Notes on Emsh

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 won further Hugos in 1960, 1961, 1962 and 1964; during that period, the only other cover artists to win Hugos were Freas and Roy G Krenkel.

His commercial success reflected his practice, for he worked quickly, accurately to order, with a fluent, expressive style and a command of formal balance that enabled him to fill his canvas with detail without overwhelming it. His brushwork balanced precision with an expressionist looseness, and he was particularly good at registering texture. His art for Bow Down To Nul (above) is representative: a dynamic composition, dominated by the bulk of the strange-looking alien, whose three arms are reaching for the defensive yellow-clad human. The ‘design’ for the alien—its watermelon head, its blunt-looking claws, the awkwardness of the third eye-on-a-stalk, which appears to be twisting round to get a look at what is going on up front—is somehow at once comical and menacing. This latter is achieved in large part by the reaction of the human as Emsh has painted him: his grim facial expression, his knife-wielding raised arm.

Here, in a 1959 commission for a SF Digest that was, in the event, not published, Emsh again creates a freeform alien being, rendered as much texturally as in terms of its shape, and with genuine pathos captured in its jagged, beaky face. Here the elements of the composition cohere to tell a story: the protective alien, the wounded foreground figure fainting away, the ray-gun leading the eye to the felled individual in the middle distance, and the other coming from the back, with the strong upright of the silver rocket-ship. The large quantity of open sky (left to allow the publisher space for title, author name and blurb) allows the whole image to breathe, and the contrasts in texture, from the roughness of the alien's skin, the fabric the spaceman is wearing, the sand and snow of the desert floor and the metallic sheen of the rocketship, all work to give the composition variety and tone.

Arguably, it was in his black-and-white interior illustrations for SF magazines that showed Emsh's brilliance best: expert draughtsmanship, fluent and strikingly composed images, efficient and never over-busy but immediate, expressive, exciting. Here is a scratchboard illustration for Damon Knight's story ‘World Without Children’ by Damon Knight (Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1951) (A scratchboard is a a piece of card coated with a layer of white china clay, and then with a layer of black india ink: the artist scratches her lines into this outer layer revealing the white, in effect drawing with white lines on black rather than inking black lines onto white paper. The result mimics traditional woodcut, but is much cheaper and easier).

Emsh's confident blocked out wedges of white and dark and the large circle of the futuristic helicopter anchor the swirl of curling lines—the curves of the rotor blades, the sweep of the ladder, the ripples in the water—emphasising the exciting vertiginous forced-perspective of the whole. Again it renders its world immediately, and captures its narrative moment. Here are three of the seventeen b&w images Emsh created for the original magazine publication of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (Galaxy October 1956-January 1957; published in the UK as Tiger! Tiger!, 1956).

Emsh's superb use of the line in his art is one of his distinctivenesses. It is, of course, most obvious in his black-and-white work, but he often used expressive line-work in his colour works too. Here is his cover for Poul Anderson's Let the Spacemen Beware (New York: Ace Books, 1963).

It is a composition that tends towards vibrant abstraction: the three vertical blocks of Mondrian-y colour, the curlicuing strands of hair, catching the yellow of the central upright and swinging it round to, on the right, construe the figure of the soldier via his cape—he is dressed like a First World War infantryman, except that he has at his belt a dagger from an earlier era, and in his right hand holds some kind of techspear or laser-rifle from a later—and on the left to web the screaming face in red of the figure on the left.

That attractive female profile is indicative too. Emsh worked in a commercial climate where SF-art, by blending heteronormative sexualisation and the grotesque—eroticisation of the female form, combined with an affective acceleration of eroticism via the monstrous, terrifying or exciting—appealed to a particular demographic: straight male sexual desire focused as thrilling and, not unrelatedly, revolting. This is art calculated to appeal to the sensibilities, or to the glands, of randy, straight male fans of SF. Not all such examples are as crude as this image below, in which an attractive, shapely woman, clad in figure-hugging gear, is menaced by a lustfully-eyed tentacular monster, whose mouth-parts take on a tacit vagina dentata symbolic terror, that is also (for the hetero male sexual cathexis) a strange kind of subconscious desire. The image served as cover art to Super Science Fiction (August 1959):

Attractive women, many in states of strategic déshabille, and often based upon, or directly modelled by, Emsh's wife Carol, are a repeated feature of his 1950s and 1960s work. It would overly-dignify this to locate it within the western art-historical tradition of the Nude, not least because so many of these images indulge in a peekaboo game of crude titillation.

In the image below, a well-proportionated blonde woman strips off what we must assume has been her disguise, the green alien outer-skin, employed, Mission Impossible-style, to fool the actual aliens amongst whom she has presumably been living. Something has gone wrong with this mission, and she has been detected and chased. As the monstrous aliens scurry and haste in search of her, she reveals, or strategically doesn't reveal, with careful positioning of arm and elbow, her toothsome nudity.

Here is that image as it was put on the newsstands, as the cover of Super-Science Fiction, February 1959.

A correlative to these cheesecake, almost-Page-3, heteronormative displays, is Emsh's love for giant, thrusting and—one cannot avoid the term—phallic spaceships or high-tech structures, often juxtaposed compositionally with shapely, futuristic lovelies in figure-hugging costumes.