to Louise and the McCall family and thank them for my own fond memories of knowing Bob and Louise McCall.

Barbara Brennan is Chair of Exhibits Design at the National Air and Space Museum.

Robert McCall (1919-2010)

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on March 5, 2010 in History, On View at the Museum, space and Stories.
1 Comment Tags: , , , , .
A Cosmic View Detail

A study for Robert T. McCall's The Space Mural -- A Cosmic View in the South Lobby.

The nation lost an inspirational figure when Bob McCall died on Friday, February 26. As an artist, Bob invited people around the globe to share his optimistic dreams of a human future in space. A native of Columbus, Ohio and a graduate of the Columbus School of Fine Arts, McCall came out of the Army Air Forces at the end of WW II and established himself as a successful advertising illustrator with a number of magazine covers to his credit. But it was the notion of flying through air and space that truly inspired him. Beginning in the 1950s, he produced over forty works for the U.S. Air Force art collection. When James Webb, administrator of NASA, created an agency art program in the 1960s, Bob McCall was one of the first artists invited to participate. He became a favorite with Hollywood, as well, producing major paintings and posters for films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Tora, Tora, Tora.

Tora Tora Tora

Concept paintings by Robert T. McCall for the 1970 20th Centruy Fox motion picture Tora! Tora! Tora! hang in the World War II Aviation gallery entrance. This one depicts the Japanese fleet en route to its attack on Pearl Harbor.

McCall was perhaps best known for his murals. The Space Mural — A Cosmic View (1976), which he painted on a south lobby wall of the National Air and Space Museum, is perhaps the best known of all of his works. It was the first of several major murals that McCall produced for other museums and NASA facilities. In addition, his paintings appeared on a dozen U.S. postage stamps commemorating space feats. “There’s a great pleasure in designing something so many people are collecting,” he once remarked. “My art may fade into oblivion, but the stamps and murals will last.”

A Cosmic View

A study for Robert T. McCall's The Space mural -- A Cosmic View in the South Lobby.

Lester Cooke, curator of painting at the National Gallery of Art, once noted that Bob McCall had “…the quality and scope of imagination to travel in space, and carry us along with him.” Without artists like McCall, he explained, events in space which ordinary citizens could not see or experience “…would remain in the realm of words, mathematical formulae and electronic signals.” There was no danger of that, as long as Bob McCall was around.

A Cosmic View

Many visitors stop to have their photo taken in front of McCall's The Space Mural -- A Cosmic View when visiting the National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall. Photo by Eric Long.

Tom Crouch is Senior Curator for Aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum.


The Saga of Lunar Landscape

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on January 22, 2010 in Behind The Scenes, Hidden Treasures, Highlights from the Collection, History, Stories and Web & New Media.
8 Comments Tags: , , , , .

For more than a decade it has been my privilege, among my other duties, to serve as curator of the National Air and Space Museum art collection. It comes as a surprise to many folks to realize that the Museum has an art collection. In fact, it includes over 4,700 works by artists with names like Daumier, Goya, Rauschenberg, Rockwell and Wyeth, and is perhaps the finest and best-rounded collection of aerospace-themed art held by any of the world’s museums. People who are aware that I manage the Museum’s art treasures occasionally ask if I have a favorite work in the collection, I do.

"Lunar Landscape" by Chesley Bonestell. Reproduced courtesy of Private Collection

Chesley Bonestell’s mural, Lunar Landscape, was unveiled at the Boston Science Museum’s Haydon Planetarium on March 28, 1957. “No spaceship reservations are needed for a startlingly realistic visit to the Moon” announced a museum press release.  Measuring forty feet long by ten feet tall, the dramatic panorama of the lunar surface was the masterwork of an artist who had done more than his fair share to set the stage for the coming of the Space Age.

Born in 1888, Chesley Bonestell grew up on San Francisco’s Nob Hill, and survived the 1906 earthquake to emerge as a leading American architectural designer. Having left his artistic fingerprints on some of the best known structures of the era, including the façade of the Chrysler Building, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Golden Gate Bridge, he moved on to Hollywood, where his matte paintings provided the stunning backgrounds for such films as, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), and The Magnificent Ambersons. (1942).

Chesley Bonestell. Portrait by Ansel Adams, Gift of Pip and Frederick C. Durant, III

Always fascinated by astronomy, Bonestell began combining the best available science with his own artistry to produce paintings of the surface of other worlds. Life magazine published a spread of the artist’s extraterrestrial scenes in its issue of May 29, 1944. The editors of Mechanix Illustrated introduced their readers to Bonestell’s notion of a “Moon Rocket” in September 1945. In 1949, he collaborated with writer Willy Ley to produce the beautifully illustrated book, Conquest of Space. The next year, Bonestell teamed with producer George Pal and science fiction writer Robert Heinlein to create a classic space flight film, Destination Moon (1950). The artist contributed illustrations to a series of eight Colliers magazine articles on space flight that began to appear in the spring of 1952, and to the books describing flights to the Moon and Mars that spun out of the magazine series. A generation of youngsters, myself among them, nursed dreams of interplanetary travel inspired by Chesley Bonestell’s dramatic visions of other worlds.

Bonestell was at the peak of his powers in 1956, when the Boston Museum of Science commissioned Lunar Landscape, a work on canvas that would take up an entire wall near the planetarium. As in the case of all of his paintings, the artist planned the mural in meticulous detail. He positioned the viewer on a spot 1300 feet up the south wall of an imaginary lunar crater (“similar to Albateguius, but smaller”), located seven degrees from the Moon’s North Pole and five degrees to the left of the center of the lunar disc. He went so far as to specify that it was 3 o’clock, Boston time, on a late June afternoon, and calculated the position of the planets and stars accordingly (Jupiter over the central peaks, Antares below and to the right of the Earth).

Continue reading ‘The Saga of Lunar Landscape’

Fly Now! Making the National Air and Space Museum's Poster Collection Accessible, Online

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on October 17, 2009 in Aviation, Behind The Scenes, Hidden Treasures, Highlights from the Collection and Web & New Media.
24 Comments Tags: , , , , .

As mentioned in Dom Pisano’s recent post “From Collecting to Curating,” six interns, including myself, and two volunteers (with our supervisor, enough for a baseball team!) photographed, scanned and catalogued much of the museum’s collection of over 1,300 posters at the Paul E. Garber Facility‘s collections processing unit this summer. It sounds like a lot of posters, but you may not have seen any of them, unless you have a great memory of advertisements you glimpsed in airports over the years while running to catch your plane. Selections from the posters have been published, but the collection is now receiving the “full treatment” by museum staff, interns, and volunteers.

Intern Mark Leadenham prepares to examine posters with a microscope to determine what printing method was used. Photo by Amelia Kile.

Intern Katy Osterwald measures and cuts archival folders to appropriate sizes for housing the posters. Photo by Carl Bobrow.

This marks the first time the poster collection, which includes graphic art published from as early as 1827 up to the twenty-first century, has been accessible to the public as an archive, since the majority of it has remained in storage in Suitland, Maryland. The collection provides a wealth of information related to balloons, early flight, military and commercial aviation, and space flight, documenting aerospace history and technology while providing a window into popular culture. As a student of art history, I found the collection visually engaging and historically significant. As a young museum professional, I gained experience physically working with the objects, recording and organizing information, photographing, identifying methods used to print the posters, and even had a lot of fun!

The “Artbox,” where the unframed art is stored, before the new storage cabinets are installed. Photo by Katy Osterwald.

Contractors, volunteers and interns install all the shiny new cabinets in 3 hours. Thanks everyone! Photo by Ben Sullivan.

Now that the collection is online, scholars will be able to contribute to knowledge, study and discussion of this valuable resource. Working hands-on within a collection that was not accessible to many people, the group working on the project developed the feeling that this was “our” collection in a sense, and it is a thrill to now be able to share it. It is a diverse collection, wide-ranging in terms of subject, country of origin and time period, and thus it will make an excellent educational tool. Photographing and documenting the posters was part of a larger, ongoing effort to provide images and relevant information about the National Air and Space Museum’s art collection to the public, all while preparing the collections to move to the new Phase Two Collection Storage Facility at the Steve F. Udvar-Hazy Center. So, take a look at the collection and tell us what you think!

Amelia Brakeman Kile is an intern in the Collections Processing Unit at the National Air and Space Museum’s Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility.