CrossingOver_2024.pdf

CROSSI NG OVER

CROSSING OVER

Edited by Peter Sachs Collopy

and Claudia Bohn-Spector

Caltech Library, Pasadena

Published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation

ART AND SCIENCE

AT CALTECH

1920–2020

FOREWORD

Kara Whatley

PREFACE

True Confessions

of an Aging Archivist

Judith Goodstein

INTRODUCTION

Peter Sachs Collopy

and Claudia Bohn-Spector

THE INFINITE LAWN

BETWEEN SCIENCE

AND FICTION

NASA’s Voyager Missions

and the Visualization

of the Space Environment

Lois Rosson

THE UNIVERSE IN PIXELS

The Creation of Charge-

Coupled Devices and the

Dawn of Big Data

Astronomy

David Zierler

TIME STREAM

POWERS OF TEN

110

“OF MEN AND MOLDS”

Neurospora

and the

Illustration of Nature’s

Molecular Order

Charles A. Kollmer

126

RENDERING THE

MOLECULAR WORLD

Soraya de Chadarevian

154

GOLDEN EVENT SCIENCE

IN THE GOLDEN AGE

OF TELEVISION

Brian R. Jacobson

194

THINKING WITH ART

AND ENGINEERING

AT THE JET PROPULSION

LABORATORY

Learning from JPL’s Visual

Strategists

Talia Shabtay Filip

230

J P L’ S

VISIONS OF THE

FUTURE

POSTERS

AND THE IMAGINED

FRONTIER

Anne Sullivan

247

AESTHETIC VIRTUE

260

FIGURES AND GROUNDS

A Critical History

of the Caltech Campus

and Its Architecture

Christopher Hawthorne

268

ARCHITECTURES

OF EPISTEMIC MASTERY

ON THE CALTECH

C A M P U S , 1915 –193 0

J. V. Decemvirale

288

PASSING IN THE

HALLWAY

Art and Technology

at Caltech, 196 8 –1972

Peter Sachs Collopy

294

AN EXPERIMENT IN ART

Baxter Gallery at Caltech

ennifer A. Watts

302

A CONSPIRACY OF

BACHELORS

Caltech and the Visual Arts

at Mid-Century

Claudia Bohn-Spector

312

EXHIBITS A & B

Notes for an Exhibition

of Science and Art

Tim Durfee

314

CALTECH ART EXHIBITIONS,

1968 –1985

316

CONTRIBUTORS

Kaiser Aluminum, 

Saturday Evening Post

“What Makes the ‘Big Eye’ See?”

March 3, 1951

Magazine advertisement

Caltech Archives and Special

Collections

As a librarian who has spent my career at scientific institutions, it gives me

particular pleasure to welcome readers to this unique volume, which combines

original essays and remarkable images to explore, illustrate, and critique the

interplay of science and the visual arts at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion

Laboratory over the last century. It may come as a surprise to some that such

a relationship even exists, synonymous as the names Caltech and JPL are

with science and technology. I first became aware of this rich history not long

after I became Caltech’s University Librarian in 2019, when one of the earliest

decisions I faced was whether we should apply to be part of the Getty

Foundation’s 2024 PST ART exhibition program on art and science. Being

new to California, I had not previously attended PST exhibitions, but what

little I knew about them certainly inspired me to learn more.

As it turns out, my decision was an easy one—any exhibition program focus-

ing on how art and science have intertwined in the Los Angeles area would

surely be incomplete without taking into account Caltech’s role and impact in

this arena. Most of the organizations participating in PST this year are art

museums building connections with science and its influence in the art world.

Caltech, in contrast, is a science institution finding art in its past and present.

Early research by our team of collaborators, centering on the exceptional

resources in the Caltech Archives and Special Collections, led us to a theme for

our PST contribution. That theme is “crossing over”—a term coined by Caltech

biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan and technician Eleth Cattell. It describes

how parental genes combine to produce new offspring and, in quite another

context, refers to how different academic and creative disciplines can cross-

pollinate to create new ones. Such “crossing over” has long defined Caltech’s

multidisciplinary approach to scientific teaching and research, and, as

this catalog will show, equally characterizes the Institute’s intriguing and

complicated history of engagement with the arts.

One of the principal, indeed iconic, roles of a university is to foster the free

expression and exchange of innovative and unconventional ideas, including

those that may strike some as controversial. This we do to inspire and create

meaningful, thought-provoking dialogue and to open the mind to new avenues

of thought. The essays in this catalog are no exception. In multiple, sometimes

provocative ways, they encourage and inspire us to think about the artistry in

scientific images and the complex interaction between art and science in ways

that many of us have not previously considered. Welcome to

Crossing Over

Kara Whatley

University Librarian, Caltech

FOREWORD

In 1968, when I was offered—and promptly

accepted—a position as Caltech’s first archivist,

I had heard of the physicist Richard Feynman,

but pretty much nothing else. To develop a sense

of history about a place takes time and when

people on campus began to call me “the school

historian,” I felt embarrassed by the title—

I didn’t feel ready to accept that designation.

After all, many renowned faculty members

had spent their entire careers at Caltech. They

had all known Millikan, Hale, and Noyes,

Caltech’s founding trio, personally. If I am often

consulted as the “school’s memory,” for lack

of a better phrase, it’s because the faculty ranks

of my generation have thinned, while I remain.

In any event, I am no longer embarrassed.

To cast back several decades, 1979 was

a banner year for Einstein celebrations. It seemed

that everyone in Los Angeles wanted to share in

his hundredth birthday, including KCET, the

local public television station, which asked that

Caltech’s archivist come down to its Hollywood

studio for a live interview about the iconic

scientist, who had spent a couple of winters at

the campus in the early 1930s. “Remember to tell

them what an archivist does,” my teenage daughter

suggested. As a graduate student, I had written

my dissertation on Sir Humphry Davy, a chemist

who came to prominence at the beginning of

the nineteenth century. However, starting out as

an archivist in 1968, I had only a foggy idea what

such a person was supposed to do. One of the

more distinguished historians on the faculty had

suggested that an archivist could spend their

days preparing brief biographies of other faculty

members. After due consideration, I have decided

not to reveal who proposed that job description.

Judith Goodstein

PREFACE

True Confessions of

an Aging Archivist

By Einstein’s centennial year, I figured I had

the job of being the Institute’s archivist more or

less down to a science—after all, I was at a premier

science institution. The formula was simple:

first, you need to decide what should be preserved,

and second, you need to do whatever it takes to

preserve it. When my KCET host began the

interview by asking what an archivist does all day,

I was ready with that answer.

The Caltech Archives today is the culmination

of that simple but far from simple-minded

approach to assembling, classifying, and curating

the wealth of historic Caltech material featured

in curator Claudia Bohn-Spector and project

director Peter Sachs Collopy’s lavish exhibition

on display at a select number of sites on campus.

With more than 500,000 objects dating from

antiquity to the present day to choose from, they

have mined the Archives’ substantial holdings

of scientific instruments, models, paintings,

rare books and prints, drawings, seals, and photo-

graphs to highlight the role and function of art in

areas that the Institute’s founders saw, and

what continues to be seen, as the most important

fields at the frontiers of science and technology.

The records of the Human Betterment

Foundation, perhaps the most controversial and,

in recent years, among the Archives’ most

consulted research collections, were transferred

from the Institute’s Waverly warehouse to

the Archives in 1968, shortly after I was told that

inactive records and files were routinely sent

there for further retention or destruction. The

papers of Ezra S. Gosney, the HBF founder

and principal donor, were either strewn across

the floor or stored in dozens of boxes, and they

were clearly marked “destroy.” Given the recent

controversy surrounding Robert Millikan’s

membership on the foundation’s board in the late

1930s, perhaps it would have been better to have

left them there. But I knew that the records

would provide historians with essential source

material for examining the eugenics movement

in America, starting with the personal and

social impact of sterilization carried out under

California’s first sterilization law in 1909 and

its revision in 1913. Beyond those records, I found

nothing else of interest in the Waverly warehouse.

As late as the mid-1950s the majority of

Caltech’s library holdings were clearly geared

toward meeting the contemporary needs of

its science and engineering faculty and students,

although I can remember checking out a well-

thumbed English-language copy, published

in 1790, of eighteenth-century French chemist

Antoine Lavoisier’s

Elementary Treatise on

Chemistry

, which had sat on the open shelves in

the school’s chemistry library for decades.

Then, like a sudden downpour in summer, rare

first editions of landmark texts in the history of

science began raining down on the campus.

Collectively, these priceless volumes are among

the Archives’—and Caltech’s—crown jewels. They

were assembled early in the twentieth century,

in Florence, Italy, by Giampaolo Rocco, a prince

with an engineering degree.

Mostly rebound in blue morocco leather and

embossed with his family’s coat of arms on

the cover, Rocco’s holdings—consisting primarily

of astronomy and physics texts published in

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—arrived

at Caltech in 1955. It may have been the only

time in the school’s history that a trustee was

persuaded to write a check, sight unseen, for 202

books, based solely on a published list prepared

by a prince’s private librarian.

Ostensibly, the Rocco collection was intended

for Earnest C. Watson, a long-time member of

Caltech’s physics faculty, whose deep interest in

books, manuscripts, pictures, and instruments

relating to the history of science had by the mid-

1930s turned him into an avid collector. Shortly

after the volumes arrived, Watson turned them

over to Caltech, not simply because they repre

sented, in his eyes, a good investment, but also as

a reminder that the pursuit of science is far older

than the institution that stands today at the

pinnacle of scientific achievement. He would go

on to supplement the Rocco collection with many

of his own rare first editions.

The designers and publishers of these

works were not themselves scientists, but they

were craftspeople, artisans, and illustrators

of the highest order, who, like many of the works’

authors, clearly had a keen appreciation of the

value of art in illuminating scientific concepts.

One of these volumes, by the first chancellor

of Oxford University and bishop of Lincoln and

one of the medieval world’s most celebrated

thinkers, Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1168–1253), is

Caltech’s oldest dated book, published in 1503

in Nuremberg. This short work,

Concerning Lines,

Angles, and Figures, and the Refraction and

Reflection of Rays

, is the first printed edition of

his geometrical analysis of light. The woodcut

frontispiece shows a tree in a tub of water to

demonstrate refraction. Meanwhile, reflected

rays of the sun shining into a mirror cause

a tree in the distance to burst into flame (page 10).

(Like the four volumes described below, this

exceedingly rare first edition was gifted to Caltech

by Earnest Watson.)

Three centuries after Grosseteste, the seeds

of modern science began to blossom. Even

a modest tour of the scientific and visual gems

in Caltech’s rare book collection must include

the Polish astronomer (and Catholic canon)

Nicholas Copernicus’s earth-shattering view of

the solar system. In his book

On the Revolutions

of the Heavenly Spheres

(Nuremberg, 1543),

which he saw in published form and handled

shortly before he died, Copernicus placed

the sun rather than the earth at the center of the

natural order. His description of the heliocentric

solar system is accompanied by one of the

most famous illustrations in the history of science:

a drawing of the six known planets orbiting the

sun (page 74). Overthrowing fourteen centuries

of traditional thought, Copernicus’s revolutionary

model, based on literal revolutions in the sky,

launched the scientific revolution that would lead,

some 150 years later, to the publication of Isaac

Newton’s

Principia

and the dawn of the Age

of Enlightenment. (A rare second edition of this

pivotal work in the history of science is also part

of the Caltech collection.)

Born not long after Copernicus’s death, the

Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe (1546–1601),

the last dedicated astronomer not to use a tele-

scope, spent much of his life carrying out the

most detailed observations then possible

of the heavens, largely with instruments of his

own invention. He accomplished all this at

observatories he had constructed on the island

True Confessions of an Aging Archivist

Robert Grosseteste

Libellus lincolniensis de phisicis lineis 

angulis et figuris

.

. ., 1503

Book (detail)

Caltech Archives and Special Collections

Goodstein

of Ven, which King Frederick II of Denmark

gave him in 1576. A stunning series of color

illustrations in cartographer Joan Blaeu’s

Atlas

Maior

(Amsterdam, 1662) offers a panoramic

view of Tycho’s astronomical kingdom. One

picture shows

Uraniborg

—named for Urania,

the muse of astronomy—a complex of buildings

that included observatories, a laboratory, a print-

ing shop for publications, and living quarters,

all enclosed within an elaborate wall. Another

hand-colored print in the same volume depicts

Tycho’s observatory

Stellaborg

, situated outside

the walls of

Uraniborg

and, as its name implies,

designed for stargazing. Partially constructed

underground to protect its astronomical instru

ments from wind and other disturbances,

the building ’s occupants can be observed in the

lower right using a sextant (a type of navigational

instrument) to measure the distances between

celestial bodies ( below).

A contemporary of Tycho, Johann Bayer

(1572–1625) published

Uranometria

, the first

true star atlas, in 1603. The most famous of

all celestial atlases, it consists of 51 constellation

maps of the night sky engraved on copper plates.

Recognized for their outstanding beauty to this

day, the maps remained a popular guide to the

constellations for more than two hundred years.

German astronomer and mathematician

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and his Italian

counterpart Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) were

both staunch Copernicans. In an early bid to

unmask the hidden design of the universe,

Kepler devised a model demonstrating how each

of the five “perfect solids” of antiquity could

be neatly interposed between the spheres of the

six planets then known in the Copernican system.

A famous drawing of these nested solids (the

outermost sphere is Saturn’s) appears in his book

The Secret of the Universe,

published in 1596

(page 74). Thirteen years later, Kepler abandoned

this idea with his discovery that the orbit of Mars

was elliptical.

The New

Astronomy

(1609) sets

forth his thesis that the orbits of all the planets are

ellipses with the sun at one focus, a proposition

now known as Kepler’s first law of planetary

motion (page 75). (This work, like the astronomy

volumes discussed below, came to Caltech with

the Rocco collection.)

In 1627, under the patronage of Holy Roman

Emperor Rudolph II, Kepler published the

Rudolphine Tables

(cultivating benefactors was

as essential to scientists in those days as it is

today, if not more so), a set of planetary tables and

star charts. Kepler himself designed the book’s

frontispiece, an elaborate engraving depicting

those he considered the giants of astronomy, both

ancient and among his contemporaries, gathered

in the temple of Urania. He placed himself

and the titles of four of his books in the left panel

on the base of the temple.

Caltech’s copy of the

Rudolphine Tables

also includes a fine seventeenth-century map of

the world, prepared by Kepler and cartographers

Eckebrecht and Walch, and dated Nuremberg

1630. As with other maps of that era, California

is drawn as an island.

The invention of the telescope in 1610

marked the end of the era of naked-eye astronomy.

The first to grasp that the telescopic lens might

be used to study the night sky was Galileo, and

Starry Messenger

—the book in which he published

his findings—marked the birth of telescopic

Tycho Brahe

Astronomiae instauratae mechanica

, 1602

Book (detail)

Caltech Archives and Special Collections

True Confessions of an Aging Archivist

observations of the heavens. One of Galileo’s

earliest discoveries was of the craters and

mountains on the moon, and

Starry Messenger

contains his hand-drawn pictures of them

(page 76). But if the moon had mountains, like

the earth, then the Aristotelian view of corrupt

bodies on the earth and perfect, unchanging

celestial bodies fell apart. There were other spec-

tacular discoveries: Venus exhibited phases

like the moon; Jupiter had four moons. Their

existence lent weight to the Copernican theory

by providing indisputable visual evidence of

satellites moving around a planet as the planets

moved around the sun.

There are important books in the history of

science canon, and then there is Galileo’s

Dialogue

Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

, one of

the great masterpieces of the scientific revolution.

His defense of the Copernican theory in this

book (and his sarcastic treatment of its critics,

which included a number of influential Roman

Catholic clergy) resulted in a summons to Rome,

where Galileo was brought to trial before the

Inquisition and sentenced to permanent house

arrest. The edition in the Archives, published in

Florence in 1632, is exceedingly rare and contains

both the proof and the final version of the

book’s frontispiece. The elegant engraving by

Stefano della Bella depicts Aristotle, Ptolemy,

and Copernicus debating their respective theories

of Earth’s position in the cosmos.

In 2000, the late Caltech Professor George

Housner, a pioneering earthquake engineer,

donated his extensive collection of historical books

and prints relating to earthquakes to the Archives.

Among them are a series of exquisite woodblock

prints created after the great Tokyo quake of 1855.

They depict scenes in the life of

namazu

—

the giant catfish whose unpredictable actions

Japanese folklore held to be the cause of earth

quakes (page 98).

Some decades before the Archives began

acquiring its rare book collection, physicist

Robert Millikan, who had recently become the

de facto head of Caltech, made his own effort

to enlist art in the service of science. In 1923 he

commissioned Belgian artist Godefroid Devreese

to create a representational work that, in

Millikan’s words, would serve “for a thousand

years to come . . . [as] the symbol by which the

California Institute will be most widely known.”

According to various archival records, Millikan

asked Devreese to design a seal that would show

an older man passing the torch to a younger one.

He wanted the figures to symbolize the spirit

of research being passed from one generation

to the next, from maturity to youth. Devreese

duly produced a design depicting the older torch-

bearing male sprinting toward the younger

as in a relay race, both unclad in the manner of

antiquity and floating in the clouds (page 256).

Appearing above these two figures, the seal’s

motto “The truth shall make you free,” also chosen

by Millikan, comes from the New Testament’s

Gospel of John. Taken in the context of the

emblem—the passing on of knowledge—Caltech’s

first Nobel laureate seemed to be endorsing

scientific truth. Moreover, as a minister’s son and

an ardent proponent of the idea that science

and religion need not be in conflict, the biblical

excerpt probably struck him as appropriate.

Millikan evidently liked the emblem, refer

ring to it as Caltech’s official seal. In 1925,

Caltech’s executive council, which he headed,

authorized its use on diplomas, where it remained

for many years.

The Devreese design was considered the

official seal until the 1960s, when there were

calls to update it. In 1969, with Harold Brown’s

inauguration as president and the imminent

admission of female undergraduates, Caltech’s

administration looked at two “new and improved”

renderings. Apparently, they couldn’t decide

which one to use: both versions appeared on

Brown’s inauguration publications.

Brown thought the original Devreese seal

didn’t help Caltech’s public image or its fund-

raising efforts. He solicited the opinion of trustee

Henry Dreyfuss, a well-known industrial designer,

on a possible revamp. Dreyfuss promptly submit

ted his own hand-drawn sketch, just after

Caltech started admitting undergraduate women.

Above it, he wrote, “Instead of boys chasing

one another, we have a boy chasing a girl, or vice

versa.” In a memo to an intermediary, Brown

wrote “I like this seal.”

Meanwhile, with surprisingly little discussion,

the trustees officially adopted a design consisting

Goodstein

of a torch held by a single hand. Members of the

student body, however, took exception, and

suddenly everyone on campus had an opinion.

To complicate matters further, when Caltech

trustees started delving into the Devreese seal’s

actual history, it was discovered that it had never

been officially approved by anyone in a posi-

tion to do so. It had merely served as the de facto

official seal for those many decades.

There matters rested until 1984, when the

issue of the Institute seal resurfaced. Caltech’s

trustees rescinded the board’s 1969 approval

of the one-handed seal. The Devreese design was

adopted as the official seal retroactively to 1925

but was taken out of circulation except for its use

on diplomas, while the motif Millikan originally

favored of a torch being passed—with just

the hands this time—went into general usage on all

campus publications, souvenirs, and memorabilia.

In the early 2000s it supplanted the Devreese seal

on the diplomas as well.

What I can tell you, as one of Caltech’s

storytellers, holds true for others who have, and

will, in the future, depict this little school in

Pasadena with its outsized ambition and aspira

tions. Without exception, their works will reflect

the perspectives, agendas, and quirks of their

creators. Mine included. We all come to our task,

to our tales, and to our art, with a point of view.

That said, all of what I have written here comes

directly out of the Archives, Caltech’s memory

vault. It’s only a sample of what lies there still,

waiting to be explored.

1–Dino Cinti,

Biblioteca Galileiana:

Raccolta dal Principe Giampaolo 

Rocco di Torrepadula

(Florence:

Sansoni, 1958). Issued in a limited

edition of 666 numbered copies,

the Cinti bibliography opens with

an essay describing the history

of astronomy from antiquity to the

time of Galileo. This is followed

by a chronological listing of

the individual works collected by

Prince Rocco, including many black

and white images of the texts.

2–The Rocco and Watson first

editions I describe were all pub-

lished in Latin, with the exception

of Galileo’s

Dialogue

, which

was originally written in Italian.

With one or two exceptions,

their titles are translated here

into English.

3–Portions of this work appeared

in somewhat different form in

Caltech News

(1992),

Caltech 336

(2001), and “Earnest Watson and

the Amazing Liquid Air Show,”

in the Earnest C. Watson Caltech

Lecture Series, October 29, 1997.

I would like to thank Heidi

Aspaturian and Elisa Piccio of the

Caltech Archives; Loma Karklins,

now retired from the Caltech

Archives; and Caltech registrar

Christy Salinas for their help

in preparing this preface.

Introduction

When architects Elmer Grey and Bertram Goodhue

each drew up plans for the Throop College

of Technology’s new campus in the 1910s, they

included both a science museum and—surpris

ingly—an art museum (pages 16–17). This college,

which became the California Institute of

Technology in 1920, was to be devoted first to

engineering and then to science as well, and

museums were to be key spaces for education.

In these plans, they sat at the western edge

of the campus, at its entrance on Wilson Avenue,

forming a bridge between the new college and

the surrounding community.

Caltech never built either of these museums.

Compared to other leading science and engi-

neering schools in the United States, the Institute

has

historically been tentative in embracing

the unique

contributions that art has made to the

generation, visualization, and communication

of scientific thought. But while art has often

stood in science’s shadow, eclipsed by the far

greater institutional priority given to scientific

and technological research, it has also

been

science’s shadow, produced as a consequence

of science’s presence and scale, but disappearing

and reappearing as the sun disappears behind

clouds and reappears again. If the history of

science and engineering at Caltech has been one

of steady growth, the history of art has been

episodic and uneven, filled with inconspicuous

starts and untimely endings.

How, we have asked in this exhibition and book,

have scientists and engineers used images and

collaborated with artists to discover, invent,

and communicate? How have science and engineer-

ing institutions used visual culture to construct

their built environments and shape the identities

of those who occupy them? How have the arts

fared at Caltech as a formerly all-male institution?

Crossing Over

probes the rich pictorial record of

a single institution, over a century of tremendous

change, to propose some answers to these

questions. The exhibition draws extensively from

the Caltech Archives and Special Collections,

augmenting those holdings with images from

other repositories and contemporary artworks.

Images, as this book and exhibition show,

are vehicles to convey information. They embody

arguments, theories, and worldviews and seek

to persuade viewers of their truth and significance.

Starting in the sixteenth century, actual images,

not just imagined ones, became increasingly

central to scientific arguments with the global

spread of the printed book. Ever since, our notion

of science as objective has drawn authority

from illustration, photography, and film, blending

phenomena in nature with their visual interpre

tation. Today, historians of science and, indeed,

scientists themselves increasingly see laboratories

as sites for the creation of images, bringing

numerous disciplines, including art history and

art itself, into closer conversation with science.

As part of PST ART’s region-wide exploration

of the interface between art and science,

Crossing Over

reveals new facets of life and work

at Caltech as they informed, and were informed

by, the vibrant visual culture of Southern California,

including the two industries that most defined

this region, Hollywood and aerospace. Bookended

by two global pandemics,

Crossing Over

spans

one hundred years. It unfolds in four independent

but interconnected movements—

The Infinite

Lawn

Time Stream

Powers of Ten

, and

Aesthetic

Virtue

—taking viewers from the “universe

without” (suns, moons, planets, and galaxies) to

the “universe within” (cells, genes, molecules,

atoms, and subatomic particles) and the evolving

ecology of Caltech itself.

As Grey and Goodhue planned for Caltech’s

architectural future, biologist Thomas Hunt

Morgan led a laboratory of scientists at Columbia

University experimenting with heredity using

Peter Sachs Collopy and Claudia Bohn-Spector

Drosophila melanogaster

, or fruit flies. They found

that some traits that a fly inherited from each

parent were correlated or linked, suggesting that

genes for them were physically located near

each other on a chromosome. Sometimes, though,

traits that typically appeared together instead

appeared separately. One explanation was

that the chromosomal structure was twisted or

flipped between these two genes so that the mother

and father’s contributions were reversed.

Morgan and Eleth Cattell—one of several women

who worked for him as technicians—termed

this phenomenon “crossing over,” and it was an

essential part of how genes from two parents

combined to produce offspring that differed from

each. (The brilliant illustrations drawn by

another of these technicians, Edith Wallace, are

featured in the

Powers of Ten

section of this

catalog.) In 1928, Morgan and his lab moved to

Caltech, founding its Division of Biology.

“Crossing over” serves as a potent metaphor

for the complex interchange between science and

the visual arts at this influential institution—

in a process that has been both fertile and fraught

with difficulty. Throughout Caltech’s history, art

and science have crossed over like the chromo

somes of two parents, producing new hybrids with

some of the traits of each. The same can be said

about many images in this exhibition and book.

Neither exclusively scientific nor strictly fine art,

the images on view straddle a divide, often

blurring the lines between the disciplines from

which they sprang. Like all images, they are

dependent on the conditions of their creation and

reception, shifting their meanings when contem

plated from new perspectives.

Both the exhibition

Crossing Over

and this

book begin with pictorial hybrids in astronomy

and planetary science.

The Infinite Lawn

focuses

on astronomers’ efforts to expand human vision

farther and deeper into space, particularly

through the construction of Palomar Observatory

in the 1930s and 1940s. In those same decades,

Caltech engineers began a rocketry research

program that evolved into the Jet Propulsion

Laboratory. In 1958, Caltech began operating

JPL for the newly founded NASA, a relationship

that continues to this day. When JPL’s Voyager

spacecraft produced new data on Jupiter

and Saturn in the 1970s, writes Lois Rosson,

astronomical illustrators merged these findings

with their artistic knowledge of Earth’s land-

scapes to produce images of alien worlds for the

wide audiences of both

Star Trek: The Motion

Picture

and astronomer Carl Sagan’s nonfiction

television series

Cosmos

. During the same period,

David Zierler writes, astronomers at Palomar

Observatory and JPL adopted the electronic

charge-coupled device, or CCD, as a new technology

for astrophotography, facilitating new forms of

computational analysis.

Time Stream

continues to gaze to the heavens

as it looks back to the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries through Caltech’s collection of rare

first-edition books in the history of astronomy,

juxtaposing them with more recent ways of

imagining the universe. This second section also

includes artist Lita Albuquerque’s ephemeral

installation

This Moment in Time

, covering

a bridge across Caltech Hall’s reflecting pool with

small sheets of fluttering gold leaf, a precious

material of profound significance in both science

and the arts.

Powers of Ten

explores how artists, scientists,

and engineers produced new images across myriad

scales and Caltech’s many disciplines. Beginning

in the 1930s, writes Soraya de Chadarevian,

chemist Linus Pauling formed a close collabora

tion with architect Roger Hayward to translate

the three-dimensional molecular models that he

and colleagues developed into a two-dimensional

“architecture of molecules.” In the 1960s, his

successor Richard Dickerson formed a similar

collaboration with artist Irving Geis. Biologist

George Beadle’s own 1948 collaboration with

Hayward, writes Charles Kollmer, shows how life

scientists—in this case using the bread mold

Neurospora

to study heredity—used drawings and

photographs to convey their findings to both

colleagues and the general public. Brian Jacobson

turns our attention to Caltech physicist Carl

Anderson’s 1932 discovery and photograph of the

Introduction

Elmer Grey

Birdseye View: Music Hall & Art Museum 

for Throop College of Technology

, c. 1910

Watercolor and ink on cardstock

Caltech Archives and Special Collections

Collopy and Bohn-Spector

positron and 1957 collaboration with filmmaker

Frank Capra, a Throop alumnus, to bring this

“image tradition” of physics to television.

Talia Shabtay Filip takes us back to JPL to

visit The Studio, where visual strategists have

brought the skills of art and design to space

exploration missions for the last twenty years.

Among The Studio’s creations is

Visions of

the Future

, a 2016 series of posters visualizing

travel to moons and exoplanets which, Anne

Sullivan explains, take their inspiration from

associations between space exploration and the

American frontier.

Aesthetic Virtue

is not part of the

Crossing

Over

exhibition, but it occupies a prominent

place in this catalog. It explores efforts to bring

art to Caltech not only in the direct service of

science, but for its own sake, and the influence

of Caltech’s architecture on its scientific

community. Christopher Hawthorne traces how

architect Bertram Goodhue, chemist and donor

Arnold Beckman, and biologist and Caltech

president David Baltimore each expressed ideas

about the role of science in society through

campus buildings. Goodhue and other designers

of Caltech’s early campus, writes J. V. Decemvirale,

used Spanish Colonial Revival architecture both

to present a narrative of European progress

and to incorporate iconography from other parts

of the world.

Art formed part of Throop’s early curriculum,

but mostly vanished as the institution narrowed

its focus in 1910. In 1941, Pasadena’s California

Graduate School of Design merged with Caltech

to become its Industrial Design Section, one of

several new academic programs in the field—but

the department lasted only eight years. In 1969,

writes Peter Collopy, Caltech invited artists

to campus to teach and make art in new media,

but the goals of the artists and their host institu

tion seldom aligned. Caltech’s experiments

in art and technology evolved into Baxter Art

Gallery, which, as Jennifer Watts writes, hosted

dozens of innovative exhibitions from 1971

to 1985 and persistently raised questions about

the role of art at a technical institute. Even as

Introduction

and Sebastien Montabonel and The Island, for

generously providing funding that has made this

exhibition and catalog possible.

An exhibition of this magnitude would be

impossible without the contribution of many

artists and lenders. We extend our heartfelt thanks

to all who engaged their creative energies and

generously contributed to our efforts by making

or loaning works.

Thank you to University Librarian Kara

Whatley for her visionary leadership in the project,

without which it would not exist. Thank you

to our collaborators in the research component

of the project: in addition to all the authors

of essays here, those include Jed Buchwald, Dehn

Gilmore, David Kremers, Melissa Lo, Patrick

McCray, Hillary Mushkin, Joanna Radin,

Chitra Ramalingam, and Caltech archivists Loma

Karklins, Penny Neder-Muro, Elisa Piccio,

Mariella Soprano, and Richard Thai. We and

several of our contributors want to extend

additional thanks to Loma for her exceptional

research support and her knowledge of art and

architecture in Caltech’s history. Special thanks

also go to our exhibition coordinator Bailey

Westerhoff, whose brilliant organizational skills

and unstinting efforts helped make the book and

exhibition a reality. The Caltech Archives

and Special Collections would not exist if not for

the decades-long work of University Archivist

Emerita Judith Goodstein, whom we thank for

her generous preface.

The development of the exhibition and

catalog have also involved many collaborations

across Caltech and beyond. Thank you to

Thomas Rosenbaum; to David Tirrell, Kaushik

Bhattacharya, Stacey Scoville, and Regina

Colombo in the Office of the Provost; and to

Catherine Geard, Chris Daley, Mitchel Del Rio,

Jocelyn Yamasaki, and Ling Lim at Caltech

Library for their unfailing support of our efforts.

We are equally indebted to colleagues across

Caltech embraced coeducation in the early 1970s,

writes Claudia Bohn-Spector, the relationship

between art and science was shaped by firm disci-

plinary boundaries and the patriarchal legacies

of single-sex education and “Bachelordom,”

reflected in artist Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic

and allegorical

Large Glass

, shown in an exhibition

just blocks away from the campus in 1963.

Tim Durfee, the architect of

Crossing Over

as an exhibition, closes our catalog with a visual

essay on the philosophy of its presentation.

If art is a shadow that expands and contracts

at Caltech, today that shadow is relatively large.

Since 2019, the Caltech-Huntington Program in

Visual Culture has brought artists-in-residence

to campus and incubated a new undergraduate

minor in visual culture. Science and engineering

disciplines like neuroscience and machine

learning have increasingly turned their attention

to vision. Artists and scientists collaborate in

Caltech’s influential Data to Discovery program.

The art curriculum begun in 1969 survives

in the cozy Art Chateau. And exhibitions and

catalogs like this one attest to the bridges that

Caltech has built between art and science for the

benefit of both.

• • •

Crossing Over

is a collaborative historical research

and exhibition project that would never have

been possible without the generous support of

many individuals and institutions. At the Getty

Foundation, we thank Joan Weinstein, Heather

MacDonald, Melissa Lo, Lu Spriggs, Zachary

Kaplan, and Selene Preciado for their formative

work on the PST ART initiative, their generous

support of our exhibition, and their unfailing

advice

in developing it. We so much appreciate

the additional support of Caltech trustees David

Lee and Maria Hummer-Tuttle, and of the

Keck Foundation, the Pasadena Art Alliance,