Peripheral Vision in 20th-Century Art: Rothko, Newman, Bayer, Eames, and Bo Bardi

Key facts

• Mark Rothko wrote in 1949 that he painted large to keep the experience 'very intimate and human,' and specified close-range viewing for his largest pictures.
• Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–51) stretches nearly eighteen feet across and contains five vertical bands he called 'zips.'
• MoMA describes the effect of Newman's painting as an 'engulfing environment,' though the canvas stays flat against the wall.
• Herbert Bayer's Diagram of the Field of Vision was first developed for the 1930 Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Paris and reworked in 1935.
• Charles and Ray Eames projected 2,200 still and moving images across seven screens, each twenty by thirty feet, for Glimpses of the U.S.A. at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow.
• Lina Bo Bardi's glass easels at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo place paintings on transparent panes set into heavy concrete bases; MASP calls the arrangement a 'forest' of artworks.
• The article is part of designboom's SPECTATOR AND SPECTACLE chapter, presented in partnership with SolidNature.
• The text contrasts these earlier experiments with contemporary 'immersive' art, noting that visual saturation alone says little about how a viewer is asked to see.