Covers Unbound

Chesley Bonestell, ‘Exploring Mars’ (1953) There are several modes of SF art: portraiture (of futuristic humans, or aliens), paintings of advanced or imagined technology and kit, quasi-surrealist art. Bonestell worked, fundamentally, as a landscape artist. Bonestell trained as an architect, and his early terrestrial architectural paintings and commercial art established his reputation as an artist. But his passion for astronomy, and fascination with outer space, produced a range of images set in space or on other planets. He worked in Hollywood from the 1930s, producing matt paintings for various movies ( Citizen Kane amongst them), before he brokethrough to popular success with his 1940s paintings of Saturn, with Bonestell’s collaborations with scientist and writer Willy Ley, and his work on the movie Destination Moon (directed George Pal, 1950). This film was a major success, whose visual styling owed much to Bonestell : Destination Moon uses matte paintings by noted astronomi...

  The most famous of Bonestell's works are his pictures of Saturn, many of which show the planet as if from one of its many moons: ‘his paintings of Saturn,’ say John Grant and Peter Nicholls , ‘as seen from the surfaces of its moons are understandably regarded as classics, [holding] great beauty and drama in their stillness and depth.’ They are, as with all Bonestell's work, compositionally poised, precisely worked, clear and marvellous. Some place Saturn larger, some smaller. Above is ‘Saturn Viewed from Titan’ (1952: oil on board. 18.25 x 23 in), in which the planet is in shade, a thin crescent with two spurs of light reflected along its rings: appearing spectral, like a ghost of itself. Here, bulkier and more impressively physical, is ‘Saturn as Seen from Mimas’ (1944) This image was used as the cover art for Ron Miller's  The Art of Chesley Bonestell (2001) + What is it about Saturn that makes it the most popular planet? Its rings (though other planets in our solar s...

  Bonestell painted a number of versions of this image, called ‘Exploring Copernicus’—in other versions the spacesuited figures are dressed in green or blue, although here they are red. It is a famous image, as accurate as Bonestell could make it, from his notional point-of-view looking down upon lunar crater Copernicus . But as with the previous post on this blog , I'm struck by the compositional boldness of this image. The tininess of the astronaut figures conveys the sense of scale, and enhances the sublimity of the perspective; but the division of the canvas into a slightly-more-than-half lower portion of textured white-grey, and weighty block of black vacuum above, gives the whole a powerful abstract Rothko-like force. Three Rothko canvases at the Fondation Louis Vuitton , 2023

  Chesley Bonestell painted this for the cover of the October 1970 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction . He was 82. It demonstrates the qualities for which he is celebrated: the clarity, the attention to realist detail, the astronomical scope and scale: a sublime image. On the back of the board is written: ‘400,000 Lt. years out from Our Galaxy, on hypothetical planet | Galaxy tipped approx. 30° | Thin atmosphere on planet | Red star above galaxy center locates Solar System | M31 — Andromeda — at far right | M33 — Just above galaxy | Magellanic clouds, extreme L.’ Bonstell has scrupulously researched the relevant cosmic bodies and their relative orientations and positions from this notional point, and reproduced as accurately as he could what it would look like. Inside the issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction for which it was commissioned—the magazine's 21st Anniversary ‘All-Star Issue’—Bonstell explains the perspective he has adopted. We are viewing the Milky Wa...

  Ed Emshwiller, cover art for Brian Aldiss's Bow Down to Nul (New York: Ace, 1960) Edward ‘Ed’ Emshwiller (1925-1990), ‘Emsh’ as he signed his art, was a major figure in twentieth-century science fiction art. Peter Nicholls calls him ‘the amazingly prolific Emsh’, noting that ‘along with vast numbers of interior illustrations’ he ‘produced over four hundred cover paintings for two dozen magazines, including Amazing , Astounding , If , Infinity Science Fiction , The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (which he dominated through the 1950s), and Startling Stories , as well as many hardback and paperback books; his work for Ace Books alone would have made his reputation.’ He, Frank Kelly Freas and Richard M Powers were the undisputed rulers of the sf-art realm during the 1950s and early 1960s, and they were among the few sf artists of the time who could make a decent living from their work. Emshwiller shared the first Hugo for Best Cover Artist with Hannes Bok in 1953, and wo...