Art with wings

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Flight and the Artistic Imagination

By Sam Smiles

The novelty of achievements in flight have been successively and variously commented upon by artists – from caricatures of Nadar aloft to enthusiastic Futurist celebrations of the aeroplane. Flight, for better or worse, in peacetime and in war, is historically a symbol of man’s mastery of his environment and, concomitantly, of his physical and spiritual limitations,

Artists’ representations of aircraft and airways are currently receiving much attention: I am thinking, for instance, of the Scott Anthony and Oliver Green survey of Imperial Airways posters and Rebecca Searle’s forthcoming book, Art, Propaganda and Aerial Warfare. Flight and the Artistic Imagination was published to accompany an exhibition at Compton Verney earlier this year. In it, Sam Smiles evocatively discusses the achievement of flight in heavier-than-air machines within a much longer and broader history. For most of this history the possibility of human flight could only be imagined: ‘the dream of escaping the tyranny of gravity has preoccupied mankind through the ages’.

Many ancient cultures, observes Smiles, responded to man’s inability to fly by depicting their gods with wings and the ascent of the blessed into infinite space, sometimes assisted by fabulous creatures (such as the winged horse, Pegasus). There are angels with wings, demons with wings (Delacroix’s Mephistopheles) and various versions of proud Icarus, suspended falling, fallen and submerged.

The inspiration of bird flight – and its scientific investigation – is suggested by pages from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and Vladimir Tatlin’s sculpture, Letatlin.  Meanwhile, the bird’s eye view was adopted long before any roaming camera could actually record the lie of the land. These combined cartographic surveying and perspective and used ‘an oblique view to bring the schematic form of the map into the world of “ordinary” vision’. With the advent of ballooning (a novelty at the end of the 18th century) artists attempted to convey not only the vertical view from the basket but also the horizontal track across the landscape – a sensational aerial phantom ride, edged or hazily obscured by clouds. But Smiles repeatedly comments on the anticipation of technologies allowing for actual views from above in presentations imagined by artists; artists brought forms of flight into consciousness before they could be actually experienced.

Conversely, the photographic images captured in the air from, and of, aeroplanes in the 1920s (literally caught in the eye of a storm or set against turrets of clouds) are referred back to preceding apprehensions of landscape. By way of extraordinary perspectives and dramatic contrasts in light and shade, aerial photographers staged ‘a modern sublime’, framed by the camera plate, in which man and his craft are cast as small and vulnerable. Or, high above any prominent natural or man-made features, in clear sky, horizons disappeared and the view was reduced to a single plane, referring both forwards and backwards to abstract imaginations of flight (a flat coloured and grounded 1947 Matisse cut-out figure, hovering in suspension; a ‘stratospheric’ Malevich Suprematist composition of 1914–15).

The material presented ranges from illuminated manuscripts, drawings, prints and paintings to photographs and paintings made from photographs. There are posters advertising public exhibitions and displays of planes in flight (aerial choreography), and photographic references to representations of flight in comics; video work (Mark Wallinger’s Angel) re-enacts ancient notions of ascent and descent. Again, there is, overall, a sense of reciprocity between new and old media in the selection of material, of anticipation, appreciation and appropriation, of a re-circulation of ideas rather than conclusive, episodic, replacement. There are views from the air and views from the ground (not least, recording the aeroplane as itself a graphic instrument, marking the sky with trails: sky-writing). Paul Nash’s 1941 homage to the Battle of Britain counters a river winding through a plain – a pastoral image – with aircraft safely returning to land below a sky sliced by the white traces of dives and rolls above (the confirmation of victory), and the fall and retreat of defeated aircraft in the distance, beyond.

Two years ago, when flights over much of Britain were cancelled as a consequence of a volcanic ash cloud issuing from Iceland, many of us were struck by their absence. Others were simply inconvenienced. Man’s ambitions to conquer the globe, now commonplace rather than heroic, were temporarily curtailed by a force of nature. Visually and aurally, aircraft are now mostly taken for granted as an everyday, ordinary phenomenon. Smiles prompts us to re-consider human flight as wondrous and extraordinary, both beautiful and fearful in its prospects. He also encourages us ‘to reflect not only on the achievements of modern aviation but on the enormous impact flying has had and continues to have on visual culture’.

Compton Verney is to be congratulated on its hosting of a truly uplifting exhibition and the production of a suitably glorious catalogue.

Flight and the Artistic Imagination by Sam Smiles is published by Compton Verney in association with Paul Holberton Publishing 2012. 96 pp., 70 illus, £16.99. ISBN 9-781907-372377