Auction for the Ray Bradbury Estate

After Ray Bradbury's death in 2012, it naturally took a while for his estate to be distributed. As I have reported previously, the bulk of his papers and correspondence, and most of his office contents, found their way to the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies in Indianapolis; and his Cheviot Hills home was sold earlier this year. But Ray's house was also full of personal effects and possessions, including a great deal of artwork - and these remaining objects are now up for auction.

The full catalogue for the auction is online, and the auction house appears to be open to online bidding. There are hundreds of lots, ranging from rough sketches by Bradbury collaborators such as Joe Mugnaini, through to the commemorative plaque for Ray's Hollywood star. Even if you don't intend to bid on anything, the catalogue is fascinating to browse through, and in most cases includes quite detailed photos of the lots. View the catalogue here.

Bradbury Inspires Exhibition

An art gallery in Ray Bradbury's old home town of Venice, California, is currently staging an exhibition of works related to Bradbury. In fact, L&M Gallery is located on the exact spot where Bradbury lived in the 1940s, and where he wrote some of his early works in including much of The Martian Chronicles. The exhibition runs until January 2013. Here's some more detail from the Gallery's press release:

Curated by Yael Lipschutz in honor of Bradbury and his journey into the red unknown, the exhibition will include the original manuscript of The Martian Chronicles, alongside artists ranging from Yves Klein—whose mysterious blue sponge sculpture from 1958 is as strange and disconcerting as any Mars rock—to Larry Bell, Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe, Matthew Ritchie, and Vija Celmins, whose exquisite renderings of the cosmos serve to propel the viewer forward through space as we travel with Bradbury on his interstellar mission. Some works directly invoke the Red Planet, such as Ed Ruscha’s Hold on For a Minute, I’m No Martian (1980), and Tom Sachs’ Phonkey (2012), a large-scale sculptural tableau, in which a lone radio sits silent, stranded atop a scorching Martian terrain.

Cordella (1988-1992), an ethereal blue resin and fiberglass plank by the late John McCracken, (1934-2011) more abstractly suggests Bradbury and the perceptual doors of the mind he opened with his literature. Mars represented not only a stage upon which the writer projected our dreams and fears as a society, but another dimension of thought. Today, as exploration of the fourth planet from the Sun continues, we revisit this philosophic arena.

“Myth, seen in mirrors, incapable of being touched, stays on,” wrote Bradbury. The exhibition is also honored to include works by the late Michael Asher (1943-2012), Mike Kelley (1954-2012), and Ken Price (1935-2012), as well as Scoli Acosta, Kenneth Anger, Brian Butler, Sarah Cain, Corazon Del Sol, Noah Davis, Liz Deschenes, Fred Eversley, Thomas Houseago, Lipschutz & Lipschutz, Anthony McCall, Cameron Parsons, Judson Powell, Noah Purifoy, Ry Rocklen, Eddie Ruscha, Ben Sakoguchi, Jim Shaw and Marnie Weber.

For more information on the exhibition, visit the L & M Arts website.

Dubious honours

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled on the British website Good Show, Sir! which collects - parades might be a more appropriate word - the most laughable examples of science fiction and fantasy book cover art. Unicorns, cat people, bare-breasted ladies... and centaurs... seem to be among the most frequent visual elements on display there.

I took a look over my shelves to see which book covers I could offer to the site, and came up with an awful Bradbury cover, plus a few others. Little did I know that the 1969 British Corgi paperback edition of I Sing the Body Electric! would end up being the highest rated cover on the whole site.

Click here to see the cover, and the witty responses it garnered from the site's visitors.

I also posted this Harlan Ellison cover, which prompted a response from Mr Ellison himself.

Bradbury and Art and...

The artist most associated with Ray Bradbury has to be Joe Mugnaini. His designs have graced the covers of several Bradbury books - The Golden Apples of the Sun and Fahrenheit 451 to name just two. He also created the line-art images that accompany Bradbury's stories in Golden Apples and some editions of The October Country, and created memorable backdrops for many of Bradbury's plays.

But how much of Mugnaini's full body of work do we know? Not much, is my guess.

Fortunately, a new book is in preparation, which will showcase a fuller range of Mugnaini's work. Wilderness of the Mind: the art of Joseph Mugnaini is due for release in early 2010. The official website of the Mugnaini estate provides some tantalising thumbnails indicating what we might expect to find inside the book.

The book is written by Ryan Leasher, with layout and design by Jessica Forsythe and a foreword by Ray Bradbury. Diana Mugnaini-Robinson will be adding a preface. Ryan very kindly answered some questions about the book, which I gather he has been preparing as a sideline to his day job in the movie industry.

"The April Witch" from the portfolio Ten View of the Moon.
Image copyright The Joseph Mugnaini Estate, 2009. Used with permission.

Ryan says, "We've had unrestricted access to the estate's archives and, most importantly, to Joe's journals. What we've found is nothing short of amazing."

"No previous book has come even close to showing the depth of the collaboration between Joe and Ray. We've got stunning concept work, including the very first and never-before published Fahrenheit 451 sketches. They were discovered hidden in a scrapbook in the estate archives, safely tucked away by Joe's wife Ruth some forty-five years ago and not seen since. Well, until now."

The book isn't restricted to Mugnaini's work with Bradbury, but reveals the lesser-known side of his work: "The book will include Joe's views and teachings on art. Although Joe was best known to many as an artist and illustrator, his greatest impact was as a teacher."

For the first time the beautiful Ten Views of the Moon portfolio will be reprinted in its entirety, including both Ray Bradbury's and Norman Corwin's full text. The ten-lithograph portfolio was originally intended to be produced in an edition of a hundred and fifty full sets, but the printing stone for "The April Witch"(pictured above) - arguably the best of the portfolio - broke after only eighty-five portfolios were produced.

At first, Ryan says, the challenge (and the fun) was finding new pieces of artwork: "I even ended up travelling to Japan to meet with two Japanese collectors of Joe's work. Now, though, the challenge is figuring out how to choose which of the thousands of illustrations and paintings will make the final cut for the 400-page book."

The book isn't yet completely finished, partly because of the extensive work required to make sure the reproductions are as close to the original pieces as possible, with an emphasis on colour reproduction.

Ryan's final comment is, "We've already got quite a few surprises in the book and we're working on few more...and one of them is big."

The target release date for the book is currently "early 2010", but anyone wanting to be kept informed of developments is encouraged to use the email link on the Wilderness of the Mind website. When a date and price have been fixed, it should be available to order through the Art of Fiction link on the Wilderness site.

As someone who has searched in vain through library catalogues for works by or on Mugnaini, I will very much welcome this publication. My thanks to Ryan Leasher for providing details of the work in progress.



On Saturday 24 October, it was Ray Bradbury: Painter at a gallery in Santa Monica, where one of his classic paintings went on display. The LA Times gave this preview and interview with Ray.





Finally, If you're looking for strange connections, the Marooned blog has an interesting series of connections between Bradbury and Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx. Even if you have never heard of Sixx, the insights into Bradbury works are quite good - see the first instalment, on Bradbury and fire, for instance.