ROBERT MCCALL

ARIZONA METROPOLIS, 3000 AD Arizona's World's Premier Aerospace Artist

triangular sail, 3 inches thick and 1200 feet wide, floats silently through space, propelled by radiant energy from the sun. The astronauts riding in capsules at each tip of the aluminized surface are on their way to Jupiter. Two hours ago they were on Earth; a few months hence they will be exploring the veiled surface of our largest planet, 500 million miles away. The gleaming craft moves slowly at first, gently pushed by solar rays through the vacuum of outer space until, unimpeded by any resistance, it attains a speed close to that of light itself. The year is 2040, in a 1967 film promoted through illustrations by Robert McCall. For McCall, America's foremost chronicler of aerospace exploration, the year 2040 is already yesterday. Appropriately, McCall even looks like an astronaut. Sandy hair, blue eyes, snub nose and high, domed forehead make him a stand-in for fellow Ohioan John Glenn; but it is not typecasting that accounts for his success. His work combines the weight of reality with the weightlessness of outer space in a way that is both convincing and dramatic. Despite painstaking detail, his paintings do not freeze into flatness, for McCall does much more than copy the NASA photographs on which much of his work is based. His knowledge of space technology enables him to visualize the various pieces of equipment from every angle, giving his tremendous freedom of composition, while a genuine passion for his subject kindles it into life.Thanks to McCall's dual talents as reporter and artist, the excitement of aerospace has been brought home to the American public in a manner unsurpassed by anything but an eyewitness view. He has, in fact, been our eyewitness before the event. In September, 1964 his cover illustration and portfolio of paintings rocketed some 7 million Life readers into a ringside seat for "America's Giant Jump into Space." When astronauts Aldrin and Armstrong went on their moonwalk on July 20, 1969, and that giant jump became a "giant leap for mankind," it was McCall who depicted the achievement for the NASA agency. And it was McCall who provided a foretaste of 2001 in his work for the Stanley Kubrick space epic. The four paintings from the film, which MGM later donated to the National Aerospace Museum, as well as 41 other works for NASA, the USIA, Life and the U.S. Air Force, were recently collected by the Smithsonian Institution into a one-man show entitled "Today and Tomorrow in Space: Paintings and Drawings by Robert McCall." McCall's first commission was a far cry from outer space: a portrait of the family dentist's dog, done when McCall was a sophomore in high school. His interest in painting has blossomed early and been cultivated by his parents, who appreciated and occasionally practiced art. By the time he was 17, McCall was proficient enough to land a part-time job as a commercial artist for a local silkscreen sign company. He kept the job while a scholarship student at the Columbus School of Fine Art, which he quit after two years in order to work full time. In 1941 he enlisted in the Army Air Force; his off-duty hours from bombardier training were spent painting pictures of planes. At the time, he recalls, "aircraft seemed about the most dramatic technological achievement of man." Besides sharpening his technical knowledge and skill at drawing, his Air Force stint brought him into contact with his future wife, then an art student at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where McCall was stationed. The two met in 1944 and married one year later.In 1949 the McCalls moved to New York with two-yearold Linda, who was the first of their two daughters, and who recently became the mother of their first grandchild. Magazines like Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post were in their heyday during this period and provided a good living for their regular illustrators, whose number McCall soon joined. By 1952 he was able to move to the Westchester suburb of Chappaqua, set in the gentle Pocantico Hills 25 miles northeast of New York City.

McCall's involvement with aerospace grew out of his work as a military artist. During the mid-'50s he paid several visits to Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy) as part of the Air Force art program. "The momentum was just beginning to build," he recalls, "and I realized that we really would be going to the moon. With the idea in mind that there would be one day when everybody would go down to watch the spacecraft being launched, I sent off a very naive letter to Life addressed 'To Whom It May Concern,' saying that I would like to represent them on that day." Both the letter and a portfolio of World War II combat illustrations eventually made their way to art director Bernard Quint, who replied that he would keep McCall in mind.About a year later an assignment came through and what an assignment! McCall was to do 20 paintings of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to accompany Walter Lord's three-part article, "Day of Infamy," commemorating the 15th anniversary of the event. It was the Big Break the start of a long and satisfactory relationship with Life and, indirectly, the beginning of McCall's involvement with motion pictures. Another series of paintings, commissioned for two consecutive Life issues documenting the accelerating space program, caught the eye of director Stanley Kubrick, then beginning to mull the idea of filming a space odyssey. Three years later, in 1967, the picture "2001: A Space Odyssey" was in the works, and McCall was in England with his wife and younger daughter, working closely with Kubrick on the four oil paintings that formed the basis of MGM's advertising campaign.

The 26 paintings for "Tora! Tora! Tora!" also came out of his work for Life, "2001" had fired his enthusiasm, and he began scanning industry newspapers for leads on other pictures. When he read the announcement that Twentieth Century Fox was going to film the story of Pearl Harbor, he got on the phone to Fox and described his work for "Day of Infamy" and "2001." The filmmakers didn't need much convincing before sending him a contract. McCall spent months reading up on the Japanese-American involvement in World War II, then flew to Kokura, in southern Japan, where the flagship Nagato and three-quarters of the 35-500-ton carrier Akagi had been reconstructed. After three weeks of on-location sketching and picture-snapping, supplemented by research files from the Japanese military archives, he went on to Honolulu. There he put in another week watching the "Fox Air Force" (70 planes remodeled into exact duplicates of Japanese and American World War II aircraft) restage the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent air battles.

THE RESCUE OF SKYLAB

Around the world in 270-mile-high orbit, once every 93 minutes, sailed our first space station. It was the largest spacecraft ever built, 1181/2 feet long with its three-man crew's earth-to-orbit Apollo ferry attached. Twenty-four days after its launch, it could also claim to be our most patched-up, lopsided spacecraft and claim it proudly, considering the emergencies that this inelegance had enabled it to survive. Our second Skylab crew has now returned, and our third one preparing to go up this month or next.

Neither flight could have taken place, but for the spectacular space-repair feats of Skylab's initial crew which put the first manned mission in a class by itself. The Editors, Popular Science. 1973 Popular Science.

To capture the speed and movement of these combat scenes, McCall relied heavily on line and wash technique. After penciling-in fine guidelines on a sheet of lightweight bond, he sponged the paper thoroughly on both sides and smoothed it down on a piece of plate glass. A Japanese reed stylus, held loosely with the fingertips, forced him out of his usual drawing habits and into a greater freedom of expression. Once the outlines had been laid-in with india ink on the still-damp paper, he spread on thin washes of acrylics and tints of colored inks whose transparency does not obscure the drawing. For the three major paintings, each 7 x 9 feet, he used oil on canvas.

"In the paintings I did for '2001,' I felt that the fantastic technological devices, the flawless scenes and sets, so beautifully designed and fabricated, required a very precise treatment, which I can achieve most successfully in oil. This is something Kubrick and I discussed together: Should the treatment be impressionistic, looser, more vigorous? We both agreed it would be better to work more precisely, although without sacrificing any of the drama. It was a wise decision, I think, because what is most stunning about the film is its incredible serenity, the feeling of timelessness and immensity that it conveys."

The work of certain abstract painters communicates this same feeling of space and depth. "I can propel myself into outer space looking at a DeKooning," McCall says, "but even more so with Franz Kline. I can enter his pictures and imagine that I'm standing on one of those broad, black swaths of pigment, and it's another world, an extraterrestrial environment with vast distances and huge scale. I've tried to paint in this way myself, but never with any great success. My paintings work best when they have some reference to reality, even if it's a symbolic one. When I paint space I want to see a sphere that might be a planet. I want to see a band of light that could be a star stream or a globular cluster or a spiral nebula. I want to get inside it, get closer to it..

"It's amazing to me what little knowledge even educated people have about the cosmos," he goes on. "They don't realize how incredibly limitless it is, that the closest stars are infinitely farther than the most distant planet. What I try to do in my paintings is create something of the scale and immensity of space, in order to stimulate a response and enthusiasm for man's role in it. Because I find it so astoundingly fascinating, I'm eager to transmit my astonishment to people who don't understand, simply for their pleasure, because it's pleasant to consider things that are awesome, mysterious, and unbeliev-able. And, of course, the universe is that."

A plane interrupts the sky with its silver flash. McCall's eyes follow it for a moment in its course, perhaps speeding it toward tomorrow in evolving transformations from lunar rocket to space shuttle to solar sail, to craft that are not yet as real as dreams. ☐☐☐

FOREWORD

From THE APOLLO STORY Although new art styles have come and gone with bewil-dering frequency and speed during the last few generations, new subject matter, by comparison, has been virtually non-existent. The exception to this has been the space theme. As man crossed the threshold into the space age, he not only created a completely new set of tools, but he also gained an entirely new concept of himself and of the space ship Earth on which we live. In this new environ we are surrounded by stygian black skies there is no up and no down. The law of gravity is a parochial condition. Forces as minute as the flutter of a butterfly's wings transmit messages across millions of miles. This revolutionary set of conditions has been a chal-lenge and inspiration to the artist. Within the last decade a new art language and iconography has been created. It is possible that when the future history of art is written space artists will form a group as independent as the Hudson River School or the Ashcan group. McCall, a flyer during World War II and closely associated with the U.S. Air Force art program during the 50s and 60s was a natural to be chosen by The National Aeronautics and Space Administration for their art program in 1963. During the last 10 years he has been present at almost every major event in American space history. When the time comes for an artist to make a flight in space, the chances are good that McCall will be the first. Today McCall is the leading space artist of his generation. He holds this position for three good reasons. First his pic-tures have the ring of authenticity. He is closely in touch with avant garde engineers in the aero space industry, and his ren-ditions, whether within the realm of fantasy or fact, are always possible from a technical point of view. Secondly McCall has the gift of communication. His paintings however far out in subject are invariably meaningful to the intelligent observer. Third, and most important, McCall is a first rate artist who commands respect in professional circles.

Hereward Lester Cooke died Friday, October 6. He was a man out of time-to be admired and emulated. Not only an inspiring author whose words fired the imagination, but his drawings and watercolors were strangely reminiscent of giants of the past.

9 countries OK space-lab joint venture

Associated Press WASHINGTON - Concluding four years of preparation, nine Western European countries formally pledged Monday to build a "space lab" to be carried into space by an American rocket by 1980. At the State Department, acting Secretary of State Kenneth Rush and Charles Hanin, Belgian science minis-ter and chairman of the European Space Conference, signed an agreement which, Rush said, represents "a new and major cooperation between the United States and Western Europe. The space lab is expected to be ready by 1978. The flight is scheduled for 1979. The nine countries Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and Britain will pay between $300 million and $400 million for the space lab. The rocket, called the Space Shuttle Orbiter, will look like a Delta-winged air-plane about the size of a large jetliner. It will be reusable. After each flight it will make a runway landing.