The airplane appeared just as Cubism and the modern art movement emerged. The forward-looking nature of human flight was fertile subject matter for these abstract expressionist pioneers. Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau, Kazimir Malevich, Giacomo Balla, and Robert Delaunay produced works inspired by and featuring the airplane.

Aviation offered the ideal link between the Cubists’ redefinition of space and alternative perception of reality and the Futurists’ desire to escape the constraints of everyday life and divorce humanity from the past. Malevich and Delaunay in particular were taken with aviation. For them, flight was a metaphor for the transformation of consciousness, a liberation from the constraints of normal existence, and a redefinition of time and space. They had a passion for the new 20th-century technologies and were fascinated with the notion of escape from the earth.