Lillian Schwartz | |
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 Schwartz atBell Labs in the 1970s | |
| Born | Lillian Feldman (1927-07-13)July 13, 1927 Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | October 12, 2024(2024-10-12) (aged 97) Manhattan, New York, U.S. |
| Known for | Computer-mediated art |
| Spouse | |
| Awards | Winsor McCay Award, Emmy Award |
Lillian Feldman Schwartz (July 13, 1927 – October 12, 2024) was an American artist considered a pioneer ofcomputer-mediated art[1] and one of the first 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 desktopcomputer revolution made computer hardware and software widely available to artists.
Schwartz was born inCincinnati, Ohio, on July 13, 1927 to Jacob and Katie (Green) Feldman.[1] Jacob was a barber born in Russia; Katie had immigrated fromLiverpool, England. Both wereJewish emigres.[2] The youngest of her parents' 13 children, she grew up during theGreat Depression.[3][4] As a young girl, she experimented with slate, mud, sticks, and chalk as free materials for making art.[4] She studied to become a nurse atCincinnati College of Nursing and Health under aWorld War II education program and later on found her training inanatomy,biology, and the use ofplaster valuable in making art. In 1946 she married James Schwartz, an intern at the Cincinnati General Hospital.[1] By 1949, both were stationed in Japan during the postwar occupation in an area betweenHiroshima andNagasaki, and she contractedpolio, which paralyzed her for a time. As part of her rehabilitation, she studiedcalligraphy with the artist Tshiro.[5]
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 athyroid tumor, possibly from exposure to plastic solvents.[6]
By 1966, Schwartz had begun working withlight boxes and mechanical devices like pumps, and she became a member of theExperiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) group that brought together artists and engineers as collaborators.[1]In 1968 herkinetic sculptureProxima Centauri was included in the important early show of machine art at theMuseum of Modern Art in New York City titledThe Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.[4] This sculpture was later used as a special effect for aStar Trek episode, in which it served as a prison forSpock's Brain.[7]
Schwartz was brought intoBell Labs byLeon Harmon, where she was a "resident visitor" from 1969 to 2002.[8][9] While there, she worked with engineers John Vollaro and others, including extensive collaboration withKen Knowlton, asoftware engineer andcomputer artist who had also had work in the 1968 Museum of Modern Art show. That collaboration produced a series of computer-animated films, each built from the output of visual generative algorithms written by Knowlton and edited by Schwartz.[10] She took classes in programming atThe New School for Social Research around that same time. She began making paintings and films with a combination of hand painting, digital collaging, computer and other image processing, and optical post-processing, initially working with Knowlton's 1963 computer graphics language,BEFLIX, his subsequent graphics language EXPLOR and also SYMBOLICS. By 1975, Schwartz and Knowlton, in collaboration, had made ten of the first digitally created computer-animated films to be exhibited as works of fine art:Pixillation, Olympiad, UFOs, Enigma, Googolplex, Apotheosis, Affinities, Kinesis, Alae, and Metamorphosis.
While those 10 films did not yet involve the digital editing of images or image sequences, Schwartz having edited them as physical film the conventional way, in her work of subsequent periods, Schwartz's creative cobbling together of different, often cutting-edge technologies has been said to prefigure what would later become common practice in such programs asPhotoshop andFinal Cut Pro.
Schwartz contributed to scientific research on color perception and sound. She had been a consultant atAT&T Bell Laboratories,IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory,Exxon Research Center, andLucent Technologies Bell Labs Innovations.[11]
Schwartz died at her home inManhattan on October 12, 2024, at the age of 97.[12][1][13]
Schwartz used the works ofLeonardo da Vinci extensively in experiments with computers. One notable work she created isMona/Leo, for which she compared the image of a Leonardo da Vinci self-portrait with theMona Lisa, matching the two faces feature by feature to show their underlying structural similarity.[14][15] Specifically, she replaced the right side of theMona Lisa with the flipped left side of a red chalk self-portrait of da Vinci. Superimposed lines drawn on the image showing the close alignments of the bottom of theeye,eyebrow,nose andchin prompted her to argue thatthe Mona Lisa is in part a cryptic self-portrait of the artist, an idea that has been referred to as the "Mona Leo theory".[1]
In further experiments along these lines, she removed thegray tones in Leonardo da Vinci's self-portrait and superimposed theMona Lisa eye over it. Not everyone is convinced by her argument for the identity of Leonardo da Vinci and theMona 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 supportthis theory.[citation needed]
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 theLast Supper.[16] Her 3D computer-generated model showed that the perspective lines in theLast Supper do match up with (extend) the architecture of the refectory ofSanta Maria delle Grazie inMilan where thefresco is located, but only because of certain changes Leonardo made to standard linear perspective.
Other works also include 1970'sPixillation, her first computer-animated film, and 1971'sOlympiad.[17][18]
Schwartz was called a pioneer in "establishing computers as a valid and fruitful artistic medium" by physicist and Nobel laureateArno Penzias and a trailblazer and virtuoso by the philosopher-artistTimothy Binkley.[19] Her films have been included in theVenice Biennale and theCannes Film Festival, among many others, and have received numerous awards.[20] In 1984, Schwartz created a computer-generated TV spot that for the newly renovated Museum of Modern Art in New York; the public service announcement won anEmmy Award.[21][16]
In 2016, Schwartz had a retrospective one-person exhibition at the New York City gallery Magenta Plains.[22] Schwartz's artworks have also been exhibited at theMuseum of Modern Art (New York),[4] theMetropolitan Museum of Art,[23] theWhitney Museum of American Art,[24] the Moderna Museet (Stockholm),[25] Centre Pompidou (Paris),[26]Stedelijk Museum of Art (Amsterdam),[16] and the Grand Palais Museum (Paris), and at numerous galleries and festivals worldwide. Schwartz was a visiting member of the Computer Science Department at theUniversity of Maryland; an adjunct professor atKean College, Fine Arts Department; an adjunct professor at theRutgers University Visual Arts Department; a visiting scholar atNew York University,[27] and a Member of the Graduate Faculty of TheSchool of Visual Arts, NYC. She was also an Artist in Residence at Channel 13,WNET, New York. She was a fellow of the World Academy of Science and Art from 1988 on.
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