Name: CHESLEY BONESTELL (1888-1986)
Brand: ROCKET TO THE MOON
Price: 22000.00 USD
Availability: SoldOut

CHESLEY BONESTELL (1888-1986)
ROCKET TO THE MOON
oil on Masonite
29¹⁄₈ x 24³⁄₈ in. (74 x 62 cm.)
Executed circa 1945.

Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), Huntsville, Alabama.
Norman Brosterman (b.1952), New York.
Acquired by the late owner from the above, 2001.

Willy Ley, “Rocket to the Moon,” Mechanix Illustrated, September 1945, front cover, illustrated (Schuetz 2).
Norman Brosterman, Out of Time: Designs for the Twentieth-Century Future (New York, 2000), p. 89, illustrated.

Tacoma, Washington, Washington State Historical Society, Out of Time: Designs for the 20th Century Future, 11 November 2000-7 January 2001; also, Lansing, Michigan, Michigan Historical Museum, 27 January-25 March 2001; New York, New York Historical Society, 14 April-10 June 2001; Laramie, Wyoming, University of Wyoming Art Museum, 30 June-26 August 2001; Fargo, North Dakota, Plains Art Museum, 1 December 2001-27 January 2002; Springfield, Massachusetts, 5 October-1 December 2002.

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Lot Essay

The first Chesley Bonestell rocket ship artwork to be published, in 1945—and Bonestell’s first magazine cover art. After Chesley Bonestell's solar system paintings appeared in Life magazine, he met Willy Ley. Ley was an immensely influential German- American popular science writer who had already published Rockets: The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere. He grew up in Berlin and was even the rocket model maker for Fritz Lang's 1929 film Die Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon), which became the first realistic depiction of spaceflight in movie history. He fled Germany in 1935, both because of his personal abhorrence for the Nazis and because he faced special scrutiny as a rocket scientist who published his work internationally.

It was Willy Ley who encouraged Bonestell to add spacecraft and astronauts to his paintings and this painting is the result of their first collaboration. It appeared in the September 1945 Mechanix Illustrated to illustrate the cover story by Willy Ley entitled “Rocket to the Moon?”