Lillian Schwartz: Bell Labs, Pixillation and the Face of the Mona Lisa

Lillian Schwartz came to computers through a sculpture. Proxima Centauri, made with Bell Labs engineer Per Biorn, was selected for the Museum of Modern Art's The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, which ran from November 27, 1968, to February 9, 1969. As The Henry Ford describes it, "A projector and ripple tank cast undulating blue patterns inside a globe. When someone steps on a pressure pad, the sphere turns red and sinks into a black box." At the opening she met the Bell Labs scientist Leon Harmon, who invited her to visit the Labs in New Jersey. She stayed for decades as a "resident visitor," working there until 2002.

Her first computer film, Pixillation (1970), was made with a program called EXPLOR, which built patterns from square units, and Ken Knowlton worked closely with her on it. The computer was slow, so she filled out the film by hand: The Henry Ford notes that "She dropped paint onto film stock, filmed growing crystals, and added color during post-production to finish the project." Gershon Kingsley scored it on a Moog synthesizer. Knowlton also worked with her on UFOs (1971), and Max Mathews provided music for films including Olympiad (1971). The Computer History Museum notes that several of her 1970s films are in MoMA's permanent collection, and MoMA came back to her in the 1980s, commissioning BIG MOMA, a computer-made television spot and poster for the museum's 1984 reopening that won her an Emmy.

In 1986 she turned the computer on art history. Using software devised by Gerard J. Holzmann, she set Leonardo da Vinci's red chalk self-portrait beside the Mona Lisa and argued that Leonardo had used his own face for the painting. The Associated Press reported in December 1986 that she "found that the eyes, hairline, cheeks and nose were identical." The theory brought her a CBS interview, and her 1988 print Mona-Leo is now in the Lillian F. Schwartz and Laurens R. Schwartz Collection at The Henry Ford.

That archive arrived at The Henry Ford in 2021, the same year the Computer History Museum named her a Fellow. In 2022 she showed at the Venice Biennale. She died in Manhattan on October 12, 2024, at 97.

Image: Lillian Schwartz with Ken Knowlton, Fish, 1970, screen print. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Sources

• The Henry Ford: Remembering Lillian Schwartz
• The Henry Ford: Best of Lillian Schwartz
• The Henry Ford: "Mona-Leo" by Lillian F. Schwartz, 1988
• Computer History Museum: Lillian Schwartz, Pushing the Medium
• Computer History Museum: In Memoriam, Lillian Schwartz
• MoMA: The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age
• The New York Times: Lillian Schwartz, Pioneer in Computer-Generated Art, Dies at 97
• ARTnews: Lillian Schwartz, Computer Art Pioneer, Dies at 97
• Los Angeles Times (AP), 1986: Reason for the Smile: It's a Self-Portrait
• V&A: Fish, Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton, 1970