Flight A Celebration of 100 Years In Art And Literature - Hardcover

Anne Collins Goodyear

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0941807835 ISBN 13: 9780941807838

Publisher: Welcome Books, 2003

Synopsis

Over the course of a century, the invention of the airplane by Wilbur and Orville Wright in 1903 has revolutionized human experience - providing new ways of traveling, news modes of seeing, and new directions for the imagination. The development of aircraft and spacecraft and their successful navigation by pilots, astronauts and cosmonauts proved that what once seemed impossible, human flight and even travel to the moon, could indeed be accomplished with ambition and dedication. Published in collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in honor of the centennial of flight, this book will provide a historical overview of the art and literature that have helped to inspire and record human ventures into the sky and the cosmos. It will consist of a compilation of artwork and literary masterpieces - poetry and prose - organized into thematic chapters, each to be introduced by respected scholars. The publication of this collection will coincide with the centenary of the invention of the airplane in December 2003. The book's timing enables it to present an important record of the achievements of the twentieth century and poises it to speak to the possibilities of the century and millennium to come. Flight: A Celebration of 100 Years in Art and Literature will document the centennial since the Wright Brothers first flew with selections from writers as diverse as Robert Frost, Rudyard Kipling, Archibald MacLeish, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke. Artists to be represented range from Pablo Picasso to Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, William Wegman, and Robert Rauschenberg.

About this title

About the Author:

Anne Collins Goodyear is Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. While a Guggenheim Fellow at the National Air and Space Museum, she conducted extensive research into the history of the NASA Art Program. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation addresses "Space, Sputnik, and Technocracy: American Art of the Second Machine Age, 1957-1971."; Roger Launius is a member of the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Previously, he served as chief historian of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He has written or edited a number of books on aerospace history, including Imagining Space: Achievements, Predictions, Possibilities, 1950-2050 (Chronicle Books, 2001) and NASA and the Exploration of Space (Stewart, Tabori, & Chang, 1998); Anthony Springer is NASA's representative for Centennial of Flight activities and the Alliance Development Manager for the Office of Aerospace Technology. He also has held positions as the NASA resident manager for the X-34 project and as a project and test engineer with the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama; Bertram Ulrich is Curator of the NASA Art Program and is also responsible for NASA's visual identity for the Office of Public Affairs. A painter himself, he also lectured on American culture during a Fulbright Fellowship in Austria. He co-authored a book with Roger Launius on the NASA Art Program entitled NASA and the Exploration of Space (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1998).

From Publishers Weekly:

This collaboration with NASA (where two of the editors work; the other two are associated with the Smithsonian) celebrates the centenary of flight, marked by Wilbur and Orville Wright's invention of the airplane in 1903 (an excerpt from Orville's diary is included). Filled with full-color and black-and-white photos, this beautiful coffee-table book captures flight as the plane has matured into an instrument to wage war and a vehicle to reach the stars. But what really stand out are the works of art that the concept of flying has inspired-poems such as "On the Beaches of the Moon," by Archibald MacLeish or "Kitty Hawk," by Robert Frost; and such paintings as Airplane Flying, by Kazimir Malevich, Notre Avenir est dans l'Air, by Pablo Picasso, or Moonwalk 1, by Andy Warhol. This is an homage in the artistic sense, so historians flipping the pages won't find snapshots of fighter planes in combat, stills of Kitty Hawk's brief flight, or explosive rocket ship liftoffs.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Welcome Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0941807835
• ISBN 13: 9780941807838
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240