14 SMITHSONIAN | April 2020prologue
ART
By
Maria G. KeehanI
PICTURE WINDOW
How do you select one image to represent half a
century of photography and art? You don’tA STUDY IN VARIATIONS
Clockwise from above, the outline
of an ammonite fossil, from the
story “Nature’s Beauty Gets Its Own
Show,” 1977. Electrically charged
microdroplets burst from the surface
of a drop of ice (dark area), a pro-
cess that occurs in a thunderhead
prior to lightning forming, from “The
Mini-Events of the Weather,” 1971. A
grain storage facility in Wisconsin,
from “The Hand of Man on America,”
a photo essay by David Plowden,- A window in Übach-Palenberg,
Germany, from “Windows, Walls:
Structural Dialogue Between Equals,” - Missiles on their launch sites
in Cuba, from “Views From Air Show
Our Earth’s Dramatic Beauty,”
based on an exhibition of aerial
photography at the National Air and
Space Museum, 1979.
T WOULD PRESENT art, since
true art is never dated, in the
richest possible reproduction.”
That’s how Edward K. Thomp-
son, the founding editor of
Smithsonian, once described
the magazine staff ’s approach to pic-
tures. So when the current art and pho-
tography editors buried themselves in
the archives in preparation for this
anniversary issue, it came as no sur-
prise that we found lots of wonderful
art. What did surprise us, however, was
just how artistic, how modern and how
forward-looking the images in the fi rst
50 years truly are.
Out of tens of thousands of images
published in these pages over the last
half-century, we selected a few hun-
dred, hoping to fi nd one that would
sum up the magazine’s unique visual
history. An absurdly diffi cult task, to
be sure. Would it be an image from
nature? Speckled-orange and green-
striped brittle sea stars on a coral reef
from 1981 would do the trick. It’s got
beauty, surprise, rarity. Or what about
an X-rayed calla lily from 1986, as stun-
ning as a Georgia O’Keeff e drawing? It embraces technology
and nature, a couple of our favorite subjects. Then there are
the red, blue and black seemingly Cubist drawings, published
in 1974, that the illustrator and cartoonist Saul Steinberg had
scribbled on Smithsonian Institution letterhead while serving
as an artist in residence. Or how about George Booth’s 1991
cover cartoon of howling dogs? Wouldn’t that underscore the
magazine’s tradition of commissioning prominent illustrators
and photographers to create original new work?
No, an impossible task.
So we decided instead on fi ve pictures, all from the magazine’s
fi rst decade, each touching on a theme. They certainly call atten-
tion to Thompson’s dictum that real art doesn’t have an expira-
tion date. Beyond that, we think they express another important
idea. There is art in science, there is art in the everyday—“the
world off ers itself to your imagination,” the poet Mary Oliver fa-
mously wrote—if only you look, really look.