An Asimovian Triptych

The triptych is an artform with a long history. The word derives from the Greek—not a triple tych,whatever that might be, but tri, three, ptychs (πτυχή, “a fold”): a painting to be folded in on itself. A typical triptych is painted on boards that constitute three linked compartments, the central one usually being bigger than the two lateral ones, hinged so the outer flaps can fold-over the centre, concealing, or protecting, the whole. In some triptychs all three elements are the same size.

There are a great many medieval and Renaissance examples of triptych art, many of them altarpieces representing sacred or Biblical subject, made to be positioned over the altar in a church. In fact the triptych first emerged in Italy in the fourteenth-century, swiftly replacing the earlier preference for polyptych panels—that is, paintings with multiple panels, in pentagonal or gabled dossal patterns. It is not clear why the more limited triptych rose to such prominence at this period. Art historian Edward J. Olszewski thinks it had a specific numeric religious significance: ‘referring to the three pinnacles of Solomon's Temple’ mediated via a later medieval Catholic medieval belief that ‘Solomon built a temple dedicated to the Lord that mystically prefigured the birth of the Blessed Mary. The temple had three pinnacles to signify Mary's triple golden celestial crown’ [Edward J. Olszewski, ‘A Possible Source for the Triptych, Lunette and Tondo Formats in Renaissance Paintings’ Notes in the History of Art 28:2 (2009), 5-11]. 

After the Renaissance the fashion for triptychs fell away, although there are various later examples of artists employing the form, usually in conscious dialogue with its earlier vogue, as with British artist Francis Bacon’s various triptychs of the 1950s and 1960s, or French artist Edouard Vuillard’s triptych The Bon Marché Department Store (1898). The connection between this fundamentally medieval religious form and science-fiction cover art might seem tenuous. But SF and Fantasy was, from the 1960s on, often published as trilogies, a reflection of the (adventitious, but influential) decision by Allen & Unwin to published Tolkien’s 1000-page Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of books, 1954-55. A great many trilogies have been published since then, and publishers have sometimes taken the opportunity to revise the triptych format for their cover art.

Asimov’s celebrated Foundation trilogy is a ‘fix-up’, that is a series of novels assembled from previously-published short fiction. Take volume 1, Foundation (published as a standalone ‘novel’ in 1951). This was comprised of a newly written framing story ‘The Psychohistorians’, and four stories that had originally appeared in the magazine Astounding, the first two in 1942, the latter two in 1944. These stories were not especially notable on their first appearance: only two of them (‘Bridle and Saddle’, which became chapter 3, and ‘The Big and the Little’, renamed ‘The Merchant Princes’ in the novel, which became chapter 4) made the cover of the magazine.

The first book edition, published by American small-press Gnome Books, carried a dust-jacket illustration by David A. Kyle (1919-2016). Kyle was not a professional artist, but rather the co-founder, with Martin Greenberg (1918-2013), of Gnome Press itself. He did the design to save having to pay an artist. It tells.

There have been many reprints and new editions of Asimov’s trilogy, and it continues to be republished to this day, aided by the success of the Phantom Four/Skydance TV adaptation. The edition I first read these books was the 1973 paperback edition by Panther books, with a triptych cover-art design in which a large Chris Foss canvas was split equally between the three books.

The cover for the first volume sets the tone. The author's name is set in large sans-serif white letters, the initial letter reduced from a capital to lower-case to increase the sense of uniformity across the whole, and the ‘Isaac’ first-name elided altogether: as if this author was already so famous that he had become mononymical, like Elvis or Voltaire. Asimov is an unusual surname in the English-speaking world, which makes it stand out even more: a Russian name, Азимов, which ought to be transliterated Azimov (the spelling of the name in English was an error: when Asimov's father arrived in the United States in 1923 he was told by immigration officials to transliterate the name into Latin characters: since he spoke German but little English, he believed that the letter S was pronounced Z in English, as it is in German).

The design of this cover is spare: a small-font superscript identifying the publisher, the author's surname large in white, the book's title smaller in yellow, then only the open-ended red-white-and-blue design by Foss: a spaceship, or perhaps (judging by the clouds in the background) rigid airship that, from its various details, appears enormous. It has nothing to do with the story of Foundation: Foss did not paint in an attempt to illustrate the specific action of the book. He was not a fan of science fiction and preferred not to read the works he was commissioned to paint, working instead purely on his own inspiration. The lack of fit between cover and story has puzzled some readers, although it also adds to the mystique and glamour of its own. Indeed, some bought these books despite not especially liking Asimov's writing, purely because the art was so splendid. 

Foss, born in 1946 on Guernsey in the Channel Islands, trained as an architecture student before becoming a professional artist. He produced many deftly realist black-and-white illustrations of copulating couples for Alex Comfort's erotic manual The Joy of Sex (1972), and also produced a large number of full colour paintings as book covers in the 1960s and 1970s. He worked with an airbrush, an adapted air-operated tool that atomizes and sprays paint with varying degrees of spread and focus, enabling him to create very fine gradations and shadings, mist effects and sheens, spotlights and starbursts. His architectural training is evident in the structural solidity and scale of his spaceships, the extrapolated flying-building quality.

 The second fixed-up volume in the trilogy, Foundation and Empire (originally published in 1952) centres on what appears to be a huge, irregularly shaped tower of some kind. Illuminated windows, or portholes, suggest that this structure is occupied. A hazy starburst light and corona dominate the composition, and a mechanical umbilicus leads to what appears to be the rear-end of a dirigible.

With the third cover, for 1953's Second Foundation, 1973 Chris Foss's ‘dirigible’ is revealed to be a rocket-powered, or at least rocket-oriented monster craft, clearly constructed from rigid materials, steel perhaps. The moon behind looms much larger than our moon does from Earth, suggesting we are on another world, or else that we are in a far future in which the moon's orbit has become much closer.

 

The fit to Asimov's trilogy is far from precise. Foss gives us no human characters, or individuals, at all; everything is on a titanic scale, two mammoth craft, one seemingly flying away from the plane of the picture, the other heading towards it at an angle; and in between a Babel-high tower. It is a beautiful, striking, rather overwhelming image that contains little within itself by way of exegesis. Asimov's novels, on the other hand, contain very little visual description (this is true of all of Asimov's voluminous writing, in fact). He is interested in human characters and their interactions, rendered largely through dialogue exchange, and with an abstracted theory of history, conveyed largely through excerpts from a fictional encyclopaedia, and occasional lectures.

And yet in another sense, this trioptych captures somethng of Asimov's distinctive qualities, and science fiction's potential.

Asimov was not a religious individual. ‘I have never, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind,’ he wrote in his autobiography. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying.’ [Asimov, It's Been a Good Life (Prometheus Books, 2002), 20]. In the Foundation trilogy it is the impersonal force of History as such that lies behind the phenomena of day-to-day living—and, in the later Foundation novels, we discover that the intelligence that has been watching-over, guiding and protecting human existence is not divine, but robotic: the robots humanity had invented and programmed with laws to attend to human wellbeing, having become in time vastly powerful and intelligent, had withdrawn from human affairs and were masterminding cosmic affairs. A kind of parody God, we might say.

The eighteenth-century theorising of the aesthetic of sublimity—in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) differentiated between the ‘beautiful’ (aesthetically pleasurable but small-scale, proportionate, charming, balanced) and ‘the sublime’ (aesthetically pleasurable but also terrifying, overwhelming, generally large-scale, destabilising). A garden might be beautiful, but the Alps are sublime; a lake might be beautiful, but the mighty ocean is sublime; day might be beautiful but night, with its spread of millions of stars, is sublime. (And, though it strikes us as sexist and reductive today: a woman might be beautiful, but man is sublime. But let’s put that on one side). In essence sublimity has to do with the disproportion in scale between finite humanity and the infinite cosmos; the Alps, though they are gigantic, are only actually a kind of fragment of infinitude, they give us a sense, an intimation, of the grandeur of the infinite spaces and infinite timescales of the universe. And more specifically, for Burke, was the sublime does is give us a sort of glimpse of God’s majesty and infinity: for him the sublime affect is, at root, a religious matter.

Burke’s ideas were influential upon the development of Gothic Literature, a mode that began with Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story and which enjoyed enormous success in the later eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. In Gothic the ‘terror’ of the sublime is foregrounded: mood and imagination, a subconscious rather than the rational, proportionate logic mind of neoclassical art—a dream logic, often. When Mary Shelley appropriated Gothic conventions to scientific extrapolation in Frankenstein science fiction as such was born: such, at any rate, is the argument of Brian Aldiss and others. We can certainly trace the eighteenth-century sublime into the ‘sense of wonder’ so prized by SF fans: the sense of scale and majesty. Asimov’s prose may be grey, his characterisation rudimentary, he may lack the skill to write in a vivid or visually evocative manner, but he communicates giant ideas, mind-blowing concepts, brilliant galaxy-spanning stories. Foss’s paintings, though they do not relate to Asimov on the level of character or plot, are in themselves gigantic, sublime visual artefacts.

And that, in a sense, is religious at root. Atheist SF fans may like to think of ‘sensawunda’ as a secularised material sublime, but the distinction becomes, frankly, moot. There is always something in essence religious in the sublime. And to return to the question of triptychs: the form’s originally trinitarian, religious form, as much as its (almost always) religious, Biblical content, rode this fault line between faith and idolatry. At the end of the 6th century Pope Gregory the Great wrote to Serenus, bishop of Marseille, after the latter had ordered all religious art destroyed. Serenus was worried that the icons themselves were being worshipped by members of his congregation in place of the proper object of worship, God (a concern shared by Judaism, and Islam, then and since). Gregory rebuked Serenus. Don't destroy altar pieces, he instructed: such artwork has value in teaching the illiterate about the gospel, educating them about the word of God—although, Gregory agreed that actual worship was due to God alone. From then until the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth-century, altarpieces—often triptychs—were widespread. But the Protestant reformers tended to agree with Serenus, that such objects had supplanted God in the attention of worshippers, and mostly stripped them away. It became a hot issue at that time. The 1563 (Catholic) Council of Trent addressed it, justifying the use of painting and sculpture in holy spaces against Protestant criticisms, and issued the ‘Tridentine decree’ defending the practice, provided the focus was on explaining holy stories to those who could not read them: such images were to be venerated but not worshipped, because that would be idolatry. Religious art continued an important element in Catholic worship, although it is not coincidental that altar triptychs passed out of fashion around this time.

Foss’s art is, in this sense, Protestant (not doctrinally: there is nothing specifically religious about his images—but in the culturally structural sense). It does not ‘tell stories in visual mode for the illiterate’. It presents not pictures of saints, or virgin Marys, to be venerated (but not worshipped!). Instead Foss provides objective correlatives of futuristic technology and structures, high-tech starships, strange interstellar hulks and vast towers. The style is, we might say, techno-Gothic, rather than futurist-neoclassical: all about the detail and ornamentation, cathedrals in space: images of (to adopt John Ruskin’s words on the nature of Gothic from The Stones of Venice ‘massy and mountainous strength, iron-bound, block heaved upon block by enthusiasm and force; and cramped and stanchioned into such weight [and] by the same narrow crosslet the passing of the sunbeam’. Look again at that sunburst in the centre of his image. It folds—ptychs—the sublime into the technological, the religious into the secular-materialist, the abstract into the representational.