The Art of Chesley Bonestell

Chesley Bonestell (1 January 1888 - 11 June 1986) was widely hailed as perhaps the foremost astronomical artist of the Twentieth Century. His paintings inspired a generation to think about spaceflight and astronomy; many he inspired went on to work in those fields. Others who saw his paintings, either as artworks or illustrating books or magazine articles, followed their interests into the hobbies of astronomy or science fiction. Perhaps a greater number, in the USA at least, saw the paintings and read the articles they illustrated, and decided that this was the sort of thing their tax dollars ought to go towards. A large part of the Zeitgeist of the 1960s can be traced directly back to Bonestell's work.

Yet there was much more to the show more man than his space paintings. Had he never chosen to illustrate other worlds, he would have had a distinguished career in architecture. As a young man, he experienced directly the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; although something of a dissolute youth, he did display a talent for art which he persisted with against parental disapproval. It was that talent which got him into the offices of architects who worked on some of the major civic and commercial buildings put up during San Francisco's reconstruction. His career took off from there, and he illustrated many of the great buildings of the Art Deco age across the nation. Although not an architect himself, he contributed to the exterior design of some of these buildings (the eagle gargoyles on New York's Chrysler Building were his, for example, as was the visual design of the towers of the Golden Gate bridge). He was capable of turning his artistic talents to any suitable subject - in this case, 'suitable' generally meant 'remunerative'. He became involved with Hollywood, producing mattes and backgrounds for some of Warner Bros. most memorable films, such as Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and later, Destination Moon.

Initially, astronomy was merely a hobby; but Bonestell's habit of sending work to magazines on spec, together with his reputation, soon got his work accepted and commissions started coming his way. Perhaps the most influential work he did in terms of space art was the illustrations for the 1951 series in Collier's Magazine of articles by Wernher von Braun, setting out his vision of the future of spaceflight. These paintings were probably highly influential in driving thinking amongst the public, the military and politicians about the necessity of an active space programme. He also provided many covers for the science fiction magazines, although he professed no love for the genre; yet many of his illustrations were entirely in tune with the science fictional mindset of the advancement of humankind through technological and scientific progress.

Bonestell's illustrations of the surface of the Moon were iconic. Unfortunately, they were also wrong. Bonestell assumed that the mountains of the Moon would be sharp-edged and jagged, partly from extensive telescopic observation of the Moon being best done when the Sun is at a low angle, casting sharp and exaggerated shadows. But in a way, that doesn't matter; he shows us the Moon as perhaps it ought to have been, and the hold of his images on the public imagination remains. His paintings came up short in other scientific matters; into the 1960s, he was still depicting canals on Mars or the surface of Jupiter. And we now know that another of his most famous paintings, Saturn as seen from Titan, just would not be possible, as we now know that Titan's atmosphere is opaque.

But this is irrelevant. His mastery of his subjects, his meticulous approach to perspective and the source of light, and his complete enthusiasm for his work, shines through. And the public reacted. Bonestell's work helped define an era.

This sumptuous book, by artist Ron Miller and genuine rocket scientist Frederick Durant, contains a full biography of Bonestell and a gallery of more than 130 pages of reproductions of his paintings and drawings. It establishes Chesley Bonestell as a key figure in twentieth century American art. show less