Lillian Schwartz, Pioneer in Computer-Generated Art, Dies at 97

Early in the digital era, she worked at Bell Labs on the intersection of art and technology, making films and at one point arriving at a novel theory about the “Mona Lisa.”

Lillian Schwartz, who was one of the first artists to use the computer to make films and who helped bring together the artistic, scientific and technology communities in the 1970s by providing a glimpse of the possibilities at the intersections of those fields, died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 97.

Her son Laurens Schwartz confirmed the death.

Ms. Schwartz was a restless, experiential artist who spent her early career bouncing among mediums like watercolors, acrylics and sculptures, often layering one on top of another and incorporating disparate, sometimes unlikely, materials.

The computer became her medium of choice after she was invited to join Bell Labs in the late 1960s as a resident visitor, a kind of artist in residence. With the help of colleagues there, Ms. Schwartz created some of the first films to incorporate computer-generated images, using photo filters, paint, lasers and discarded footage from science films, among other elements.

Her seminal work was done years before computers were controlled using the kinds of graphic user interfaces that are now central to the personal computer. To make her first film, the four-minute “Pixillation” (1970), for example — a project that took two months — she fed punch cards into an IBM 7094 mainframe computer to produce 85 black-and-white frames on magnetic tape.

She then reproduced the tape on film using a microfilm recorder, enhanced with color filters, and layered in elements like drawings and footage she had taken of paint being poured onto glass. The final film was viewed using a projector, not a computer.

“I had to push the early machine and cajole scientists to make the computer an art tool,” Ms. Schwartz wrote in “The Computer Artist’s Handbook” (1992), which she wrote with her son Laurens, an artist. “Initially, I was satisfied when I pushed the machine into serving as a brush, an ink block, and oil paint. But the machine had to keep pace with me — just as I learned that I had to grow with the machine as its scientifically oriented powers evolved.”

In her digital explorations, Ms. Schwartz also came up with a novel theory about Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” provoking intense debate.

In a 1986 article in Arts & Antiques magazine, she claimed that her digital forensics proved that da Vinci had used himself as the model for the painting. On a computer she juxtaposed an image of the portrait with one of the artist to show that they aligned almost perfectly. The idea became known as the “Mona Leo” theory.

Most art historians dismissed the idea, saying there was no evidence to support it. But it got people talking.

“Within hours it became elevator chat and cocktail party conversation,” The New York Times reported under the headline “Is the Mona Lisa Laughing at Us?” “At the Louvre in Paris — as happens with every flare of publicity about what is arguably the world’s most famous painting — the crowds swelled around the work.”

Ms. Schwartz’s early films were made at a time when artists were leery of the computer’s role in making art and when scientists, for their part, were skeptical of the value of lending the new technology to artists. But through her collaborations with scientists and engineers, they formed a mutual appreciation of how the different fields could complement one another.

“There really was a time where people tried to keep those fields of art, science and technology sort of separate and on their own,” said Kristen Gallerneaux, the curator of communications and information technology at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Mich., which is home to Ms. Schwartz’s archives. “I think one of Lillian’s main contributions was that she showed different ways that you could bridge those three things.”

Lillian Feldman was born in Cincinnati on July 13, 1927, to Jacob and Katie (Green) Feldman. Her father was a barber who was born in Russia; her mother had immigrated from Liverpool, England. Their voices alone made them a distinctive couple, Ms. Schwartz recalled in an interview in 2013 with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Her father spoke with a thick Russian accent, she said, while her mother “spoke a bit like the Beatles.”

Ms. Schwartz said an older brother, who studied at art school, taught her how to use oils, pastels, charcoal, Conte crayons and other materials. Her early canvases were made out of scraps of clothes discarded by older siblings.

To pay for college, she signed up for the Cadet Nurse Corps during World War II and studied at the University of Cincinnati College of Nursing and Health. She soon realized that nursing wasn’t for her.

“I was a terrible nurse,” she told The Times in 1975. “I was always fainting at the sight of blood. The only thing I was good at was doing sketches on casts for the kids in the hospital.”

While she was in the cadet corps, she met James Schwartz, who was known as Jack, a medical intern at Cincinnati General Hospital. They married in 1946.

Dr. Schwartz, who had studied medicine under a government-sponsored program, was stationed in postwar Japan in 1948 tending to U.S. service members. Ms. Schwartz and the couple’s first son, Jeffrey, joined him there in 1949.

Soon after arriving, she contracted polio, which left her paralyzed from the waist down and in the right arm as well. She eventually regained her ability to walk and to use her arm, but in later years she would say that she never fully recovered. She also said that her family had suffered myriad health effects from radiation exposure in Japan after the atomic-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The family settled in St. Louis after leaving Japan, and Ms. Schwartz began to study various forms of art, beginning a pattern of exploration and evolution. She would learn how to work in one medium and then put her own twist on it. After working with watercolors, for example, she took sand from a beach and added it to her paintings. She also discovered that plastics, wood and other materials would stick to globs of acrylic paint on canvas and acrylic sheeting.

“I never really could stay with one medium,” she told the Computer History Museum. “I would always learn the traditional method and then try to push the medium to find other ways to use it.”

By the mid-1960s, Ms. Schwartz was working on motorized, kinetic sculptures and had fallen in with Experiments in Art and Technology, also known as E.A.T., an organization that brought together artists, engineers and scientists. A self-professed “garbage collector,” she began incorporating in her work things like tubing she found at a plastics factory, fish tank motors and even her husband’s liquor.

She was known to make house calls to fix sculptures that customers had purchased, variously showing up carrying a soldering iron, hypodermic needles, a blow torch or a drill.

In 1968, her kinetic sculpture “Proxima Centauri” appeared in a landmark show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York titled “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age,” curated by Pontus Hulten. The piece included discarded street lamp domes and the motor from a sewing machine that Ms. Schwartz had inherited from her mother.

The Times later described a version of the piece, which was in her home, as “a big black cabinet with a plastic dome inserted in the top, with a color sequence running beneath the dome’s surface. When anyone stands close to the cabinet, the dome starts to withdraw and slowly drops out of sight.”

At the exhibit’s opening, Ms. Schwartz met Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton of Bell Labs, who had created a piece for the show, a computer-generated nude. Mr. Knowlton devised some of the earliest programming languages for computer animation. They invited her to visit their facilities, in New Jersey, beginning her decades-long relationship with Bell Labs.

Her collaborators there included the computer music pioneer Max Mathews, who provided music for some of her films, among them “Olympiad” (1971) and “Mis-Takes” (1972). She also worked closely with Mr. Knowlton on her films “Pixillation” and “U.F.O.’s” (1971).

In 1985, Mr. Schwartz won a New York Emmy Award for “Big MOMA,” a 30-second computer-generated public service announcement that she had been commissioned to create for the opening of the renovated Museum of Modern Art in 1984.

She went on to work as a consultant for IBM and Lucent Technologies.

In addition to her son Laurens, her survivors include her other son, Jeffrey.

Although her work was shown at other high-profile venues, besides the Museum of Modern Art — the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cannes Film Festival, among them — it wasn’t until 2016, when she was 89, that Ms. Schwartz had her first solo gallery show in New York, at Magenta Plains on the Lower East Side.

In her review of the show for Artforum, Hannah Stamler wrote that the exhibit reinforced “just how groundbreaking the artist’s oeuvre was.”

She added, “Schwartz’s ability to put a mesmerizing, often painterly spin on digital imagery is consistent throughout her work and indeed makes her a pioneer of the form.”