ON THE COVER

DAPHNE VOM BAUR

Artist Jack Perlmutter (CC ’62) offers an interpretation of the next age of exploration

Jack Perlmutter: painter and printmaker; professor of art and a visiting lecturer and resident artist at numerous universities around the world. Recipient of prestigious awards, Jack can name a long list of national and international museums and galleries that have exhibited his paintings and prints, many of which are in permanent collections around the globe.

NASA selected Jack Perlmutter to document several manned and unmanned space launches, including the maiden flight of the space shuttle. April 12, 1981, set the tone for the new space age of exploration when Columbia actually left Earth. Here, on the front cover of the COSMOS Journal, Professor Perlmutter’s computerenhanced painting is appropriately entitled “Cultural Liftoff.” The painting depicts the shuttle preparing for launch, and the momentous changes about to occur in human biological, cultural, and technological evolution are symbolized by the caterpillar on the upper left edge awaiting the next stage of metamorphosis. The flowers appearing on the lower right-hand edge represent a somewhat whimsical hope of the artist that, one day, life would be found on other planets.

In many ways, the shuttle is the next great step in human exploration. In the mid-to-late 1400s, the “Age of Exploration” started with the voyages of the Chinese Admiral Zheng He and, for the Western world, the Portuguese voyages down the coast of Africa. As noted by J. Carter Brown in his foreword to Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration (1991), “The measuring and mapping that led to the navigation of unknown seas sprang from the same impulses that helped define spatial perception through perspective, the structure of the human body, and even the attempt to chart what Leonardo [the most “protean” explorer of them all!] called ‘the motions of the mind’...The worlds of visual art and artifact communicate so much more than the dry facts of historical events and do it, bridging time and space, without words, directly.”

Just as rapid scientific advances now make possible voyages that were only science fiction a few decades ago, staggering technological advances have added incredible tools to the artist’s arsenal. New film, lighting techniques, and optics for the photographer; new media for the sculptor; new and synthetic brushes, paints, and canvases; new equipment, sights, and sounds for the holographic artist; new combinations of all for the illustrator. And then there is the computer “enhancement” of art that can boggle the mind with its hundreds of colors, tones, intensities, compositional techniques, ad infinitum. But what we are presented with in this new age of art are the intensely argued and unsettled distinctions between art and fine art, illustrative art, and high-tech gimmickry art. When is art no longer art? When does the mark of the hand cease to matter?

And that is where we are today with Jack Perlmutter, developing a multicultural understanding of the space age of exploration using traditional art methods and media, often enhanced by cutting-edge technology. But we are barely at the point of preparing the canvas, firing up the forge, manipulating the celluloid, fine-tuning the computer programs, and creating a true virtual reality. For artist and astronaut alike, this new age of exploration is an exciting time indeed.

Daphne vom Baur (CC ’97) is the associate editor for art for the Cosmos Journal.

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