Isms, isms, everywhere

M'learned colleague Adam has already posted a couple of times here about surrealism in sf art, most recently in covers for Christopher Priest. As he suggests there, the surreal may be an especially appropriate way to illustrate authors whose work puts in doubt the nature of consensus reality. Which means that we really have to talk about Philip K Dick: in the 80s, Granada published a huge number of his works - sometimes with covers using hyper-detailed spaceships by artists like Chris Foss; and sometimes with art more specific to the book, like these.




That last cover for A Maze of Death is so overloaded with symbols (cross-bow, get it?) that it reminds me of the worst classical music cover ever:



But looking at these, particularly the one for The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, put me in mind of a slightly different tendency in art, towards abstraction per se. Here are the two jackets (by Richard Powers and Ralph Brillhart respectively) for the Library of America's anthologies of 50s sf:





Clearly, there are several things going on here: these are 1950s artworks, chosen and repurposed in 2012 as an appropriate billboard for a very varied selection of novels. In the nature of things, they can't narrowly represent any one of the books within. But I'm struck by how much, in both, those things that might be depicted figuratively in another context are instead pushed towards abstraction. The human (?) figures, the spaceships (??), and even the ground itself. (Are the figures in the Powers standing on anything at all? And what's that weird spirograph thing hovering at the back?) 

But....both these and the Stigmata illustration (by Peter Gudynas) also evoke another gravity-well for sf: the idea of transcendence. Just as, in abstraction, representational forms start to dissolve into pure colour and shape, so (when sf tries transcendence) characters can ascend out of the bodily, fleshly world. Of course, the promise of transcendence in Stigmata (all those orange-shaded worlds in the panels) is a lie. And who knows what kind of realm the figures in the Powers exist in. But they're clearly more abstract than regular humans; there are many more covers out there that link the two (see future posts). I thought it might be worth ending, though, with a cover for a work that breaks the rule I've just articulated: the work is about transcendence of the bodily, but the art (by Mark Salwowski) reads as overwhelmingly surreal.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Dean's landscapes

Image
  In 2013, the Royal Academy staged a comprehensive exhibition ‘Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape’. The argument of the display, elaborated in its catalogue, was that the development of landscape painting in the 18th century was dominated by a variety called ‘topography’, and sometimes ‘strict topography’, committed to ‘the accurate recording of particular places’: artists like Paul Sandby (1731-1809), who began as a map-maker, and carried a cartographic precision of representation over into his accomplished landscape watercolours; or Michael Angelo Rooker (1746-1801), who worked scrupulously in oils and watercolours. But in the early 19th century, however, topographical art was ‘transcended by something much more serious and more powerful, a sublime style of painting that sought to represent the grandeur of nature’ rather than accurately to reproduce it, and by exaggerating, distorting, or augmenting and inventing, to produce in viewers ‘feelings of aw...
Read more

Michael Whelan, ‘Chanur’s Homecoming’ (1986)

Image
 American artist Michael Whelan (born 1950) was inducted into ‘ The Science Fiction Hall of Fame ’ in June 2009, the first living artist so honoured. His Hall of Fame citation describes him as ‘one of the most important contemporary science fiction and fantasy artists, and certainly the most popular. His work was a dominant force in the transition of genre book covers away from the surrealism introduced in the 1950s and 1960s back to realism.’ In demand, copiously productive, Whelan has produced a deal of work for DAW books, and much for other imprints too: SF, Fantasy and Horror. His run of awards is particularly impressive: he won the Hugo for Best Professional Artist in seven consecutive years—1980 to 1986—and only didn’t win again in 1987 because he declined the nomination (he subsequently won the same award six further times, also receiving the 1988 Best Nonfiction Hugo award for his compilation, Michael Whelan's Works of Wonder ). Whelan has also won many Locus Awards, Chesl...
Read more

Space Ark

Image
The animals march, two-by-two, into an Apollo-era rocket, as the skies grey and pour behind. The image is cover art by Alex Schomburg for Fantastic (October 1961), illustrating Robert Young's novella of a new Flood, Deluge II . Schomburg, born Alejandro Schomburg y Rosa (1905-1998), was a Puerto Rican commercial artist of remarkable precision and fineness of line; and his artwork here entirely encapsulates Young's tale, cutting through the early sections (‘the ancient stresses were ready to tear the earth apart, and only Anton Burke was ready. He planned to choose his passenger-list with care. But when the time came, his space-ship Ark was empty—save for the strangest friends a man could have on a journey to the stars’) to the Noahic revelation at the story's end, that Burke will be accompanied to safety and the stars by Earth's beasts rather than its human population. By angling the scene ten degrees to the right, Burke adds dynamism and verve to what might have been a...
Read more