To Capture the Beauty and Wonder of Flight, These Celebrated Artists Created Spectacular Visions of Astronauts, Aviators, Rocket Launches and the Moon

Norman Rockwell’s Man on the Moon (Portrait of an Astronaut) is unlike many of his other paintings. Rather than portraying an American tableau, scenes from everyday life, this work pictures a tightly cropped face with blue-green eyes, his nose a faint line of turquoise and white stars glimmering in the middle distance. Commissioned by Look magazine to document the space program in 1966, Rockwell took as his subject not only the mystery of lunar landscapes, but also the inner life of an American faced with new and boundless worlds.

The man depicted, Rockwell’s neighbor, has a marvelous depth of feeling in his eyes. Rockwell’s subjects were not “faceless heroes,” asserts National Air and Space Museum curator Carolyn Russo, but men and women in whom readers could see themselves. The 1967 painting, on view in the museum’s current exhibition “The Art of Air and Space: Interpretations of Flight,” speaks to a fundamental impulse, Russo writes in the show’s catalog, to “transcend earthly bounds.” Featuring oil paintings and sculptures, etchings and prints, the show, on view through next summer, is “a window into the soul of flight,” the curator notes.

Quick fact: New galleries at the National Air and Space Museum This fall, the museum will open two more galleries—“At Home in Space” and “Modern Military Aviation”—completing its multiyear renovation. The exhibition, spotlighting the museum’s impressive art collection, is a testament to the power of the visual realm in understanding the history of flight. Dean, who became the museum’s first art curator in 1974 after serving as director of the NASA Art Program, made a concerted effort to bring the agency’s artwork into the museum’s collection.

Since then, Smithsonian curators have been acquiring works that bring to life the breadth of human imagination. Consider Francisco Goya’s etching Los Disparates (No. 13: Modo de Volar), completed between 1815 and 1823, which depicts winged figures, men with beaked headpieces, cutting across a murky expanse. The work gestures to the “freedom of imagination,” as Russo puts it, and the possibilities of flight long before the invention of airplanes.

French artist Henri Farré’s 1915 print Avion Canon Voisin Combattant un Aviatik also has that air of freedom. In the sprawling picture, a dogfight is underway, set against lilac-tinged clouds. A fighter pilot fires at a plane in the corner, the shot a needle-thin line.

It’s a propulsive work, the eye drawn to the feverish scene, to the plumes of smoke to come. The first known aerial combat artist, Farré flew with a sketchpad strapped to his leg, dashing off notes in midair. He once said he could “paint things with an aerial vision.” That vision runs through the show, where curiosity is at work.