His name sounds like one you’d give a character in a parody of patrician privilege.
But the real story of Chesley Bonestell, pronounced BON-uh-stell, has nothing to do with mixing G&Ts or being one of the strongest doubles partners at the club.
Instead, it’s a little bit nerdy and a lot retro-cool. And it’s on display now at the Adler Planetarium in a vibrant new exhibition called “Worlds of Chesley Bonestell.”
In 11 Bonestell paintings up now, with 11 more to rotate into their place in early February, the space museum offers a pictorial history of what people — or, rather, one highly influential person — used to think space looked like.
So you see imagined rocket ships, a view of Saturn from the surface of its moon Titan, a moonscape featuring craggy, almost Alpine peaks, and more.
Bonestell has been dubbed the “father of modern space art,” which might sound marginal until you hear that folks from Robert A. Heinlein, the science fiction writer, to Carl Sagan, the cosmologist, have attributed their career choices to being moved by Bonestell’s art.
In the 1983 book “Worlds Beyond: The Art of Chesley Bonestell,” “We had dozens of science fiction writers and astronomers talking about how they were all spurred in their careers and inspired to do what they do because of Bonestell,” Ron Miller, one of the book’s authors, said in an interview.
One painting in particular, 1944’s “Saturn From Titan,” which ran in Life magazine, was especially influential because of its pioneering, almost photographic realism. A fellow artist, Miller said, “referred to it as the painting that launched a thousand careers.”
It’s in the Adler’s collection, and it’s hung prominently in the exhibition.
What the show doesn’t offer is almost anything of the other fascinating careers Bonestell had. He drew for architectural firms, working on the Golden Gate Bridge and the Chrysler Building (“Its famous gargoyles are Bonestell’s work,” Miller has written.)
And he did matte paintings for a time in Hollywood, providing the detailed backdrops on one of the finest films ever made. The mansion “Xanadu and old Chicago in ‘Citizen Kane’ are his paintings,” Miller said. (There is, at the planetarium, a short video showing some of Bonestell’s work on science fiction films, including “Destination Moon.”)
But he was always interested in astronomy, and in the 1940s he began to shift his focus to space art, which he worked at until he died at age 98.
Through his work published in such magazines as Collier’s and Life, Bonestell helped convince the public that space travel wasn’t just fantasy.
“Bonestell’s work looked like postcards,” said Miller, himself an illustrator and author of a second, longer but similarly titled Bonestell book, 2001’s “The Art of Chesley Bonestell.”
“It was that hyper-realism that really sold people on believing that these stars and planets weren’t just figments of the imagination. He convinced people these were places you could stand on.”
Said Geza Gyuk, the Adler’s vice president for astronomy, research and collections, “He was pretty seminal in getting the public to think this was real.”
The Adler has on display several of the magazine stories Bonestell illustrated, including Wernher von Braun’s 1954 piece for Collier’s, “Can We Get to Mars?”
The planetarium decided to mount a Bonestell show in part because it has new gallery space available, in a former “Cyberspace Classroom” on its lower level, and in part because it’s got a collection of 18 Bonestell paintings, which it began acquiring in the 1970s.
(The other four paintings in the show are on loan form an anonymous private collector. Adler officials declined to talk about the paintings’ value, but Miller said that Bonestell works, although rarely up for sale, sold for as much as $100,000 in a recent auction.)
The Adler in this century has shifted its focus from general astronomy to space exploration, Gyuk said, and showing Bonestell’s paintings fits perfectly into that mission.
“We just said, ‘It’s time,'” he said. “The planetarium is not just about what the facts are. It’s the inspiration. This exhibit is really all about the inspiration.”
Born in San Francisco in 1888, Bonestell worked hard at realism; he made models of stellar objects to get the shadows just right, and he talked to scientists to better understand the far-off worlds or not-yet-existent rocket ships he was painting, Gyuk said.
Yet “Saturn From Titan” is “very accurate yet very inaccurate simultaneously,” said Gyuk. The shadows and lighting are perfect, “but it’s also inaccurate because Titan has this really thick atmosphere. But he didn’t know that.”
But Bonestell was also working with something of a gleam in his eye, Miller believes.
“He approached the whole thing like the Hudson River School painters,” said Miller. “He depicted things accurately enough, but he was really into getting across the emotion and the romance of space travel.”
Bonestell thought of himself as an illustrator, Miller said, but Hereward Lester Cooke, curator of painting at the National Gallery of Art in the 1960s, “considered Bonestell to be one of the greatest landscape painters this country has produced.”
The show comes at a time when, despite the shrinkage of NASA, new frontiers are being achieved in space exploration: news of exoplanets, Mars exploration, a flyby of Pluto, landing on a comet.
“These paintings,” Miller said, “were kind of the roots of all of that.”
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
‘Worlds of Chesley Bonestell’
When: Through April 26
Where: Adler Planetarium, 1300 S. Lake Shore Drive
Tickets: Included with general admission ($12 for adults); 312- 922-7827or adlerplanetarium.org
