Lillian F. Schwartz (born 1927) is a 20th century American artist considered a pioneer of computer-mediated art and one of the first women artists notable for basing almost her entire oeuvre on computational media. Many of her ground-breaking projects were done in the 1960s and 1970s, well before the desktop computer revolution made computer hardware and software widely available to artists.
Early life and artistic training
As a young girl during the Great Depression, Schwartz experimented with slate, mud, sticks, and chalk as free materials for making art. She studied to become a nurse under a World War II education program and later on found her training in anatomy, biology, and the use of plaster valuable in making art. Stationed in Japan during the postwar occupation in an area between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she contracted polio, which paralyzed her for a time. As part of her rehabilitation, she studied calligraphy with the artist Tshiro.
After her return to… read more
Lillian F. Schwartz (born 1927) is a 20th century American artist considered a pioneer of computer-mediated art and one of the first women artists notable for basing almost her entire oeuvre on computational media. Many of her ground-breaking projects were done in the 1960s and 1970s, well before the desktop computer revolution made computer hardware and software widely available to artists.
Early life and artistic training
As a young girl during the Great Depression, Schwartz experimented with slate, mud, sticks, and chalk as free materials for making art. She studied to become a nurse under a World War II education program and later on found her training in anatomy, biology, and the use of plaster valuable in making art. Stationed in Japan during the postwar occupation in an area between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she contracted polio, which paralyzed her for a time. As part of her rehabilitation, she studied calligraphy with the artist Tshiro.
After her return to the United States, she continued to experiment with media, including metal and plastic sculpture. In this period, she had to have surgery for a thyroid tumor, possibly from exposure to plastic solvents.
Career
By 1966, Schwartz had begun working with light boxes and mechanical devices like pumps, and she became a member of the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) group that brought together artists and engineers as collaborators. In 1968 her kinetic sculpture Proxima Centauri was included in the important early show of machine art at the New York Museum of Modern Art entitled “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.” This sculpture was later used as a special effect for a Star Trek episode, in which it served as a prison for Spock’s brain.
Schwartz was brought into Bell Labs in 1968 by Leon Harmon; while there, she worked with engineers John Vollaro, Ken Knowlton and others. She took classes in programming at the New School for Social Research around the same time. She began making paintings and films with a combination of hand painting, digital collaging, computer processing, and optical post-processing using such early programs as BEFLIX, EXPLOR, and SYMBOLICS. Many of the works she created in this period by creative cobbling together of different, often cutting-edge technologies prefigure what would be done with such programs as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro a quarter century later. As a result of this experimentation, Schwartz made one of the first digitally created films to be shown as a work of art, Pixillation, which shows red squares, cones, pyramids and other geometic shapes on black-and-white backgrounds.
Notable works
Schwartz used the works of Leonardo Da Vinci extensively in experiments with computers. One notable work she created is Mona/Leo, for which she compared the image of a Leonardo da Vinci self-portrait with the Mona Lisa, matching the two faces feature by feature to show their underlying structural similarity. Specifically, she replaced the right side of the Mona Lisa with the flipped left side of a red chalk self-portrait of Leonardo. Superimposed lines drawn on the image showing the close alignments of the bottom of the eye, eyebrow, nose and chin prompted her to argue that the Mona Lisa is in part a cryptic self-portrait of the artist. In further experiments along these lines, she removed the gray tones in Leonardo da Vinci’s self-portrait and superimposed the Mona Lisa eye over it. Not everyone is convinced by her argument for the identity of Leonardo da Vinci and the Mona Lisa; one common counter-argument is that the similarities are due to both portraits having been created by the same person and therefore bearing the hallmarks of a characteristic style. Additionally, though the drawing on which Schwartz based the comparison is held to be a self-portrait, there is no firm historical evidence to support this theory.
In a similar experiment, Schwartz used a custom ray-tracing program to investigate the perspective anomalies in the drawing of da Vinci’s fresco painting of the Last Supper. Her 3D computer-generated model showed that the perspective lines in the Last Supper do match up with (extend) the architecture of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan where the fresco is located, but only because of certain changes Leonardo made to standard linear perspective.
Reception of work
Schwartz has been called a pioneer in “establishing computers as a valid and fruitful artistic medium” by physicist and Nobel laureate Arno Penzias and a trailblazer and virtuoso by the philosopher-artist Timothy Binkley. Her films have been included in the Venice Biennale and the Cannes Film Festival, among many others, and have received numerous awards. Among these is an Academy Award (with Ed Emschwiller) in 1980 for special effects on the film The Lathe of Heaven. In the 1980s, a computer-generated TV spot that she created for the newly renovated Museum of Modern Art in New York won an Emmy Award.
Schwartz’s artworks have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Centre Beauborg (Paris), Stedlijk Museum of Art (Amsterdam), the Grand Palais Museum (Paris), and at numerous galleries and festivals worldwide. Schwartz has been a visiting member of the Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland; an adjunct professor at the Kean College, Fine Arts Department; an adjunct professor at Rutger’s Visual Arts Department; an adjunct professor at the Psychology Department, School of Arts and Sciences, New York University; and a Member of the Graduate Faculty of The School of Visual Arts, NYC. She has also been an Artist in Residence at Channel 13, WNET, New York. She has been a fellow of the World Academy of Science and Art since 1988. —Wikipedia
