Margaret Leiteritz | Science in Culture | Nature (2004)
Margaret Leiteritz (1907 -1976) was a german painter who produced ‘painted diagrams’ in the 1960s and early 1970. Given that there is no much that can be found about her life on the vast and sometimes quite useless Internet (a piece here, a piece over there) , I will limit myself to reproduce her bio from Wikipedia.
Margaret Leiteritz (1907–1976) was a German painter who studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau from 1928 to 1931.[1]
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Leiteritz produced 'painted diagrams', which drew heavily from the scientific articles and books in her care as she was a professional librarian before becoming a painter.
Many of her works were strongly influenced by chemical engineering, and especially the field's graphs which depicted physical properties of substances. Leiteritz's paintings typically reworked a mundane graph using large expanses of colour and a bold abstract theme, changing it into a dynamic painting. Other works are reminiscent of Bunsen burner flame or DNA gel.
One of her most famous paintings, "Crossing at the Left Border" (1966; oil on linen), appeared on the cover of the catalogue for an art exhibition in Chicago in 1969. This painting is known to have been inspired by a specific graph appearing in an otherwise unremarkable paper of the American Institute of Chemical Engineering Journal.
Her work has much in common with that of Paul Klee.
A little bit more about her ‘painted diagrams’ work can be found in the article from the journal Nature (2004). The thing with Nature is that I never know if even a short excerpt is allowed to be reproduced so I’d rather not take any risks and just direct you to a link.
Read the Article | Nature | Martin Kemp
To see her works one would need to have a book published in 1993 and I don’t have this book. So, for the time being using the imagination may be of help :-)
Die Bauhaus-Künstlerin Margaret Leiteritz: gemalte Diagramme
By Margaret Leiteritz, Klaus E. R. Lindemann