‘Four things to see’ is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, a free arts and culture platform that provides access to museums, galleries and cultural spaces around the world on demand. Explore now.
Each week we bring you four of the most interesting objects from the world’s museums, galleries and art institutions, hand-picked to mark significant moments in the calendar.
On 15 May 1936, 90 years ago this week, Amy Johnson touched down in England after a record-breaking return flight to Cape Town. The Yorkshire-born aviator had already made history in 1930 as the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia. Her 1936 Cape Town trip, completed in a Percival Gull in less than eight days, cemented her place in the popular imagination: a glamorous daredevil, a working-class girl who had conquered the skies.
Johnson was part of a generation for whom aviation was still new – a technology barely older than she was. The Wright Brothers’ first sustained flight dated only to 1903, yet within three decades pilots were racing between continents for sport. As well as making the world smaller, flight stirred something deep: the desire to leave the ground, to see the earth from above, to move freely through air – a desire shared by artists and engineers alike. For centuries artists have responded to flight with excitement, wonder and occasional unease: after all, the aeroplane arrived trailing both heroism and destruction. This week we explore four works that trace different moments in the history of flight.
Scale model of the Montgolfier Balloon (1783), Montgolfier Brothers
Air Zoo Aerospace & Science Center, Portage
This colourful scale model in Michigan commemorates one of history’s most audacious experiments. On 19 September 1783 Parisian crowds watched Étienne and Joseph Montgolfier launch a balloon that was carrying an unlikely trio of passengers: a duck, a sheep and a rooster. The animals survived the eight-minute flight and the brothers promptly began adapting the balloon for humans. Two months later, the first human passengers were airborne. Click here to read more.
Angels and Airplanes (1914), Natalia Goncharova
Minneapolis Institute of Art
In this lithograph, aircraft wings and propellers interlock with the wings and halos of descending angels. Goncharova made the print in the early months of the First World War, when aviation was still primarily used for reconnaissance rather than artillery. Whether the pilots and angels are at odds with each other or working together – the work is ambivalent on this – they share a celestial vantage point. The Russian avant-garde artist was celebrated for her synthesis of Cubism and folk tradition, but here she turns her eye to the strange new proximity between the modern machine and the divine. Click here to find out more.
Homage to Blériot (1914), Robert Delaunay
Kunstmuseum Basel
Delaunay’s canvas explodes with circular forms and intense colour, suggesting wheels, propellers and the dazzle of sunlight at altitude. The French artist was a frequent visitor to Buc Airport near Marseille, fascinated by the machinery and the spectacle of early aviation, and dedicated the work to Louis Blériot, the aircraft designer who had made the first cross-Channel flight in 1909. The painting does not depict an aeroplane so much as capture the thrill of take-off. Click here to learn more.
Sheila Scott Journey Log Book, 1 May 1971–2 May 1972
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
This modest log book records one of aviation’s most remarkable solo journeys. On 1 June 1971, Sheila Scott – born in Worcester in 1927, a former actress and model who had earned her pilot’s licence at 33 – left London, aiming to fly from one point of the equator to another over the North Pole. She landed back in the capital on 4 August having become the first person to fly over the Pole in a single-engine aircraft. The log book, which Scott kept meticulously throughout the year, is both personal document and historical record: a handwritten account of an achievement that few would have thought possible. Click here to discover more.
‘Four things to see’ is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, a free arts and culture platform that provides access to museums, galleries and cultural spaces around the world on demand. Explore now.
