The release of “Webb’s First Deep Field,” one of several infrared image captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope — successor to the venerable Hubble, and the most powerful camera ever assembled — has captured attention here on Earth with its portrait of a heavens larger and older than can be imagined. It is the highest-resolution image of the early universe ever taken.    

One way to appreciate this stunning scientific success is to look at it as art. As Einstein noted: “After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well.” With that in mind, this critic wondered what it would be like to encounter the image in such a context. 

Gazing at “Webb’s First Deep Field,” I thought of Jackson Pollock. His drips and swirls marked a clean break with a thousand years of art. Like that of the universe, his work is kinetic; the marks on the canvas record Pollock dancing, a flowing movement that the critic Harold Rosenberg would call “action painting.” 

Like the greatest of Pollock’s works — “Autumn Rhythm (No. 30)” and “Mural on Red Indian Ground” come to mind — the NASA photograph offers multiple visual pathways and a range of entry points. It feels like an explosion, its randomness struggling against the observer’s desire to impose coherence and order. 

Both “Webb’s First Deep Field” and Pollock’s work furnish their own vocabulary of color and geometry and invite analysis of empty space and densely knotted formations, zigs and zags, chaos and zones that feel both scripted and ordered. 

Just as much as a medieval triptych, Webb’s work provides a set of characters, albeit one staffed by planets and stars. NASA furnishes a legend, noting, “The red objects in this field are enshrouded in thick layers of dust. Green galaxies are populated with hydrocarbons and other chemical compounds.”  

The Webb image is an exercise in unfathomable perspective. As NASA explains, it “covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground – and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of vast universe.” 

NASA adds that “Webb’s First Deep Field” is an exercise in “looking back in time to within a billion years after the big bang when viewing the youngest galaxies in this field.” The oldest light it captures is nearly 14 billion years old, a polaroid of the universe as an infant.

The philosopher Blaise Pascal, who was himself also a physicist, mathematician, and theologian, recalled, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.” With Webb’s help, we can now look into the wonder of that endless silence.