At the age of seventeen, artist and illustrator Chris Foss read in a newspaper a rave review of “Whaam!”, the diptych by American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, heavily inspired by a panel of a 1962 comic strip. “I remember being absolutely outraged,” Foss said. “The world was going crazy over this bloated comic panel, and all I could think of was the original artist, the person who fixed the dots and was completely ignored. Who knew that, thirty years later, the same thing would happen to me?
In October, “Ornamental Despair”, a 1994 painting by British artist Glenn Brown, sold at auction in London for $5.7 million. The painting is almost an exact replica of a science fiction illustration Foss created for a men’s magazine in the 1970s, for which he was paid around three hundred and fifty pounds. Brown’s painting was based on a reprint of Foss’ original, featured in a 1990 collection of books about the artist’s work. “I knew he copied it from the book because the painting had been cropped to fit the page. His version is clearly based on the cropped version,” Foss said.
Brown, who is forty-eight, is a controversial figure in the art world, well known for his reinterpretations of works by other artists that are surprisingly close to the originals. Brown imitated the works of past artists such as Rembrandt, Dali and van Gogh, but also lesser-known living illustrators. In 2000, Anthony Roberts, another British science fiction artist, sued Brown for copyright infringement over a version of Roberts’ illustration for the cover of a 1974 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein. The painting, titled ‘Loves of Shepherds’, was exhibited at the Tate. The ensuing legal battle cost Brown one hundred and forty thousand pounds – “Every penny I had”, he said later. Roberts’ claim against Brown was eventually settled out of court, and Brown changed the title of his painting to add the words “(After Anthony Roberts)”.
Sir Nicholas Serota, the chairman of the Turner Prize Jury, said of Brown’s work: “He uses the work of other artists, but that doesn’t mean you could possibly confuse his work with theirs… he takes the image, he transforms it. , he gives it a completely different scale. But, when Foss heard of the mimicry, he was less generous in his appreciation of Brown’s originality. In September 2004, when Brown received a retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Foss traveled from his home on the island of Guernsey to confront the artist in person.
“I was furious,” he told me. “I burst into the gallery and shouted at the director, ‘Take those pictures off the wall; they have no place there. I was not happy to see copies of my work everywhere. With admirable diplomacy, the gallery director managed to appease Foss, offering to add credit under paintings that cite the source of inspiration. When his anger subsided, Foss was introduced to Brown. “He’s pretty much a nice guy,” Foss said. “I said to him, ‘What if, in the future, I do the line work and you fill in the colors?’ ”
Foss has always taken a pragmatic approach to its work. He knew from an early age that he wanted to be an artist and by fifteen he was making a living creating signs for local businesses in Guernsey. Foss left to study architecture at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where studies ranked low on his list of priorities. He only attended two conferences in his first and only year in college. Instead, he devoted his time to pursuing commissions from professional magazines. When he heard about the launch of Penthousehe sent an erotic illustration to its founder, Bob Guccione, who, according to Foss, “got completely freaked out, and he published the picture in the third issue”.
The new independent gig has earned Foss an unusual privilege with the college’s night porter, a Penthouse reader, which would allow the undergraduate to slip into his dorm after the midnight curfew. Foss left Cambridge and was immediately placed under arrest with Penthouse. His entry into the field of science fiction illustration, for which he is best known, came through his relationship with Guccione. “Bob said to me, ‘There’s this new movie called ‘2001,’ which you have to see,” he recalled. “That’s when spaceships started.”
Foss, who had bought an airbrush to better render human skin in nude magazine illustrations, turned the tool into spaceships and, through his agent, began supplying the covers for many of the book’s landmark novels. era, including those of Isaac Asimov and JG Ballard. Foss rarely read the books, relying instead on his own imagination to create his majestic space panoramas, defined by buckshot stars, whirlwinds of colored gas, and corpulent spacecraft.
It was during this time that Foss created “Captain Nemo’s Castle”, the illustration on which Brown would later base his painting. “Men only magazine ordered a completely open file from me,” he said. “The concept of the play was that Captain Nemo had arrived in space and needed to dock on an asteroid to resupply.” At the time, Foss was creating about three pieces a week. In most cases, he was allowed to keep the original work. “Sometimes when people said they liked a piece, I would give them the original,” he said. “It never occurred to me that it might be worth anything.”