When he was seventeen years old, the artist and illustrator Chris Foss read a glowing newspaper review of “Whaam!,” the diptych painting by the American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, which was heavily inspired by a panel from a 1962 comic book. “I remember being completely outraged,” Foss said. “The world was going mad over this blown-up comic-book panel, and all I could think about was the original artist, the person who arranged the dots and who was being completely overlooked. Who knew that, thirty years later, the same thing would happen to me?”
In October, “Ornamental Despair,” a 1994 painting by the 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 that Foss created for a men’s magazine in the nineteen-seventies, for which he was paid about three hundred and fifty pounds. Brown’s painting was based on a reprint of Foss’s original, featured in a 1990 book collection of the artist’s work. “I knew he copied it from the book because the painting was 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 reinterpretations of other artists’ works that are strikingly close to the originals. Brown has imitated the works of bygone 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 breach of copyright over a version of Roberts’s 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 a hundred and forty thousand pounds—“Every penny I had,” he later said. Roberts’s claim against Brown was eventually settled out of court, and Brown amended his painting’s title by adding the words “(After Anthony Roberts).”
Sir Nicholas Serota, the chairman of the Turner Prize jury, said of Brown’s oeuvre, “He uses other artists’ work, but that doesn’t mean to say you could possibly mistake his work for theirs … he takes the image, he transforms it, he gives it a completely different scale.” But, when Foss heard about the mimicry, he was less generous in his appraisal of Brown’s originality. In September of 2004, when Brown was given a retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery, in London, Foss travelled from his home on the island of Guernsey to confront the artist in person.
“I was furious,” he told me. “I stormed into the gallery and shouted at the director, ‘Take these pictures off the wall; they don’t belong there.’ I wasn’t happy seeing copies of my work all over the place.” With admirable diplomacy, the gallery’s director managed to placate Foss, offering to add a credit beneath the paintings that cited the source of inspiration. When his ire dampened, Foss was introduced to Brown. “He is rather a nice chap,” Foss said. “I said to him, ‘How about, in future, I do the line work and you fill in the colors?’ ”
Foss has always taken a pragmatic approach to his work. He knew from a young age that he wanted to become an artist, and at fifteen he was earning a living creating signage for local companies on Guernsey. Foss left to study architecture at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where studying ranked far down on his list of priorities. He attended just two lectures in his first and only year at the college. Instead, he dedicated his time to pursuing professional magazine commissions. When he heard about the launch of Penthouse, he sent an erotic illustration to its founder, Bob Guccione, who, Foss said, “absolutely flipped, and he published the picture in the third issue.”
The newfound freelance gig earned Foss an unusual privilege with the college’s night porter, a Penthouse reader, who would allow the undergraduate to slip back into his dorm after the midnight curfew. Foss left Cambridge and was immediately placed on retainer with Penthouse. His move 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 film out called “2001,” which you have to see,’ ” he recalled. “That’s when the spaceships started.”
Foss, who had bought an airbrush to better render the human skin in nude magazine illustrations, turned the tool to spaceships and, through his agent, began providing the covers for many seminal novels of the time, including ones by Isaac Asimov and J. G. Ballard. Foss would rarely read the books, instead drawing upon his own imagination to create his majestic space vistas, defined by buckshot stars, gaseous swirls of color, and portly 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 commissioned me with a completely open brief,” he said. “The concept for the piece was that Captain Nemo had made it into 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 loved a piece, I’d give them the original,” he said. “It never occurred to me that it might be worth something.”
Despite Foss’s initial fury over what he saw as plagiarism by Brown, the younger artist had in fact sought permission, in the early nineteen-nineties, to create an homage to the picture. Foss’s work had attracted the attention of the film director Stanley Kubrick, who hired Foss to create concept art for his film “A.I.” “One of the reasons Brown got away with what he did is that I was working so hard for Kubrick. He was a taskmaster,” Foss explained. “I was commuting up to his house every day when my assistant received a letter from Brown. He put himself over as a young student who loved my work, and who wanted to create an homage. I scribbled a reply that simply read, ‘Go for it.’ ”
Today, Foss doesn’t know who owns the original “Captain Nemo’s Castle.” “I think a Parisian gallery sold the work in the early nineteen-eighties,” he said. But he’s certain that it’s worth only a fraction of Brown’s version. (Friends of Foss who reside in his Guernsey home town own another of the paintings that Brown reinterpreted.) “What I can’t understand is, who would pay six million dollars for a copy when they can buy the original for a fraction of the price?” Foss said.
Foss’s modesty about his career is charming but misplaced—or, perhaps, misdirected. Only once did he allow a flicker of indignation to show, when he said, “I wouldn’t mind a retrospective of my work at the Serpentine.” The source of his restraint may be the simple fact that he worked as a for-hire illustrator during his most productive and influential phase, during the nineteen-seventies, rather than in the echelons of high art where Brown plays. But his freelance work established the visual language of a genre, making vivid the hazy future of routine space travel not only for film directors but for the culture at large.
There is, then, an undercurrent of injustice to the astronomical price of Brown’s imitation: he has reaped a larger financial reward. Foss must settle for something else: the plain knowledge that he defined and popularized a niche—a noble success, but one that seizes fewer headlines than seven-figure auction prices. But perhaps Foss will leave a different kind of legacy. “Just before Christmas, I was installed in London’s Shepperton Studios to dream up spaceships for a new Marvel film,” he said. “After I sat down, I was joined by these whiz kids with computers, who were all there to do the same thing. I was the only one with pencils and paper. They told me, ‘You are the one that inspired us to get into this.’ That was a great moment.” Foss continued, “To be truthful, I didn’t bother asking which film I was there for. I just drew spaceships, which is all most people seem to want from me.”
