Precision, Machinery, War, Destruction, Beauty, and Art

A couple years ago I saw the exhibit Cult of the Machine: Precisionism in American Art at the Dallas Museum of Art. In addition to seeing a startlingly beautiful and unique Georgia O'Keeffe, the exhibit left me with such a positive impression that I used a quote from the curator in a presentation I gave at a CFD conference shortly thereafter. After all, precisionism was a movement that depicted in art the glory and power of technological and architectural development and in America in the 1920s and 1930s. And CFD is nothing if not precision.

Through a recent article in the WSJ on the exhibit Ralston Crawford: Air + Space + War, I found a fork in the Precisionist road. Crawford's work matured during WWII when he had access to a variety of aircraft settings (flights, factories) and post-war nuclear testing - including being in the U.S. Army. That exposure to death and destruction greatly influenced his work, retaining the flatness and precision of Precisionism while introducing an element of chaos that heightens the work's emotional appeal. 

Certainly my initial attraction was the usual juxtaposition of several of my interests (painting, aircraft, nuclear weapons development). But upon reading the exhibition catalog and learning about the development of Crawford's work and how it fits with his contemporaries (the chapter on aviation art was really interesting) I found myself loving his painting solely on its own merits - the shift of perspective, the rough edges, the colors.

So if you're in Pennsylvania, I recommend heading over to the Brandywine River Museum of Art before the exhibition closes on 19 Sept. For everyone else, here's a video walkthrough that deserves more than 72 views. 

Predominance of the Christmas Spirit

Mondrian himself said that Composition in Black and Gray has a Christmas mood "if one understands the Christmas idea in a really abstract way... the predominance of the spiritual."

As an abstraction, the painting utilizes a simple motif of diagonal lines to divide the canvas into 256 triangles. Mondrian's use of thicker lines to trace out an irregular arrangement of squares produces a twinkling effect at the intersections.

The painting's spirituality derives from the overall visual effect in which the eye wanders across the canvas, an infinite sky full of stars, especially relevant for a particular starry night. Its small size makes this a joyful intimacy, as though this vista is for you alone.

Piet Mondrian, Composition in Black and Gray, 1919. source

Merry Christmas to all.

Innes, Iceberg

The dictionary definition of abstract is "existing in thought but not having a physical existence." It's no wonder then that many people can't find a connection between abstraction and their own experience of reality. "What is it supposed to be?" is often asked.

While not all abstract painting need represent a tangible object (and it doesn't), sometimes you see something that immediately reminds you of an abstract painting. Such was the case when I saw David Burdeny's photograph, Mercators Projection, on Bored Panda.

David Burdeny, Mercators Projection.

Immediately I thought of one of my favorite painters, Callum Innes. And it didn't take long for me to find a Callum Innes painting that looked like a David Burdeny photograph.

Callum Innes, Exposed Painting Blue Lake, 2013.

I'm not suggesting that Innes was painting an iceberg. But next time you are standing in front of an abstraction, try taking it for granted that the scene has a physical counterpart and spend the time thinking about the artist's expression of reality and your perception of it. Rather than a puzzle to be solved, think about the communication of ideas. You might be surprised at what is revealed.

Line into Color, Mesh into CFD

Painter Helen Frankenthaler's work has been on my mind since seeing the exhibition Fluid Expression: The Prints of Helen Frankenthaler at Fort Worth's Amon Carter Museum of American Art earlier this week. While there I also purchased and then read John Elderfield's book on her painting, Line Into Color, Color Into Line. Both left me with a much stronger appreciation for her work.

As often happens to me, certain concepts, ideas, or statements about art trigger analogies to my work in computational fluid dynamics and mesh generation. Such was the case when Frankenthaler was quoted in the book as saying

I felt more and more that the drawing should come from what the shapes of the colors are; rather than, "I am arranging this with lines or confinements or patterns." And I do very much believe in drawing, especially when it doesn't show as drawing... When I talk about drawing, I mean "how are you getting your space," not where the pencil is going.

To put that quote in context, the book's theme was how Frankenthaler exercised three types of lines (drawn lines, the perimeter of regions of color, and the edge of the canvas) to great effect in her paintings that are more typically known for their ethereal washes of color - poured, stained, painted or otherwise.

Helen Frankenthaler, Sesame, 1970. source

But first a bit of background. Within the world of computational fluid dynamics, the mesh is the digitalized version of the object around which you wish to solve the equations of fluid motion - digitalized so the computer can understand it. Think of it as the scaffolding on which the fluid will be simulated. In the illustration below (image source), the mesh lines around a ship's hull define where the computations will be performed.

When the equations of fluid motion are solved on the mesh, the results are often presented as graphical contours of a some property of the fluid like pressure as shown below on the ship's hull (image source). In this picture, red represents high pressure and blue represents low pressure.

The analogy I'm making between Frankenthaler's paintings and computational fluid dynamics is lines are meshes and color is the CFD results. When she says "drawing should come from what the shapes of the colors are" I hear the case for mesh adaptation (closely coupling the mesh to the actual flow of fluid instead of just the geometry). When she says she believes in drawing "especially when it doesn't show as drawing" I hear the case for "invisible" mesh generation (because meshing is not and end unto itself, only a means to an end). Regardless of whether we're talking about lines in terms of mesh or lines in terms of boundaries of the regions of color, it's true that the mesh is how you're getting your space, the space within which the simulation will be performed.

Other than the fluidity with which she applies pigment to canvas, there's little that visually ties her paintings to CFD (the images above make this clear). The drawn lines in Sesame don't look anything like lines in a mesh and the regions of color don't look much like fluid flow. But it's Frankenthaler's process and approach and her way of thinking about the interplay of line and color, mesh and CFD, creating and defining space, that brings art and science, a bit closer, at least in my mind.

Seriousness in True Joy

During my business trip to Denver earlier this month, I toured - for the second time - the Clyfford Still Museum. And, and is my compulsion, I bought a book. But not just any book: a vintage copy of the catalog that accompanied Still's donation of 28 of his paintings to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1976.

Toward the end of the book, a 1963 quote of Still's is included that I'll quote directly here:

"I'm not interested in illustrating my time. A man's 'time' limits him, it does not truly liberate him. Our age - it is of science - of mechanism - of power and death. I see no virtue in adding to its mammoth arrogance the compliment of graphic homage."

Flipping a few pages back in the book brought me to PH-261 (see below), a painting completed about the same time as Still made that statement. Certainly, this painting exudes timelessness and is without mechanism. It is essentially human.

Clyfford Still, PH-261, 1962. source

Still also is quoted in the book as saying "I am a serious man about those things I consider important. Perhaps there is a seriousness in true joy." There is no better word than joy to describe my reaction to Clyfford Still's work.

Reference: Clyfford Still at the SFMOMA.

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots by Gavin Delahunty

With only a week to spare, friends and I finally saw the exhibit Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots at the Dallas Museum of Art.

It was well worth having to suffer Dallas traffic.*

The exhibition at the DMA is the only U.S. venue to show this rare and unique assemblage of black paintings Pollock produced in the period 1951-1953. These black paintings represent a stark contrast to his signature all-over paintings from the decade of the 1940's.

The expert commentary in the catalog delves into what Pollock was attempting to express with this new style, whom may have influenced it, and where he might have taken it had he not died in 1956.

The art speaks for itself. But that won't stop me from expressing a non-expert opinion. Pollock's use of black was always there, even in the famous all-over paintings. In those works he was able to use line as shape through density and layering. (I would attempt to analogize them with a fractal, a space-filling curve.) The black paintings seem to be a way of removing the veil of color from the all-over paintings, retaining the black, and giving the black lines area and heft through thickness and pooling. The interaction of those "black spots" with the unpainted background, whether it be paper or canvas, raises the latter to the foreground and in some of the later black paintings Pollock filled the grounded areas with color.

Let's start with photos of the black paintings. (And trust me, I was surprised that non-flash photography was permitted.)

Unlike Cathedral below, this work is brassy and reminded me strongly of Clyfford Still's work.

This beautiful trio was tucked in a corner and seemed to me totally under appreciated. 

And now for some of Pollock's more well-known all-over paintings. These, I must admit, I loved more than the black paintings. The latter are important historically and from the standpoint of learning about Pollock. But his all-over paintings are lush and raucous, energetic and calming, joyful and contemplative.

Cathedral, from the DMA's permanent collection, is stunning. 

*Fort Worth is where the west begins. Dallas is where the east peters out. I am waiting for one person in particular to give me grief about that comment.

So Much Bookmarked Art

For some reason, I have a lot of newly bookmarked art. Don't know why.

Michelle Marie Murphy, Business Casual. source

Daniel Libeskind, Vanke Pavilion. source

Gabriel Schama, Mandala 4. source

Anne Truitt, 1 April '65. source

Mary Corse, Untitled (Black and White with Blue Outer Bands, Beveled). source

Sara Carter, Grid Twenty Two. source

Aydin Hamami, 2 Green Grid. source

Thornton Willis, Co-Chief. source

Mack McInnis, City Streets. source

Thaddeus Wolfe, Patterned Reliefs. source

Holly Miller, Twist #2. source

Engineers and Abstract Art - Episode 54

Mark Rothko's Untitled (Yellow and Blue) 1954 was sold by Sotheby's at auction for $46.5 million. Here's a link to a Sotheby's video about the painting.

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Yellow and Blue), 1954

The news was a great opportunity for me to engage with some fellow engineers in "art appreciation." I'll let you imagine how those conversations went.

Here's what I find curious.

Engineers often love to parrot a quote attributed to Henry Ford: "The most beautiful things in the world are those from which all excess weight has been eliminated."

So if elimination of excess is that highly regarded by engineers in the context of designing a car or a bridge why can't they apply that same principle to painting?

An abstract painting has shed the excess weight of figuration. Despite the lack of traditional symbols, an abstract work still conveys human emotions and perhaps does so in a more archetypal and timeless manner than anything representational.

But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Addendum: Since writing the bit above, news reports indicated that Piet Mondrian's Composition No. III with Red, Blue, Yellow and Black sold at auction for $50.6 million. Are engineers more comfortable with Mondrian's more regimented style?

Piet Mondrian, Composition No. III with Red, Blue, Yellow and Black, 1929

Compare and Contrast These Rising Suns

Random neurons firing produced this "Hmmm" moment. Compare and contrast these two rising suns.

Nuclear test shot Hardtack Oak, 28 June 1958, Enewetak Atoll, 8.9 Mt.

Claude Monet, Impression Sunrise, 1872, Le Havre, France

Robert Motherwell Open

Sometimes looking at
paintings is much better than
reading about them.

The essays included in Robert Motherwell Open are way over my head. Good thing there are a lot of pictures of the artist's paintings from his Open series.

Let's just say their geometric simplicity is offset by brushwork and color complexity and the combination reveals a sense of infinite possibility.

Robert Motherwell, In Plato's Cave, 1972. (I chose this particular example of Motherwell's Opens for my friend Chris because of its blackness.)

No one in their right mind would compensate me for this "review."

Highlights of Fort Worth's Main Street Arts Festival 2014

After not attending for 20+ years, my lovely wife and I strolled through the annual Main Street Fort Wort Arts Festival today. For those unfamiliar (or out of touch like me), Main Street is a highly regarded multi-day festival of art, music, food, and fun and has been awarded the IFEA's Grand Pinnacle award 3 of the last 5 years.

Here are the artists whose work caught my attention.

Rey Alfonso

All things being equal, I would've loved to come home with a painting by Rey Alfonso. He paints on Baltic Birch using only pure pigments and distresses the pieces by sawing them, burying them, and burning them. I see a little Diebenkorn, a little Scully, a little Fisher and a lot of Alfonso.

Lisa Burge

Lisa Burge told me about her architectural influences and how process is strongly evident in her worked over canvases. She also creates monotypes by painting on glass and then pressing that up against paper to create a one of a kind work. Booth 502

Scott Olson

Scott Olson and I talked about the similarity between his work and that of Donald Sultan but also looked at the fine detail he adds in graphite (I think). Note: Scott's website says not to use his images w/o permission. Sorry. I wanted to share.

Hidden Spring Designs

Cathy and I agreed that the work of Hidden Spring Designs would look good in a beach house. Booth 514

Bonus: Craig Lossing

I'm not one much for sculpture but the wood work of Craig Lossing has such visual tactility that I could easily see myself getting one of his half carved, half natural wooden pieces. (Sorry, no pics.) Booth 439

Jackson Pollock's Mural: The Transitional Moment

In Pollock's painting
do you see the draftsmanship
or only spilled paint?

Are transitional moments an in thing for art books? First it was Rothko's transitional decade and now Pollock's transitional painting, Mural, 1943. Called the most important American painting ever made, Mural not only prefaced Pollock's own signature drip style but its enormous size (20 x 8 feet) set the stage for all of abstract expressionism.

Mural recently completed two years of much needed restoration at LA's Getty Museum and is now on display until June 1 when it's due to return to its home, the University of Iowa. The Transitional Moment is about the painting's history and restoration, the latter consisting of hard core, almost forensic, science about the materials used down to the microscopic cross sectional detail.

If you just want to see the painting's amazing transformation, check out the before-after animation on Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes blog.

I received no compensation of any kind for this review.

Mark Rothko at the Arkansas Art Center

The exhibition Mark Rothko: The Decisive Decade 1940-1950 made its closest approach to DFW by landing at the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock. So a friend and I hopped in a car and drove 5-hours up and 5-hours back in order to see paintings from the decade during which Rothko's style transitioned from surrealist figuration to the rectangle-based abstraction by which he is most widely known.

The highpoint of the exhibition for both me and my friend was Untitled, 1949 representing the transition's completion and rightfully placed in the exhibit's final gallery.

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1949. On loan to the exhibition from the National Gallery of Art.

From across the room, its brilliant, luminous colors draw you in. But when you stand within 18 inches of it - as Rothko wanted you to do - every brush stroke of the large central area sparkles deep blue and the entire dark region warmly embraces you. At the same time your eyes play vertically over the spectrum of colors from white to yellow, orange, red, blue, black, and green. The soft edge work between the colored regions lightens the overall effect. It's a giddy sensation that made me smile.

I commented on the exhibition catalog this past June. While in Little Rock I was able to purchase a copy of the catalog signed by Rothko's son, Christopher Rothko, who wrote one of its essays.

[Update 26 Jan 2014] In the exhibit catalog, No. 3, 1947 is shown in a horizontal orientation (pg 115). But in David Anfam's  Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas the same painting is shown in a vertical orientation (pg 266).

The Arts of The Sciences

"Are nuclear explosions art?"

OK, you've piqued my curiosity.

Photograph of the Castle Bravo nuclear test in 1954 of the United States' first hydrogen bomb. Image from Wikipedia.

Alex Wellerstein (@wellerstein) asked this question at the beginning of his article Art, Destruction, Entropy on the Restricted Data blog about nuclear secrecy.

On its surface the question seems patently ludicrous. A nuclear detonation brings to mind heat, fire, blast, radiation, fallout, war, conflict, apocalypse, destruction, and death. Anything but art.

Chopping up a piano with an ax isn't art either.

Or is it?

Art, Exhibits, and Museums

Let me back up. Wellerstein's inspiration was an exhibit at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum that he saw called Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950 that features both film footage of nuclear test detonations and Raphael Montanez Ortiz' piano destruction (among many other pieces by many other artists). Ortiz is not new to this, having been involved as far back as 1966 in the Destruction in Art Symposium, a reaction to the human race's "will to kill" and a recognition that death itself, not life, needed a sense of the transcendental.

Wellerstein, a historian at the American Institute of Physics, seems to take the position that the exhibition's inclusion of wall-sized looping footage of U.S. above-ground nuclear tests from the 1950s is art only because it is being shown in an art gallery and because of the innate aesthetics of the images. According to him, this focus on the aesthetics distracts the viewer from the larger context of these events such as their intended cataclysmic use, the effect of fallout on innocent bystanders, and the societal cost of the Manahattan project and subsequent decades of nuclear weapons development. He asks whether this particular presentation of nuclear force robs it of something, specifically its larger global context.

Screen shot of the Hirshhorn's webpage for the Damage Control exhibition.

I seems to me that this decontextualization, to use his word, is precisely what contributes to the film's artistic value. Or maybe, more accurately, it's the recontextualization of the work when juxtaposed with Ortiz' and others. To rely solely on aesthetics as a barometer of art misses the point. Certainly the original purpose of the detonation films was one of scientific and historic record and their aesthetic value is merely coincidental.

But those two purposes aren't necessarily at odds either. I am reminded of something William Deresiewicz wrote in The American Scholar: "We ask of a scientific proposition, “Is it true?” But of a proposition in the humanities we ask, “Is it true for me?” So while the nuclear scientists could use the films to learn scientific truth, their inclusion in the exhibit allows the public to assess their implications in a more personal light. In other words, by placing works of scientific origin within the context of Ortiz' work and the works of other artists it humanizes what might otherwise be too incalculably vast to be comprehended.

Are Squares Art?

Let's look at this from a slightly different perspective. You might just as easily ask whether squares are art. This would be coincidental because also on the Hirshhorn's website is a section dedicated to an exhibit on Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration. Albers is probably best known for a series of paintings called Homage to the Square that he used to explore the interaction of colors through the form of inset squares. Through the interaction of form and hue Albers was able to achieve sensation of depth through the picture plane and a shimmering vibration within the plane itself.

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square, 1966. Image from the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation website. (I chose this painting in particular because it has a certain abstract similarity, in my opinion, to the Castle Bravo photo above.)

Albers was also a great color theorist and author of Interaction of Color, a pivotal work on color. (See also the app.) In the preface of this important work Albers wrote "Just as knowledge of acoustics does not make one musical... so no color system by itself can develop one's sensitivity for color." "What counts here - first and last - is not so-called knowledge of so-called facts, but vision - seeing."

Note that it is the act of seeing - by the observer - from which value is derived. The intent of the producer may have been something totally different.

It is the relative interaction of various colors and forms - i.e. their context - that change a color into something else. Two different colors appear to be the same, the same color appears differently due to interaction with a third, two colors in proximity create a third in their midst. Many monochromatic painters achieve effects on the entire gallery in which their works are placed. 

Interaction of Color by Josef Albers. (Highly recommended but not an easy read.)

So questioning whether squares are art is similarly off target as questioning whether film footage of nuclear detonations are art. Albers' forms interact with each other through their placement and relative color allowing you to see more than shapes and hues. The detonation film puts Ortiz' piano destruction in its own new light and vice versa, allowing us to perceive each in a new way.

Multiples and MIRVs

Wellerstein also raises the issue of producer's intent, questioning whether something made specifically for one purpose can be regarded in another. From the art world, he cites work by Andy Warhol (included in the Damage Control exhibit) and exemplified by the image below.

Andy Warhol, Red Atom Bomb, 1963. Image from the C4 Contemporary Gallery. (Note: I don't know whether this work was included in Damage Control. Its inclusion here is simply for illustrative purposes.)

Wellerstein compares Warhol's work with the photographic series of the Trinity explosion taken by lead photographer Berlyn Brixner (see below).

Berlyn Brixner, TR-NN-11, 1945. Image from the Restricted Data blog. (I tried to find an independent source of this image but failed.)

Clearly, Brixner's purpose was scientific while Warhol's was artistic. A cursory interpretation of Warhol's work is that it makes  a statement on the commoditization of destruction. I would argue that his colorization - and admittedly I'm not a huge Warhol fan - draws something from Albers, if not in this particular work then in his others.

The question remains whether there is any artistic value in the Brixner photographs. Again,  I would argue that there is - or can be - depending on context. I'd make my argument by introducing the work of Edward Tufte, author of the seminal and beautifully produced text, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. As the name of the book implies, Tufte is a master of making dense data understandable through visualization. One of his techniques is the method of small multiples.

The essence of Tufte's concept of small multiples is to contextualize data by answering the question "compared to what?" (Chess players can see a good example of small multiples on Tufte's website for Magic Knight's Tour.) As opposed to a single photograph of the Trinity explosion, Brixner's photograph above compares the fireball are various times. A single photo almost begs the question "So what?" while the array of photographs reveals details about the evolution of the explosion. And here I would make the argument that it's done in a highly visually appealing manner.

To complete the tie-in, I'll mention that it was via Tufte's recommendation, after attending his seminars in Dallas, that I purchased and read Albers' book.

So What?

So what exactly is my point? First, I have kept to this blog's intent to be a rambling stream of consciousness. Second, as frequent readers know, I have this fetish for instances where my various interests are juxtaposed. In this case we have Cold War and nuclear history crossing with modern art and data visualization.

But that's what's in it for me. What about you?

Are nuclear explosions art? The answer, like most things in life, is "it depends." They can be simple scientific and military tools to the extent they impart understanding and support national objectives. And they can be art in how they make each of us think and feel about life and death.

Like the old - really old - SNL skit said, "Sometimes a banana is just a banana." And sometimes a square is just a square. But through contextualization of a square's color and form it can become a striking work of art.

And just because science and math are quantitative, it doesn't mean their execution and explanation and insight can't also be executed beautifully.

Frederich Nietzsche is credited with saying something that seems quite apropos for the subject at hand: "We have our arts so we won't die of truth."