Chesley Bonestell

While art and artists have historically been an important influence on social and political events, artists who had an influence on the development of science and technology are vanishingly rare. Perhaps the most outstanding—and perhaps sole—example was Chesley Bonestell. In a career that spanned nearly a century, Bonestell contributed to some of the greatest icons of the 20th century . . . and helped inspire the century’s crowning achievement. Born in San Francisco in 1888, Bonestell studied architecture at New York’s Columbia University. Dropping out in his third year, he worked as a renderer and designer for several of the leading architectural firms of the time. While with William van Alen, he designed the façade of the Chrysler Building as well as its distinctive “gargoyles”. Returning to the west coast, he worked on the Golden Gate Bridge, where he illustrated all of the stages of the bridge’s construction as well as contributing to the final design. When the Depression dried up architectural work in the United States, Bonestell went to England, where he rendered architectural subjects for the Illustrated London News. When he finally returned to the States in the late 1930s, he went to Hollywood instead of New York, where he used his talent for realistic painting to work as special effects artist, creating matte paintings for such films as Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Eventually becoming the highet-paid matte artist in Hollywood, Bonestell realized that he could combine what he’d learned about camera angles and painting techniques with his lifelong interest in astronomy. The result was a series of paintings of Saturn as seen from several of its moons that was published in Life in 1944. Nothing like these had ever been seen before: they looked as though National Geographic photographers had been sent into space. Bonestell followed up the sensation these paintings created by publishing more paintings in many leading national magazines. These and others were eventually collected in the book, The Conquest of Space (1950), which immediately became a best seller. Meanwhile, Bonestell did his final stint in Hollywood contributing special effects art and technical advice to the seminal science fiction films produced by George Pal, such as the semi-documentary classic, Destination Moon. When Wernher von Braun organized a space flight symposium for Collier’s magazine, he invited Bonestell to illustrate his concepts for the future of spaceflight. If the Life paintings caused a sensation, the Collier’s series started a revolution. For the first time, spaceflight was shown to be a matter of the near future and not a Buck Rogers fantasy for the 25th century. Von Braun and Bonestell showed that it could be accomplished with the technology then existing in the mid-1950s and that the only question was that of money and will. Coming as they did at the beginning of the Cold War and just before the sobering shock of the launch of Sputnik, the Collier’s series were instrumental in kick-starting America’s space program. Bonestell died in 1986 with an unfinished painting on his easel. By then he had been honored internationally for the contribution he made to the birth of modern astronautics, from a bronze medal awarded by the British Interplanetary Society to a place in the International Space Hall of Fame to an asteroid named for him. His paintings are prized by collectors and institutions such as the National Air & Space Museum and the National Collection of Fine Arts. Today, there are few participants in the aerospace industry—from engineer to astronaut—who do not acknowledge Bonestell’s influence on their careers. One of his classic paintings, an ethereally beautiful image of Saturn seen from its giant moon Titan, has been called “the painting that launched a thousand careers.” Wernher von Braun wrote that he had “learned to respect, nay fear, this wonderful artist’s obsession with perfection. My file cabinet is filled with sketches of rocket ships I had prepared to help in his artwork—only to have them returned to me with . . . blistering criticism.” Carl Sagan once said that he had no idea what the planets really looked like until he saw Bonestell’s paintings as a youngster. Chesley Bonestell, Arthur C. Clarke summed up, “had a wonderful life and saw nearly all of his dreams come true . . . I hope that his name will appear on maps of the worlds he drew, before the Space Age dawned.”