Chesley Knight Bonestell Jr. (January 1, 1888 – June 11, 1986) was an American painter, designer, and illustrator.[2] His paintings inspired the American space program, and they have been (and remain) influential in science fiction art and illustration. A pioneering creator of astronomical art, along with the French astronomer-artist Lucien Rudaux, Bonestell has been dubbed the "Father of Modern Space art".
Life and career
Early years
Bonestell was born January 1, 1888,[3] in San Francisco, California, to Chesley Knight Bonestell and his wife, Jovita (née Ferrer). Jovita was a daughter of Manuel Y. Ferrer, a prominent Spanish-American musician.[3]
Young Chesley attended Clement Grammar School, Dickensen's Academy, and St. Ignatius College, and George Bates University School. After graduating in 1904, he worked for his grandfather, Louis H. Bonestell, at the Bonestell Paper Company. For the next three years, he attended evening classes at the Hopkins Art Institute.[3]
His first astronomical painting was done in 1905. After seeing Saturn through the 12-inch (300 mm) telescope at San Jose's Lick Observatory, he rushed home to paint what he had seen. The painting was destroyed in the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake. Between 1915 and 1918, he exhibited lithographs in the 4th and 7th annual exhibitions of the California Society of Etchers (now the California Society of Printmakers) in San Francisco.
Bonestell enrolled as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York City in 1907, adopting an architecture major. Dropping out in June 1910,[3] he worked as a renderer and designer for several of the leading architectural firms of the time, including the firm of Willis Polk, "The Man Who Rebuilt San Francisco."[4]
Bonestell moved to England in 1920, where he rendered architectural subjects for the Illustrated London News.[5] He returned to New York in 1926. While with William van Alen, he and Warren Straton designed the art deco façade of the Chrysler Building as well as its distinctive eagles. During this same period, he designed the Plymouth Rock Memorial, the U.S. Supreme Court Building, the New York Central Building, Manhattan office and apartment buildings and several state capitols.[6]
Bonestell's first cover for Galaxy Science Fiction (Feb 1951), The Tying Down of a Spaceship on Mars in Desert Sandstorm
Bonestell then realized that he could combine what he had learned about camera angles, miniature modeling, and painting techniques with his lifelong interest in astronomy. The result was a series of paintings of Saturn as seen from several of its moons that was published in Life in 1944. Nothing like these had ever been seen before: they looked as though photographers had been sent into space. His painting "Saturn as Seen from Titan"[7] is perhaps the most famous astronomical landscape ever, and is nicknamed "the painting that launched a thousand careers."[8] It was constructed with a combination of clay models, photographic tricks and various painting techniques. (Titan has a thick haze; such a view is probably not possible in reality.)
Bonestell followed up the sensation these paintings created by publishing more paintings in many leading national magazines. These and others were eventually collected in the best-selling book The Conquest of Space (1949), produced in collaboration with author Willy Ley. Bonestell's last work in Hollywood was contributing special effects art and technical advice to the seminal science fiction films produced by George Pal, including Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, The War of the Worlds and Conquest of Space, as well as Cat-Women of the Moon. Beginning with the October 1947 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, Bonestell painted more than 60 cover illustrations for science fiction magazines, primarily The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, in the 1950s through 1970s. He also illustrated many book covers.[1]
When Wernher von Braun organized a space flight symposium for Collier's, he invited Bonestell to illustrate his concepts for the future of spaceflight. For the first time, spaceflight was shown to be a matter of the near future. Von Braun and Bonestell showed that it could be accomplished with the technology then existing in the mid-1950s, and that the question was that of money and will. Coming as they did at the beginning of the Cold War and just before the sobering shock of the launch of Sputnik, the 1952–1954 Collier's series, "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!", was instrumental in kick-starting America's space program.
In 1986, Bonestell died in Carmel, California, with an unfinished painting on his easel.[9]
His paintings are prized by collectors and institutions such as the National Air and Space Museum and the National Collection of Fine Arts. One of his classic paintings, an ethereally beautiful image of Saturn seen from its giant moon Titan, has been called "the painting that launched a thousand careers." Wernher von Braun wrote that he had "learned to respect, nay fear, this wonderful artist's obsession with perfection. My file cabinet is filled with sketches of rocket ships I had prepared to help in his artwork—only to have them returned to me with...blistering criticism."
In 2017, the first ever album of Sun Ra vocal tracks was released, The Space Age Is Here to Stay, featuring sleeve art authorized by the Bonestell estate.[14]
Constructing the moonships in the space station's orbit (endpapers)
The space station (p. 11)
Spaceships coming in for a landing on the Moon (p. 63)
Landing on the Moon (p. 67)
Unloading the cargo ship on the Moon (pp. 76–77)
Exploration convoy crossing lunar plain (p. 101)
Take-off from the Moon (p 115)
Heuer, Kenneth (1953), The End of the World (Chesley Bonestell, Illustrator) (Reprinted and revised in 1957 as The Next Fifty Billion Years: An Astronomer's Glimpse into the Future, Viking Press)
Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future (feature-length documentary, 2018)[15]
Documentaries
Bonestell appeared in the documentary The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal (1985) (Produced and directed by Arnold Leibovit).
A documentary about his life, Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future, was produced in 2018.
Popular culture references
Arthur C. Clarke, in his 1953 story "Jupiter Five", referred to Bonestell's astronomical illustrations appearing in Life magazine in 1944.
Robert A. Heinlein made Bonestell's name into a verb first in his 1958 juvenile Have Space Suit—Will Travel, then in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land: "Opener: zoom in on Mars, using stock or bonestelled shots, unbroken sequence, then dissolving to miniature matched set of actual landing place of Envoy".
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Tapestry", a young Captain Picard is involved in a fight with aliens at the Bonestell Recreation Facility, a spaceport named after the artist. This incident is first mentioned in the second-season episode "Samaritan Snare".
In chapter 35 of The Long Mars by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter and set in the year 2045, the character Douglas Black says that "this world was ... just like a Chesley Bonestell painting, and all of them save Mac had to look up that reference to see what he meant."
^After inducting 36 fantasy and science fiction writers and editors from 1996 to 2004, the hall of fame dropped "fantasy" and made non-literary contributors eligible. Alongside one writer, the first three were Bonestell in the "Art" category, "dynamation" animatorRay Harryhausen, and filmmaker Steven Spielberg.[12][13]
^Chesley Bonestell (Photograph by Cedric Braun.)Archived March 1, 2010, at the Wayback Machine Chesley Bonestell Memorial Lecture Series, Each year, the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy presents a lecture for the general public supported by funds from the Chesley Bonestell Memorial Lecture Endowment. – Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy
