‘Flight originated from the imagination’: how artists have captured space travel
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- NASA launched its own art programme in 1962 after administrator James Webb saw Bruce Stevenson's 1961 portrait of astronaut Alan Shepard, with James Dean leading it from 1962 to 1974.
- James Dean transferred roughly 2,000 NASA artworks to the Smithsonian, whose collection has since swelled to more than 8,000 pieces by artists including Alexander Calder, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell and Alma Thomas.
- Norman Rockwell painted a moon-landing scene about three years before Armstrong's actual step using a NASA-provided lunar module model, then publicly questioned whether the programme was worth its cost amid Vietnam, poverty and racial injustice.
- Alma Thomas, a 35-year Washington public-school art teacher, drew on color-TV rocket launches for vivid paintings including "Blast Off," whose Saturn V flame evokes an Egyptian pyramid, and "Astronauts' Glimpse of the Earth."
- Robert Rauschenberg is featured in the temporary "Ascent of Rauschenberg" exhibition, with works incorporating discarded airplane parts, bicycle wheels and cardboard turkey boxes, plus his Stoned Moon series made with NASA materials Dean supplied.
- The Moon Museum, a thumbnail-sized ceramic tile bearing tiny drawings by Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and others, was reportedly attached to Apollo 12's lunar module in 1969 and remains on the lunar surface today.
Why it matters: The National Air and Space Museum is among the world's most-visited museums, and its revamped Flight and the Arts Center gives tens of millions of annual visitors a curated humanistic counterweight to the rockets and artefacts on display — including a Rockwell that guessed at the moon landing three years early and a Warhol-co-signed tile still sitting on the lunar surface.
