Tag Archives: mural

Robert McCall (1919-2010)

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A Cosmic View Detail

A study for Robert T. McCall's The Space Mural -- A Cosmic View in the South Lobby.

The nation lost an inspirational figure when Bob McCall died on Friday, February 26. As an artist, Bob invited people around the globe to share his optimistic dreams of a human future in space. A native of Columbus, Ohio and a graduate of the Columbus School of Fine Arts, McCall came out of the Army Air Forces at the end of WW II and established himself as a successful advertising illustrator with a number of magazine covers to his credit. But it was the notion of flying through air and space that truly inspired him. Beginning in the 1950s, he produced over forty works for the U.S. Air Force art collection. When James Webb, administrator of NASA, created an agency art program in the 1960s, Bob McCall was one of the first artists invited to participate. He became a favorite with Hollywood, as well, producing major paintings and posters for films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Tora, Tora, Tora.

Tora Tora Tora

Concept paintings by Robert T. McCall for the 1970 20th Centruy Fox motion picture Tora! Tora! Tora! hang in the World War II Aviation gallery entrance. This one depicts the Japanese fleet en route to its attack on Pearl Harbor.

McCall was perhaps best known for his murals. The Space Mural — A Cosmic View (1976), which he painted on a south lobby wall of the National Air and Space Museum, is perhaps the best known of all of his works. It was the first of several major murals that McCall produced for other museums and NASA facilities. In addition, his paintings appeared on a dozen U.S. postage stamps commemorating space feats. “There’s a great pleasure in designing something so many people are collecting,” he once remarked. “My art may fade into oblivion, but the stamps and murals will last.”

A Cosmic View

A study for Robert T. McCall's The Space mural -- A Cosmic View in the South Lobby.

Lester Cooke, curator of painting at the National Gallery of Art, once noted that Bob McCall had “…the quality and scope of imagination to travel in space, and carry us along with him.” Without artists like McCall, he explained, events in space which ordinary citizens could not see or experience “…would remain in the realm of words, mathematical formulae and electronic signals.” There was no danger of that, as long as Bob McCall was around.

A Cosmic View

Many visitors stop to have their photo taken in front of McCall's The Space Mural -- A Cosmic View when visiting the National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall. Photo by Eric Long.

Tom Crouch is Senior Curator for Aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum.


The Saga of Lunar Landscape

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For more than a decade it has been my privilege, among my other duties, to serve as curator of the National Air and Space Museum art collection. It comes as a surprise to many folks to realize that the Museum has an art collection. In fact, it includes over 4,700 works by artists with names like Daumier, Goya, Rauschenberg, Rockwell and Wyeth, and is perhaps the finest and best-rounded collection of aerospace-themed art held by any of the world’s museums. People who are aware that I manage the Museum’s art treasures occasionally ask if I have a favorite work in the collection, I do.

“Lunar Landscape” by Chesley Bonestell. Reproduced courtesy of Private Collection

Chesley Bonestell’s mural, Lunar Landscape, was unveiled at the Boston Science Museum’s Hayden Planetarium on March 28, 1957. “No spaceship reservations are needed for a startlingly realistic visit to the Moon” announced a museum press release.  Measuring forty feet long by ten feet tall, the dramatic panorama of the lunar surface was the masterwork of an artist who had done more than his fair share to set the stage for the coming of the Space Age.

Born in 1888, Chesley Bonestell grew up on San Francisco’s Nob Hill, and survived the 1906 earthquake to emerge as a leading American architectural designer. Having left his artistic fingerprints on some of the best known structures of the era, including the façade of the Chrysler Building, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Golden Gate Bridge, he moved on to Hollywood, where his matte paintings provided the stunning backgrounds for such films as, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), and The Magnificent Ambersons. (1942).

Chesley Bonestell. Portrait by Ansel Adams, Gift of Pip and Frederick C. Durant, III

Always fascinated by astronomy, Bonestell began combining the best available science with his own artistry to produce paintings of the surface of other worlds. Life magazine published a spread of the artist’s extraterrestrial scenes in its issue of May 29, 1944. The editors of Mechanix Illustrated introduced their readers to Bonestell’s notion of a “Moon Rocket” in September 1945. In 1949, he collaborated with writer Willy Ley to produce the beautifully illustrated book, Conquest of Space. The next year, Bonestell teamed with producer George Pal and science fiction writer Robert Heinlein to create a classic space flight film, Destination Moon (1950). The artist contributed illustrations to a series of eight Colliers magazine articles on space flight that began to appear in the spring of 1952, and to the books describing flights to the Moon and Mars that spun out of the magazine series. A generation of youngsters, myself among them, nursed dreams of interplanetary travel inspired by Chesley Bonestell’s dramatic visions of other worlds.

Bonestell was at the peak of his powers in 1956, when the Boston Museum of Science commissioned Lunar Landscape, a work on canvas that would take up an entire wall near the planetarium. As in the case of all of his paintings, the artist planned the mural in meticulous detail. He positioned the viewer on a spot 1300 feet up the south wall of an imaginary lunar crater (“similar to Albateguius, but smaller”), located seven degrees from the Moon’s North Pole and five degrees to the left of the center of the lunar disc. He went so far as to specify that it was 3 o’clock, Boston time, on a late June afternoon, and calculated the position of the planets and stars accordingly (Jupiter over the central peaks, Antares below and to the right of the Earth).

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