At Sotheby’s, a Trove of Early Examples of Computer Art

It’s Geek Week at Sotheby’s—the auction house’s annual marquee science series focused on nature, tech and space—and a lot in the History of Science & Technology sale is poised to make one lucky art collector very happy. Plainly labeled Algorithmic Art, it’s easy to overlook amid flashier offerings like the Wozniak- and Jobs-built Apple-1 computer or the pre–World War II electromechanical rotor-based encryption machine. Not to mention the headline-making juvenile Ceratosaurus nasicornis skeleton and literal chunk of Mars up for grabs in the concurrent Natural History sale.

The auction house describes the lot of approximately eighty works as an “extensive archive of early computer art” spanning from the 1950s through the 1970s, with works by Vera Molnar, Manfred Mohr, Christian Cavadia, Aldo Giornini and quite a few others. That’s already heady stuff for a particular kind of collector—someone invested in the layered history of what many now see as one of the defining artistic movements of our moment.

Though long derided, digital art—a broad term encompassing everything from pixel-based painting to code-based works to the NFTs so many people love to hate—is here to stay. And, as I’ve written before, it’s hardly new. Some of the first exhibitions of computer art took place in 1965, including Georg Nees’s “Generative Computergrafik” at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart and “Computer-Generated Pictures,” featuring work by Bela Julesz and A. Michael Noll, at Howard Wise Gallery in New York. The first widely attended exhibition of computer art, “Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts,” opened just three years later and drew roughly 50,000 visitors to London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Today, computer art as a genre links postwar conceptualism with contemporary digital practice. For collectors interested in that throughline, the works in this lot—spanning two pivotal decades—are essential: without algorithmic plotter drawings, there would be no generative NFTs; without early software experiments, no A.I. artworks. Of course, whether that’s a good thing or not is in the eye of the beholder. Earlier this year, Christie’s Augmented Intelligence auction prompted a takedown petition, but artists working with technology have long had to justify their choices. “In spite of their advantages, computers, no more than other simpler tools, do not guarantee that a work of art of good quality will result, for it is an artist’s skill that is the decisive factor,” Molnar wrote in an article published in the journal Leonardo in 1975.

It’s worth noting that many early practitioners of computer art—who were not only artists but also mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists—were operating decades ahead of their time, often without support from the gallery system. Their contributions are only now being properly historicized, which means their work often remains both culturally undervalued and financially underpriced relative to their impact.

Which brings us back to Sotheby’s trove of algorithmic art, initially estimated to fetch between $10,000 and $15,000, with a high bid of $26,000 at the time of publication. While the low price and long list of artists included is certainly compelling, the bigger draw might be the fact that every work in the lot—on paper or canvas, ranging from 10.5 x 14 inches to 38 x 49 inches—comes from the personal collection of computer art pioneer Grace Hertlein. Trained in the fine arts but professionally rooted in computer science, Hertlein had her first exhibition in 1969 and went on to introduce countless people to computer art as both a comp sci professor and as editor of the magazines Computers and People and Computer Graphics and Art. Writing in 1977, she presciently suggested that the “full implication of computer art and computer-controlled textile systems is perhaps the next ‘industrial revolution,’ in which computer designs, computer-assisted, produced textiles could enhance private and industrial environments.”

For anyone fascinated by this evolving chapter of art history and the people who shaped it, the fact that these works were deemed worth preserving by Hertlein is significant. Other artists represented in the collection include Javier Sequi, Jean Claude Marquette, Karl Martin Holzhauser, Solded Sevilla, Ben Laposky, Edward Zajec, Ruth Leavitt, Herbert W. Franke, Jean-Charles Truout, Diazos, TM Stephens, Duane Palyka, Paul Shao and Kenneth Dunker—a group whose practices, taken together, form what Sotheby’s calls “a kaleidoscopic snapshot of the early decades of an art historical and technological phenomenon.” Long overlooked by the mainstream and only now gaining recognition, this early computer art offers collectors a rare chance to own a piece of the algorithmic age’s origin story.