Painting by numbers

Credit: MUSEUM FÜR ANGEWANDTE KUNST, FRANKFURT

Graphs are not generally considered to be things of beauty. Some of the lines that map typical behaviours of physical systems, such as the bell-curve beloved of statisticians, may have a certain visual charm, but the overall appearance of a graph in a scientific publication is not expected to incite aesthetic rapture. However, one of the jobs of artists is to see potential in, and take inspiration from, the most unexpected places, causing us to look afresh at something we take for granted. This is just what the German artist Margaret Leiteritz hoped to achieve with a series of paintings based directly on graphs in texts on chemistry and physics.

Educated first as a librarian, Leiteritz studied between 1928 and 1931 at the Bauhaus in Dessau, the school that was radically reshaping architectural thinking and all related fields of design. Her graduation diploma was signed by such luminaries as Mies van der Rohe, who directed the Bauhaus, Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian pioneer of abstract painting, and Paul Klee, the intellectual master of new and quirky pictorial vocabularies. This gives us an idea of the experimental environment in which she was immersed. After working in Dresden and Wuppertal, she was for many years librarian at the Engler-Bunte Institute at the University of Karlsruhe. But she continued to create art, pursuing a virtually secret career in which she developed a unique kind of painting.

Between 1961 and 1974, Leiteritz produced a remarkable series of ‘painted diagrams’, derived from a wide variety of the scientific articles and books in her care. She was particularly attracted to chemical engineering, and was fascinated by graphs that recorded phenomena of gases, liquids and solids, such as mixtures, solutions, reactions, liquefactions, viscosity, ignition and combustion. She transformed the linear diagrams into colourful, dynamic and engaging paintings, creating suggestive analogues for the life of the materials during the transformations they were undergoing. In effect, she created portraits of these processes, translating the conventions of graphs into pictorial forces — much as Klee had translated the energies and motions of the Universe into line and colour, aspiring to create psychologically effective signs in a new kind of pictorial language. Her paintings, like those of Klee, are abstracted, but not abstract in the sense of not representing something.

One of Leiteritz's most elegant graph paintings, Crossing at the Left Border (shown here), painted in 1966, was prestigiously used on the cover of the catalogue for the exhibition 50 Years Bauhaus in Chicago in 1969. It was developed from figure 13 — “Separation as a function of flow rate with plate spacing as parameter” — of a paper entitled “Separation of liquids by thermal diffusion” by J. E. Powers and C. R. Wilke (in Am. Inst. Chem. Eng. J. 3; 1957). The mellifluous curves are closely transcribed from her source, and the colours and their tilted borders are designed to convey a sense of the dynamic separation processes induced by temperature. The materials that Leiteritz used — oil on a linen-lined aluminium plate — sustain the technical tone of the image.

Leiteritz was trying to express that the graphs in the books and periodicals that passed through her hands were not inert and uninvolving records from specialist nooks and crannies of science; they were precious visualizations of the underlying actions of materials in nature, embodying the forces and forms that make up the patterns and rhythms of the world. To use a philosophical distinction, she said: “The diagram is not the thing in itself, but represents something that happens.”

Her pictures can be seen at the Museum for Applied Art in Frankfurt, Germany, until 5 September, and are illustrated in Gemalte Diagramme: Die Bauhaus Künstlerin Margaret Leiteritz (Info Verlag, 1993).