The Measure of All Things

A few days ago, while emptying an old filing cabinet my wife came across a thick folder of photographs. “Look,” she said, handing me one. “Remember him?” The photo depicted a younger version of me, laughing with a remarkable man.



Chesley Bonestell and yours truly enjoying a good laugh. Source: Cedric R. Braun.

It reminded me how, as a boy, I spent hours in my father’s library going through his books on astronomy, exploring in my imagination the cosmos as it was visualized during those long-ago pre-Viking, pre-Hubble days. There was one to which I returned to time and again. I forget its title but it had wonderful illustrations of what other planets looked like. Through its art, I stared at the Moon’s desolation through the faceplate of my spacesuit, sweltered on Mercury, was pummeled by Martian sandstorms, and watched the rising of Saturn from one of its satellites. As an adult, I met and became fast friends with the artist who gave form to all that wonder, Chesley Bonestell.



Saturn rising viewed from Titan, one of its moons. Source: Griffith Observatory.

I met Chesley in the late 1970s, when I interviewed him for an article that I was writing for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. He and his wife Hulda lived in Carmel, California, and I was invited over for what would become over the years the first of many get-togethers.

We sat in his studio where—surrounded by his work—it was very difficult for me to keep my eyes on the subject of my interview. Some of the canvases carelessly stacked against a wall were old friends and I realized—much to my delighted surprise—that many of my favorite planetary panoramas were in color, not black and white as they were in my father’s book.

Chesley was special. I’ve been fortunate to meet many of the legends I’ve admired and whose work, in one way or another, influenced my life—Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Wernher von Braun, and Isaac Asimov come to mind. But Chesley has his own spot in my mind and heart.

Let me tell you why he was so special. Until his death in 1986 at age 98, in a career spanning more than 70 years, his work ranged over practically every facet of the illustrator’s art. You’ve probably seen much of it without realizing it; especially if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool science-fiction fan. It brightens books considered classics in astronomy and space exploration. It’s found at art exhibitions, in public and private collections (the Smithsonian has several), and was especially commissioned by museums and planetariums.



Double star system seen from a hypothetical planet. Source: The Museum of Science, Boston.

Chesley was always an artist. In 1905, when he was 17, already doing art work for Sunset Magazine, he hiked to the summit of Mt. Hamilton and Lick Observatory, and for the first time saw the Moon and Saturn through a telescope. He dated his preference for astronomical subjects, particularly Saturn, from that time. His grandfather, head of the family’s prosperous paper business, couldn’t rid his grandson of that “damned bohemian streak” and decided to channel it into a respectable profession. He offered to send him to any university he chose—to become an architect—and Chesley became a member of the Class of 1911 at Columbia.

After working as a designer for leading architects of the time, he went to Europe to study and returned to New York in time for the 1929 market crash. Chesley went back to San Francisco, his home town and, while working out color schemes for the Opera House and Veterans’ Building, was approached by Joseph Strauss, chief engineer for the still-unfinished Golden Gate Bridge who, knowing of his architectural background, asked him to become the project’s illustrator.



Rendition drawn from the sketches and blueprints of the then-unfinished Golden Gate Bridge.

Money was tight during the Depression, and the engineers had to show those holding the purse strings how various parts of the project would be constructed, before getting another installment. Based on sketches and blueprints, Chesley would draw views of what the end product would look like. In 1937, William van Alen, architect of the Chrysler Building, urged him to enter the technical side of motion pictures and, armed with van Alen’s letter of introduction, he went to work for RKO as a special effects expert known in the trade as a “matte artist.”



Panorama of Martian city between canals. This scene appears at the beginning of the sci-fi
classic, War of the Worlds. Source: Paramount Pictures

Now there is CGI, but back then the matte artist was the one who in a Biblical epic, for example, would add the non-existent distant ancient city, or a vaulted ceiling to a movie set only slightly higher than the actors. This required a fine sense of tonal perspective and had to be realistically executed because the camera detects and enlarges any flaws into large, screen-sized ones. Several memorable films received his touch, among them Citizen Kane, Destination Moon (for which he got an Oscar), When Worlds Collide, and the original War of the Worlds.



Earth rises over the lunar landscape, in the sci-fi thriller, Destination Moon. Chesley won an
Oscar for special effects. Source: George Pal Productions.

Chesley realized that movie camera angles could be used to illustrate space travel in paintings, and produced a series of them—Saturn and its satellites—which was published in Life magazine in the early 1940s.

At the end of World War II, he introduced to a Collier’s magazine executive a young man he met at a rocket engineering symposium—Wernher von Braun—who had harebrained ideas about spaceships, space stations, and trips to the Moon and Mars. This resulted in a series of articles on the possibilities of space travel.

Von Braun would send Chesley sketches on graph paper, which he would convert into working drawings and then add perspective. To show the relation of orbiting spacecraft to Earth, it was necessary to show what the ocean and land would look from a certain point in orbit. Knowing the altitude of the hypothetical orbit, it was not difficult to calculate how much of the Earth could be seen through a determined angle. However, to show surface details from orbit—many years before any imaging satellite—Chesley developed a unique spherical perspective of his own. The articles, written by von Braun and illustrated by Chesley, were an instant success.



First view of Zyra, the new world to which survivors of humanity escape to in, When Worlds
Collide. Source: Paramount Pictures.

Since then, men have walked on the Moon and probes have shown us other planets. But those of us who recall how it was before the shock of Sputnik, also remember when nobody knew for sure what the surface of other worlds was like. It was into this atmosphere of relative ignorance that Chesley brought his unique combination of talents to depict what nobody had ever seen before. A measure of his influence is annually acknowledged by the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists when it honors the best in the field with the Chesley Award.

After Chesley died, I visited Hulda, and together we climbed to his studio, where an unfinished painting sat on the easel. I asked her for one of his brushes. As I write this, I can see it hanging on the wall, the hues of a thousand alien planets still clinging to it.

Yes, I remember Chesley. Even those who never met or heard about him have been influenced by his work, his conceptualizations of what things look like, as Captain James T. Kirk would have put it, “Out there…”