Name: CHESLEY BONESTELL (1888-1986)
Brand: ZERO HOUR MINUS FIVE
Price: 48000.00 USD
Availability: SoldOut

CHESLEY BONESTELL (1888-1986)
ZERO HOUR MINUS FIVE
signed Chesley Bonestell (lower left)
oil on Masonite
19¹⁄₂ x 14¹⁄₄ in. (49.5 x 36.2 cm.)
Executed circa 1949

Norman Brosterman (b.1952), New York.
Acquired by the late owner from the above, 2001.

Willy Ley, The Conquest of Space (New York, 1949), plate IX, p. 73 (Schuetz 31).
Henry Ward, Hell’s Above Us, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1960, dust jacket art.
“The Fine Art of Space Travel” Outre #10, 1997, back cover art (Schuetz 724).
Norman Brosterman, Out of Time: Designs for the Twentieth-Century Future (New York, 2000), p. 88, illustrated.
Ron Miller and Frederick C. Durant III, The Art of Chesley Bonestell (London, 2001), p. 132, 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.
Seattle, Pivot Art + Culture, Imagined Futures: Science Fiction, Art, and Artifacts from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection, April 7-July 10, 2016.

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Lot Essay

An original rocket ship illustration for The Conquest of Space. This depiction of the moon rocket launch preparations was published as plate IX in Willy Ley’s The Conquest of Space. “This painting shows a winged rocket being prepared for launch to the Moon. Designed to fly back to Earth after returning from space, it became the stylistic model for many postwar science-fiction movie spaceships and the conceptual precursor of the American space shuttles of the 1980s” (Brosterman).

The importance of The Conquest of Space to American history is hard to exaggerate. It was a collaboration with text by Willy Ley, a refugee from Nazi Germany and rocket designer. The Conquest of Space was both the first book illustrated by Bonestell and his most popular. It was a phenomenal best-seller. The Conquest of Space "convinced an entire generation of post-World War II readers that spaceflight was possible in their lifetime. There are countless professional aerospace engineers and scientists working today who decided their careers when they saw The Conquest of Space." (Miller & Durant, p.57).