Aircraft have been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. The horrific crash of Air India’s AI-171 in Ahmedabad is one of the rarest aviation disasters in the nation’s history. While we are still trying to make sense of it all, sifting through the rubble, here’s a look at how aircraft have played a part in art.
Aviation art is a genre that tries to portray all aspects of flying, from the aesthetics of the aircraft to the historical events connected with some of them, although the styles may vary from abstract interpretations to realistic portrayals. So, what drew artists to this not-so-conceptual muse, which ideally fits into a science museum rather than an art gallery? In the past, travelling in an airplane wasn’t a common mode of travel. The novelty of it and the technological advancement it signalled fascinated artists as it did the rest of the world. They took to their canvases, especially with the commercial flight boom in the 1950s and allowed their imagination to soar to the skies.
American modernist painter, Georgia O’ Keefe, known for her paintings of flowers and desert landscapes, started sketching on airplanes while travelling around the world, enamoured by the spectacular views she saw through the windows. “Such things as I have seen out this window, I have never dreamed”, she once wrote to her sister. Her monumental painting, ‘Sky Above Clouds IV’ from 1965, captures an endless expanse of clouds, a sight that can be seen only through an aircraft window.
If O’Keefe’s depictions were of aerial views, Russian artist Kazimir Malevich chose pure geometric abstraction to illustrate the experience of flight. In his painting from 1915, ‘Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying’, instead of painting an aircraft as we know it, he used rectangles to convey motion and the right colours to indicate an upward trajectory. This new form of movement enchanted him greatly, and he once wrote, “Can a man who always goes about in a cabriolet really understand the experiences and impressions of one who flies through the air?”
The surfaces of aeroplanes also served as canvases to be adorned with artworks. Several aircraft carriers had decorative art on the tails of the planes. And Nose Art specifically refers to art on the front fuselage of the aircraft. It was popularised during the Second World War to boost the morale of those fighting by personalising their war planes with art.
In all the stories on aviation art thus far, this takes the cake — an entire city was designed based on aerial views. When renowned architect Le Corbusier was flying over Rio de Janeiro in 1929, he sketched the urban plan for the city, incorporating elements of the landscape and the topography inspired by the new perspectives he saw through his plane window. The design came like a revelation, he once stated. He even went on to write a book on the “eagle eye” that aviation offered.
Art history is replete with visual odes to air transport and although the tragedy of an aircrash can shake us, we must acknowledge the global connectivity that air travel has given us, besides the unique perspectives in art. Bon Voyage!