An Art Historical Tour of JavaScript

May 2, 2024

The history of art is long and storied; we have been creating since the dawn of mankind. Art grew and transformed over the millennia, shaping us as we shaped it, becoming the discipline it is today. Humans have used art in religion, communication, business, expression … it’s permeating.

JavaScript is basically the same way. Hear me out.

The World Wide Web exploded onto the scene in 1995 - the dawn of the Information Age. As humans and the Internet intertwined, some smart people at Netscape saw the need for interactivity on the Web. The project was handed to developer Brendan Eich, and within six months JavaScript was released. We have grown together with the Internet and JavaScript. It’s the language driving our connections, our entertainment, our businesses, our neuroses.

With those weighty ideas set out, I can move to the actual article. This began as an assignment to create a presentation about a programming language. I chose JavaScript because I’m a web developer, and decided to match topics with pieces of historic art because I’m also an art historian. I had a blast finding some pretty esoteric connections, so now I’m writing them out to share. Note that this post is written off the top of my head, so please don’t cite it in your papers or anything.

Part 1: JavaScript

Alphonse Mucha, Untitled, n.d.; Aubrey Beardsley, Black Coffee, 1895; Pierre Bonnard, Coffee Drinking Women, 1907

We start with some pretty literal takes on the topic: ladies holding coffee.

Alphonse Mucha had a real gift for painting pretty ladies. This woman’s rosy, kind face, red hair, and relaxed posture make the painting look calm and welcoming. The negative space is a textured gradient of blue to yellow - a quick but effective background. Her yellow dress fades into the bottom of the frame and the woman becomes monolithic, a henge on the cafe floor. The coffee she holds balances out the composition with its steam.

Not unlike this woman, JavaScript is a monolith of the Web. It’s the only language you can write for the Web in!! The usual choice a programmer has is gone, for better or worse.

Aubrey Beardsley was pretty out there. His illustrations were unique when they were made and they’re still unique a hundred years later.

Part 2: JavaScript: I Don’t Like It

Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man, 1843

Gustave Courbet was a troubled artist like many others. He sometimes created erotic celebrations of the female body, sometimes grim funeral scenes, sometimes narrative scenes. This piece is one of many self portraits Courbet created with a painful energy.

This is also a pretty accurate depiction of how I tend to look as I push my way through brackets upon brackets of JavaScript code.

Part 3: JavaScript

Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1990

Maman is one of Bourgeois’s many spider sculptures. Its massive sinewy form lords over viewers. The spiders were inspired by Bourgeois’s mother (maman is French for “momma”), who was a weaver, helpful, and protective.

JavaScript is what we use to weave the modern Web together. Its presence is just as overbearing online as Maman in its space.

Part 4: JavaScript History

Charles Willson Peale, The Exhumation of the Mastodon

History paintings were very common in 18th and 19th century Europe, typically depicting classical (as in Greco-Roman) or Biblical scenes. In grand, Neoclassical style, typical history paintings contained numerous figures, perfectly painted in poses emulating Roman marbles. The Exhumation of the Mastodon is an interesting example of an early American painter trying his hand at a history painting - of a contemporary subject.

Charles Willson Peale was one of America’s first museum collectors and hobby paleontologists. At the time, evolutionary theory was in its pre-infancy. Charles Darwin hadn’t yet released his explosive On the Origin of Species, but people were beginning to whisper Enlightenment-era ideas about life’s origins.

Discoveries of fossilized dinosaurs and mastodons were causing confusion and debate over the concept of extinction. The prevailing view among Westerners at the time held that God had created the world in an essentially perfect, therefore unchanging, state. Every species of animal, every hill or valley, was a result of divine intervention. Mountains didn’t move, and species didn’t die out or form anew.

Fossilized mastodon teeth and bones had been found around the Northeast. What was one to make of these discoveries? Where did these elephantine remains come from? According to Thomas Jefferson, these were evidence of the American Elephant, still roaming in the Pacific Northwest. To Puritan Cotton Mather, the bones were proof that the Biblical Nephilim - giants - had roamed New England.

Peale heard about a new discovery of mastodon bones and decided to add them to his museum. He excavated the remains himself, and painted The Exhumation of the Mastodon as a history painting to memorialize the act. Exhumation is one of the pieces I’ve written an actual paper on, so I have a lot of fun talking about it. Check out this post for more on Exhumation.

Part 5: Grammar and Syntax

Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, 1775

Samuel Johnson was a prominent writer and linguist in mid-18th century England. He was the main creator of A Dictionary of the English Language, one of the most important English dictionaries in history.

Although I was focused more on syntax here, I thought this portrait of Johnson was a good fit. His perplexed squint - a common theme in his portraits - really captures the feeling of learning JavaScript syntax.

Part 6: Program Control: Map and Filter

Philippe Mercier, The Sense of Sight, 1747

This painting has a map in it, so clearly it’s perfect for JavaScript’s map function.

Really though, this is a neat example of the 16th-18th century ‘trend’ of allegory paintings. You see a lot of paintings of concepts like Truth, Justice, or Time, for example. Allegories are common in all sorts of art and literature. The Bible and the ancient Greeks used them, for instance. This particular piece is one of many allegorical paintings responding to the Enlightenment. Math and science were in vogue. Allegorical art was themed accordingly. There’s a real sense of wonder here at exploration, discovery, and observation, and a celebration of sight for facilitating.

Part 7: Functions

Ettore Sottsass Jr., Carlton Room Divider, 1981

Carlton Room Divider is in the High Museum’s decorative arts collection, one of my favorite sections to visit when I’m up there. It’s just a really fun piece of the 80’s Memphis style of interior design. Actually, it turns out Sottsass pioneered the look!

Memphis reacted to the Bauhaus philosophy of ‘function over form’ by doing the opposite. JavaScript falls somewhere between the extremes. It’s a multi-paradigm language, supporting both object-oriented and functional programming. But it’s kind of a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. If you’re interested in OO design, you’d just go for Java or C# or something, and if you want functional you might go for F#, Haskell, or some other language I stumbled through in my Programming Languages class.

Part 8.1: Data Types

Nicolas de Courteille, Allegory of Truth, 1793; Jasper Johns, 0-9, 1960; Charles Demuth, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, 1928; Sheila Pepe, Mind the Gap, 2005;

Lightning round!

Allegory of Truth felt fitting for booleans. I wonder if there’s an Allegory of Falsehood out there. Reminds me of that Girodet of some lady he didn’t like as … some lying Greek.

0-9 has numbers.

I Saw the Figure 4 in Gold has a Big number.

Mind the Gap is made in yarn. Sheila Pepe does neat installations where she crochets into a space. They had her come out to my university last year and put one up, and it was a really unique piece to visit.

Part 8.2: Data Types

Hugo Simberg, Garden of Death, 1896; Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition - White on White, 1918; Kristoffer Zetterstrand, The Void, 2009; Henri Matisse, Dishes and Fruit, 1901

Garden of Death is one of those paintings that comes up when you read about the Symbolism movement.

White on White is one of those pieces that I love as an art historian, while also being very aware that normal people don’t get much value from it.

Kristoffer Zetterstrand is the guy who made the Minecraft paintings. He has a gallery of those and other pieces he’s done that’s really fun to look through.

Still lives like Dishes and Fruit are full of objects.

Part 9: Objects

Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936

Object is another piece for the art historians. A teacup, saucer, and spoon wrapped in fur from some deer adjacent thing. I think Object is a great title for it - what else can you really say about it?

JavaScript objects are entities that hold key-value pairs, kinda like dictionaries in other languages. They also hold functions, so here’s where the OO paradigm works from in JavaScript. Object holds a lot within itself, past the top-level concept of “furry cup.” To Oppenheim, it was about womanhood, discomfort, fragility. There’s a delicate teacup swathed in the most animalistic material you can get. There’s the story of Oppenheim getting the idea for the piece, then going off to buy the teacup right away. There’s the difficulty that the decaying, shrinking fur has given conservators.

You see one variable, or one artwork, but there can be so much more below the surface.

Part 10: JSON

Michele Cortazzo, Jason Wearing the Golden Fleece, 1865

JSON and Jason sound pretty similar.

Part 11: Document Object Model

Hiroshige, Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake, 1857

The DOM is the API that bridges the gap between JavaScript and the webpages it runs.

Here we have a literal bridge. Pretty straightforward. But there’s also the idea of the Japonisme that spread through Europe after Japan opened itself to trade. When woodcut prints (ukiyo-e) like this made their way to the West, artists were drawn in fast. European artists began taking inspiration from the flat, colorful, lined styles in ukiyo-e. There are Van Gogh works that are practically master copies of Japanese prints, for example, and Monet’s famous Water Lilies bridge was Japanese. Western art had been connected to Japanese art, and things were never the same.

Part 12: Asynchronous JavaScript

Francois Morellet, Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares Using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory (detail), 1971

Morellet was part of the 60s and 70s Op-art movement, which happened to overlap with very early computer art. Early computer art often experimented with geometry and randomness, two concepts that were difficult to implement in analog. Morellet held out in the realm of paint and canvas, though. For Random Distribution, he divided a large canvas into 40,000 squares, then had his family read numbers out of a phone book. If a number was odd, the corresponding square would be red; evens were blue. It’s like the Algorists went acoustic!

Part 13: Promises

Rene Magritte, The Promise, 1966

Promises is promises and promise is in the title. :)

Part 14: Extending and Expanding on JavaScript

Thomas Cole, The Oxbow, 1836

The Oxbow is a classic piece for classes on American art history. Cole was part of New York’s Hudson River School, a group-slash-movement that celebrated the natural beauty of the Northeast. At this point, much of New York was practically unsettled (to white people); it was wilderness outside of the cities. The Oxbow shows the meeting point between the wild and the expansion of settlement. You have the clear sky over farmland and a small town, then rainclouds over the trees and greenery. Under the ‘blasted tree,’ a symbol of wild danger, you can just see the artist at his easel. To be painting en plein air in such a setting, Cole must have been pretty confident in the territorial expansion that was underway.

You know what else has expanded a lot over time? That’s right, JavaScript.

Part 15: Local JavaScript

John Sloan, Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair, 1912

Sloan was part of the New York City Ashcan School, a movement that celebrated the city’s culture, atmosphere, and ways of life. There are Ashcan School pieces of things like busy market streets, fire escape conversations, and factory workers mid-break. It’s a confident presentation of what artists saw every day, like an ethnography in paint. Here specifically, we see some women who’ve taken to a rooftop to dry off, given the crowded streets or stuffy apartments they’d use otherwise.

The Ashcan School is a highly localized movement. JavaScript used to be the opposite, intended entirely for client-side, web-based work. Node.js came in and changed that. With Node, JavaScript can be run locally. It made JavaScript even more versatile, handling both client- and server-side tasks.

Part 16: npm Packages

Joseph Cornell, Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery, 1943

Joseph Cornell made self-contained ‘toys,’ boxes of things that could be interacted with and manipulated. This is an example of his work. It’s all nicely contained in its frame, but it interacts with the world. Those on the outside reach in to Cornell’s work and change what’s inside.

npm packages are pieces of code that can extend on JavaScript’s capabilities. They reach out into developers’ code and help it along to reach its full potential.

I’ve been writing for too long and my elbow hurts.