Name: CHESLEY BONESTELL (1888-1986)
Brand: TARGET FOR METEORS
Price: 1100.00 USD
Availability: InStock

CHESLEY BONESTELL (1888-1986)
TARGET FOR METEORS
inscribed and signed Chesley Bonestell (on reverse)
oil on board
13¹⁄₄ x 9⁵⁄₈ in. (33.7 x 24.5 cm.)
Executed circa 1947.

Anonymous sale; Philip Weiss Auctions, Lynbrook, New York, 10 September 2015, lot 450D.
Acquired at the above sale by the late owner.

"The End of the World," Coronet Magazine, July 1947, illustrated (Schuetz 8).
Willy Ley, The Conquest of Space (New York, 1949), plate XLI, p. 153 (Schuetz 31).
Ron Miller and Frederick Durant, The Art of Chesley Bonestell (London, 2001), pp. 166-167, illustrated.

Christie’s thanks Melvin Schuetz for identifying this painting as being published in 1949 as plate XLI in Willy Ley’s seminal book: The Conquest of Space.

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Lot Essay

"For New Yorkers this would be the end of the world" (Coronet Magazine, July 1947).

A frightening image from the early years of the Cold War. As described in the "picture story" where this painting was first published in July 1947, "[E]ven before physicists developed the atom bomb, astronomers knew of greater, if less immediate, threats to world safety. To bring you some of the results of their research, Coronet commissioned Chesley Bonestell, an artist and astronomer, to make the paintings on the following pages. In the opinion of experts, these are some of the catastrophes which may someday plunge the earth into chaos."

The meteor strike was described specifically in the same article: "After punching a mile-wide hole in the middle of Manhattan, a meteor has set off tremendous explosions, killing millions and enveloping the city in flames. For New Yorkers this would be the end of the world." Bonestell depicted the crater as the same size as Meteor Crater in Arizona. He himself was a survivor of one of America's biggest urban disasters: the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. He was 18 years old and recovering from a night of revelry in San Francisco's Barbary Coast district when the quake struck and changed his life forever.