Bonestell as Landscape Artist

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 astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell. These were used for the departure of the Luna from Earth; its approach to the Moon; the spaceship's landing on the lunar surface; and a panorama of the lunar landscape. An oft-noted criticism of the film is the fact that the lunar surface is crisscrossed with gaping cracks. Mudcracks would imply that the surface was once mud, which requires water, and the Moon does not have water. Bonestell, who painted the large backdrop that mimicked lunar crags and mountains, was unhappy with the cracks, which were designed by art director Ernst Fegté. “That was a mistake”, he insisted to Gail Morgan Hickman, author of The Films of George Pal. But Pal explained to Hickman, “Chesley was right, of course ... but we were shooting on a small sound stage because of our limited budget. We had to make the set look bigger. Chesley designed a beautiful backdrop, but it needed something to give it depth. That’s why we made the cracks. The cracks in the foreground were big and those in the distance were small, so it gave a real feeling of perspective. For some scenes we even used midgets in small spacesuits to add to the feeling of depth”

 

Some of Bonestell's backdrop paintings are now on display in the Smithsonian, and in the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. 

Air and Space Museum in Washington DC staff hang the panels of Bonestell’s ‘A Lunar Landscape’, 2021

In the 1950s Bonestell collaborated with Wernher von Braun, the notorious Nazi scientist and creator of the V1 and V2 rocket ‘Vergeltungswaffen’ programme, who avoided Nuremberg because, under Operation Paperclip, the Americans secretly moved him to the USA to develop their own rocket programmes. As part of this, von Braun wrote a number of highly successful books—The Mars Project (1953) and First Men to the Moon (1958)—illustrated generously by Bonestell. Here is Bonestell's ‘In Orbit 600 miles above Mars! Preparing to Land’: originally created to illustrated a magazine article by Von Braun and Cornelius Ryan, “Can We Get to Mars?: Man will Conquer Space Soon!” [Collier's, 30 April 1954]. It is a brilliantly dynamic piece of composition that combines the vibrant diagonals and geometric energy of a colourful Op Art work with the precisely observed, or hypothecated, specific technical detail of the kinds of craft von Braun anticipated creating to travel to Mars.

The landscape at the head of this blogpost was also painted for The Mars Project. It gets the colour of the Martian sky wrong, although so dark a blue was a reasonable guess by someone who knew Mars's atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's (in fact its atmospheric volume less than 1% of our world's)—in fact dust particles in the air give it a pinkish hue. But it is another superb piece of composition, full of detail and action without being over-busy, sweetly coloured and balanced, an image that draws the viewer into the exciting exploration it represents.

  Catherine Newell persuasively reads Bonestell’s art in the longer historical context of the Hudson River School, nineteenth-century American landscape artists who combined a realist technique with a Romantic aesthetic of the sublime in their representations of the American landscape. [Catherine L. Newell, Destined for the Stars: Faith, Future, and America’s Final Frontier (Pittsburgh, 2019)]

Frederic Edwin Church, ‘Niagara Falls’ (1857)

Thomas Cole, ‘The Oxbow, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm’ (1836)

Bonestell painted a number of non-space landscape works:

Bonestell, ‘San Francisco & Golden Gate Bridge’ (c. 1939)

But it is in his otherworldly landscapes, images of the final rather than the Western frontier, that he captures the sublimity and scope of the greatest Hudson River works.

                                            

                                                        Bonestell, ‘The Conquest of Space’ (1949)

One ironic element in the relationship between Bonestell and his Hudson River forebears is that the latter very often painted water: rivers, lakes, waterfalls. Flowing or standing water not being part of the Solar System (Earth excepted), these things are never part of Bonestell's subjects; although in this late canvas, he paints a suitably sublime sea of molten lava:

Chesley Bonestell, ‘Formation of the Earth’ (1978)

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