SPACE AGE PAINT SERIES

Their style has a schoolboy naivety, but they show insights into the ways and means of reaching space, including escape velocity, fuel, and the use of multi-stage rockets remarkably close to those that would eventually be employed.

The exhibition shows his notes and sketches for a 1930s film called Cosmic Voyage, on which he was a consultant. Space was seen as a place where the revolutionary project of a perfect society could reach fulfilment.Ī key figure is Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a bearded provincial schoolteacher, almost completely deaf, who wielded a vast ear trumpet of his own design and manufacture and who from the late 1870s until his death in 1935 studied questions of weightlessness and space travel, and tried to communicate them through science fiction.

SPACE AGE PAINT SERIES

There is also the 1928 Labour Commune by an architecture student called Georgy Krutikov, a series of circular space stations that formed part of his atomic-powered Flying City project. In the Science Museum’s Cosmonauts exhibition, which covers Russia’s fascination with space from late tsarist times to the present, it is possible to see the country’s extraterrestrial exploration as a vast art project.Įxhibits include early abstract paintings representing new cosmic orders and Konstantin Yuon’s New Planet, a 1921 painting intended for the drop curtain of the Bolshoi theatre, where the October revolution is shown as a previously unknown world, floating amid strange spheres and bursts of radiant light. At the same time it was part of a movement already decades old at the time that the first Sputnik was launched in 1957, which combined fantasy and image with function and science. Like the best icons, it wasn’t designed for effect but for the fearsome expediencies of the race between the USSR and the US to put the first manmade object into orbit, and for the changed physical rules of the previously unknown world outside the Earth’s atmosphere.

It caught a moment, summarised the space age and encouraged a style of spindliness and volume that shaped motels and table lamps. A s design icons go, it’s hard to beat a Sputnik: for its combination of sphere and line, its double otherworldliness (to westerners), being both cosmic and Soviet, its mixed message of global unity and intercontinental, potentially nuclear, rivalry.

Space age paint