In October 1987, thirty years after the launch of Sputnik, a group of American illustrators traveled to Moscow to display their artwork at the Soviets’ Space Future Forum. The gathering turned out to be an unusual moment in the thaw of Cold War tensions between the two superpowers—the U.S. artists, largely unknown in their home country, were chauffeured around Moscow and fêted alongside international space-science luminaries. The forum was a symbol of a new, more magnanimous period in space diplomacy, in which Sputnik was celebrated not as a Soviet triumph but as a human one. The accompanying art exhibition brought together U.S. and Soviet space artists for the first time since the onset of the space race.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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The Soviet Union of Artists’ Committee on Science and the Cosmos had invited the American illustrators—members of the International Association of Astronomical Artists—because they, too, specialized in the visual depiction of space subjects. What the show revealed, however, was that over the course of their Cold War isolation from each other, the two groups had cultivated radically different approaches to visualizing the space environment. The Americans emphasized precision, deploying a style of pictorial realism that they defended as technically accurate. By contrast, the Soviets embraced dramatic brushwork and impassioned coloration, focusing more often on the emotional or spiritual dimensions of spaceflight. To the IAAA members, the Soviet artwork’s lack of realism demonstrated the relative secrecy of the nation’s space program. To the Soviets, the American preoccupation with depicting data was characteristically materialist.
The explanations for the aesthetic differences speak to a broader pattern in depicting space that has proved to be remarkably persistent in the United States. Though the IAAA had spent the bulk of the 1980s finessing strategies to create accurate representations of distant space landscapes, its work looked undeniably “American” when compared with that of the Soviets. More specifically, the American illustrations recalled the visual vocabulary of 19th-century American landscape painting, a dynamic that prompted serious reflection among the IAAA’s membership. How could an image be so stylistically reminiscent of the Hudson River or Rocky Mountain school of painting—artistic moments clearly bound up in the intellectual history of manifest destiny—while also being defensible as scientifically neutral?
After all, the Rocky Mountain school was kicked off by the painters and photographers who accompanied members of the U.S. Geological Survey on their expeditions west, observing landscapes firsthand and reconstituting their impressions into attractive pictures. Whether these counted as truthful approaches, though, depended on the audience. Albert Bierstadt’s 1863 The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak—painted from observations made while the artist was a member of Frederick W. Lander’s 1859 Honey Road Survey Party—is an illustrative example. When the painting debuted in Europe, Bierstadt was celebrated for his artistic interpretation of the landscape; he was seen as a step above “a mere copyist of nature.” Back in the United States, however, Bierstadt’s work was more susceptible to claims of inaccuracy: a critic writing in Watson’s Weekly Art Journal exclaimed that while Bierstadt’s artistic whims might have resulted in pretty scenery, they ultimately amounted to a “heartless violation” of nature, and “the whole science of geology crie[d] out against him.”
But if no individual member of the IAAA had tried to code the space environment in the pictorial grammar of frontier settlement, why was this format so persistent? How—in the century between Frederick Jackson Turner’s declaration that frontier peripheries were central to the American spirit and the casting of outer space as the far edge of U.S. scientific exploration—had the landscapes of the Southwest come to be conscripted as a stand-in for the cosmos?
SPACE COWBOYS
The IAAA was a hallmark of the post-Apollo moment, when NASA’s flagship programs transitioned from human to robotic space exploration. Starting with Mariner and continuing with the Viking, Pioneer, and Voyager programs, remote hardware issued a new glut of visual information about the alien landscapes of the universe. The IAAA’s call to action was to supplement machine vision with human reason, extrapolating coherent landscapes from abstract-looking data. The artists who made up the guild’s ranks worked in a variety of capacities, illustrating everything from NASA special publications to articles for popular-science periodicals to covers for science fiction blockbusters. Because the artists’ professional reputations hinged on the accuracy of their images, IAAA-made illustrations were also popular in science fiction venues, which often used scientific rigor as a metric of literary quality. Astronomical illustration, once associated primarily with 19th-century European observatories, offered a rubric for hand-illustrating celestial subjects in ways that still read as scientifically objective.
The IAAA had formed unofficially in the early 1980s out of what was already a loose association of space-painting illustrators. After realizing the field was reaching a critical mass, artist and planetary scientist William K. Hartmann convened a plein air painting workshop on the Big Island of Hawaii, giving participants a chance to observe volcanic formations directly. The workshop was held again in Death Valley the next year, and while in the Mojave Desert, the group formally professionalized into the International Association of Astronomical Artists. The guild was modeled on the Cowboy Artists of America, a Sedona, Arizona–based organization that specialized in “authentic representation” of life in the West. The IAAA hoped to emulate the immense financial success of the CAA—one report claimed that the cowboy artists had sold over $1,762,000 worth of artwork in an opening weekend—while also sharing the group’s overall commitment to maintaining the standards of realistic depiction.
The roving plein air workshops quickly became a linchpin of the IAAA’s professional identity. Locations throughout the Southwest served as the most frequent terrestrial analogues for distant planets. Organizers defended the method of collecting on-site reference material as an empirically valid approach to producing scientifically informed astronomical illustrations. The logic of the plein air observation process maintained that if the laws of physics were continuous throughout the universe, then the geological forces that shaped the landscapes of Earth should be visible on planets elsewhere in the solar system. The Southwest was useful because it was largely uncovered by grass or cities, so the geology that characterized its sublime topographies was uniquely visible to the naked eye. The Grand Canyon, Utah’s Zion National Park, and Arizona’s Meteor Crater all became popular destinations. Artists could paint on-site, photograph rocks, and compare notes on the techniques used by their colleagues.
Death Valley was a recurrent favorite because of its proximity to Los Angeles and the sheer variety of geological phenomena it contained within a day’s drive. Ubehebe Crater, the yawning remnant of a violent explosion caused by magma reaching an underground aquifer, was a popular stand-in for Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanically active object in the solar system. The delicate crystalline formations of Badwater Basin’s salt flats were often cast as snow on the poles of Pluto, while the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes stood in for sandy Martian valleys. In some cases, this had a recursive impact on Death Valley itself—rock distribution in one particular region of the park looked remarkably like Viking imagery of the Martian surface to IAAA members and was subsequently dubbed Mars Hill. In 1991, the Planetary Society, a frequent patron of the IAAA, successfully submitted a proposal to make the name official.
SEEING IS BELIEVING
By the time the IAAA arrived in Moscow in 1987, the group had standardized a set of methods that undeniably relied on the American West. But what made the IAAA members’ images distinctly American was not just their resemblance to the mythological frontier but also the very idea that the distant landscapes of space could be seen accurately at all.
The conceptual schism discovered between U.S. and Soviet artists at the Space Future Forum illustrated not just a profound difference in their representations of subject matter but also a difference in what constituted knowable information. For the IAAA members, empirical observation was a method through which the landscapes of space could be meticulously charted—much as the American West had been. Their counterparts in the Soviet Union asserted that the only way to truly comprehend the scale and complexity of the cosmos was to focus on the human and spiritual.
As the United States blueprints a new phase of American spaceflight, the cosmos will undoubtedly continue to function as a cultural Rorschach test. Ideally, our previous approach to picturing space will offer a cautionary tale. While western frontiers served as proxies for otherwise unobservable celestial landscapes, we should be careful not to see the space environment as a stand-in for the peripheries of empire.•
Lois Rosson is a historian of science and technology who lives in Los Angeles. She is working on a history of airborne astronomy for the NASA History Office and is writing a book about visual culture in Southern California’s aerospace industry. Her work has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution, the Berggruen Institute, and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
