WINSOR McCAY HAD AN OPINION ON TARIFFS

Today the Supreme Court listened to heated legal arguments about the tariffs recently imposed by the US.  But the arguments over tariff policy have been going on for a long time.  

Over a century ago, Winsor McCay, the creator of Little Nemo, drew the following political cartoon about the effect of tariffs:

In my view, today's political cartoonists haven't learned much from the past century.

On the other hand, neither have today's politicians. 

TAMEA versus MAISIE

Tamea, the bewitching queen of the South Sea isle of Riva, kissed Dan twice within 5 minutes of meeting him.  Maisie, on the other hand, Dan's reliable and steadfast girlfriend from America, permitted Dan to kiss her just once in twelve years.

by Dean Cornwell, from Cosmopolitan Magazine, 1923

In the story, Never The Twain Shall Meet by Peter Kyne, Dan is torn between his passion for Tamea and his loyalty to Maisie.  

In the end, Tamea makes the choice for Dan.  She loves him, but nobly sends him back to Maisie because she knows he wouldn't be happy for long with the free life on her tropical island.  He grew up in a culture of restraint, control and Christian values.  The cultures were just too different, and "never the twain shall meet." 

When Tamea rejects Dan and sends him back to Maisie, he breaks down sobbing:

At the end of of the story, we witness Dan returning to America with Maisie, but staring thoughtfully back to Riva as it disappears in the distance:

Here's the story behind the story: the illustrator Dean Cornwell married Miss Mildred Kirkham in 1918.  The couple had cultural differences of their own.  For one thing, Mildred was morally opposed to drinking alcohol.  For another, Mildred didn't enjoy traveling.  She preferred to stay close to home in NewYork city while Cornwell loved the great outdoors and exploring the American West.  Soon Cornwell was working overseas, and was known to have had romantic relationships with other women.

After Cornwell's illustrations for Never The Twain Shall Meet were published, the canvases were returned to his studio.  Cornwell revisited his painting of Dan and Maisie sailing away and decided to change the outcome.  He painted over the face of Maisie with the face of his own mistress.

In this way, art permitted Cornwell a tiny rebellion against the fate of the fictional character, Dan.

ON TOP OF THE ENCHANTED MESA

 Fans of Krazy Kat will be familiar with the "Enchanted Mesa," the mystical cliff in the remote desert.  No human ever sees the top, but it is a place where magic occurs.  For example, it is where babies come from. 

Fans of the illustrator Harold Von Schmidt will be familiar with his own treatment of the Enchanted Mesa, an actual place in New Mexico:   

from Von Schmidt's masterful illustrations for the book, Death Comes For The Archbishop (1927)

It's my bias that when dealing with mystical subjects, line is a superior medium because it keeps a respectful distance from the magic.  It is less literal than realistic painting, and less presumptuous in its response to awe.  Drawing, by its nature, acknowledges its limitations, yet those limits leave more room for human supposition. 

And as the Von Schmidt drawing demonstrates, all of this can be done without losing the power of the original subject.

ELIZABETH SHIPPEN GREEN ON THE BRINK

 In 1902, this is how Elizabeth Shippen Green illustrated moonlight:

Less than ten years later, her treatment of moonlight was far more accomplished:

How do we account for the great transformation of her work within a decade?

Green worked at the dawn of the 20th century, on the brink of many great changes:

• The art world was evolving: Green's beloved teacher and mentor, Howard Pyle, passed away along with other great classical illustrators such as Edwin Austin Abbey.  Green had been a member of Pyle's first art class in 1894; she recalled, "he did not so much teach me how to draw but how to interpret life."  Now a new generation was elbowing its way onto the stage.   In the decade following 1902, Picasso and Braque invented cubism; Fauvism made its debut at the Paris salon; and Marinetti introduced his "Futurist Manifesto."

• Opportunities were changing dramatically for women illustrators:  Previously, illustration had been almost exclusively a man's profession.  In 1907, Green was among the very first women admitted to the Society of Illustrators.  She earned a long term contract with Harper's Magazine doing a higher quality of illustrations. As Green's biographer Alice Carter wrote,  "The first generation of educated American women was becoming successful in a variety of careers, and their achievements were beginning to attract considerable attention."

• Color printing was undergoing a revolution:  Green began her career drawing black and white illustrations with thick outlines.  Look how her work changed as new technologies increased her powers.

Slowly, crude color was added:

Color became more accurate and subtle:

Finally, here are some details from the example I used at the start:

• Wrenching changes in Green's personal life:  The changing role of women forced difficult decisions on Green.  She had to choose between working as an artist or higher education at one of the colleges now available to women. Green, along with illustrators Violet Oakley and Jessie Wilcox Smith, stayed briefly at Bryn Mawr college where Green said she got her whole education sitting on the college lawn breathing in the knowledge left unabsorbed by the coeds. 

Most importantly, during this decade of change Green lived as one of the "red rose girls," three talented women illustrators who lived together in an intimate, loving relationship made possible by the new freedom for women.  The three had vowed never to get married, but in 1911 Green broke her vow and left the group to marry a man. Her decision was agonizing for the entire group. Green was so torn by her choice, she prolonged her engagement, on and off, for 7 years.  

Green lived on the brink of these great trends; she had to gamble, making choices before the outcome was clear.  As we've seen, these changes in art, technology, relationships, and popular taste for illustration caused her great distress but didn't stop her art from improving. 

We all live in times of change. Today we have uncertainty swirling all around us, from technological revolutions caused by AI to radical transformations in the audience for illustration.  It remains to be seen if we navigate them as well as Green.

THE MAN BEHIND J.C. COLL'S DOOR

 

There's a lot going on in J.C. Coll's little drawing of a sword fight by a stranded stage coach.

Look how knowledgeable Coll's line is!  He understands that the coach would be tilted by the natural slope of the road, not upright.  He knows how the wheel would look caked with mud.  He even understands the suspension system of the coach, and is smart enough to make the lines dissipate before the details become boring.

There are six figures interacting in this little roadside ballet, each one posed with elegance

And each face, though tiny, retains its own integrity:

Hidden away in the back, behind the door of the coach, is another swordsman, this one a buffoon who couldn't quite make it out of the coach to defend the fair maiden.  (In the shadows we can just make out his hand fumbling the sword and his feet slipping out from under him.)

If you saw this illustration in a magazine today, who would even notice the small figure behind the door? It's debatable whether a narrative this complex even needed another figure.  

My point today is that this drawing was done in a very different era for a very different kind of audience, an audience that had time to linger over subtle details and get pleasure from small, hidden elements and surprises.  An audience without a computer or television competing for its attention, an audience that was not skimming over dozens of images, often in thumbnail sized icons.  That difference has a major impact on the incentives for the artist and the reaction of the audience.  

HOW ART SET MAD MAGAZINE FREE

Compare these two cartoons from MAD about father/son relationships.  The first is by Jack Davis:

The second is by Mort Drucker:

The first joke is a wisecrack using generic cartoon characters. The second joke involves a different kind of visual humor. It uses sharp observations about the personalities of the father and son: contrast the thick, rough lines used for the father with the delicate lines of the meek son; note how the angle of the picture points us right to the boy's upturned face and frail shoulders. The father’s cigar in his immense paw is a prop strategically placed in the foreground. The father's "smile" is misshapen from years of chomping on those cigars.

We know nothing about the lives of the father or son in the Davis cartoon but it doesn't matter; the joke doesn't depend on it. On the other hand, Drucker’s drawing tells us everything about this boy's life and the life of his father.

The first cartoon could've been drawn by any of the artists in MAD's talented stable.  The second cartoon could only have been drawn by Drucker.

MAD's evolution from the first type of joke to the second type of joke is the story of how art set MAD free.

__________________________

MAD started as a ten cent comic book, containing mostly silly spoofs of other comics or movies. It had an excellent collection of artists such as Davis, Wally Wood and Will Elder but its content remained mostly slapstick. MAD couldn't graduate to a more challenging and relevant form of humor until it acquired a different kind of artistic talent– a talent capable of handling a wider range of facial expressions, psychological staging and body language, of cultural and political references. 

This doesn't mean the early MAD art wasn't wonderful and hilarious. My point is that the new drawing ability gave MAD's writers a vehicle for more ambitious humor with far greater range.

MAD moved from Superduperman to questioning authority around the kitchen table...

... and from questioning authority around the kitchen table to questioning the veracity of TV commercials or even Presidents of the United States. It was this new, more mature brand of humor that was primarily responsible for transforming MAD into the inspiration for The National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live. Terry Gilliam (of Monty Python) said, "MAD became the Bible for me and my whole generation." Its irreverence conquered America.

Consider some of the fruits of MAD's new artistic reach:

Drucker’s version of West Side Story was not a satire of the movie, but rather a story about a street gang rumble between the communist eastern block nations and the democratic western nations. Drucker had to draw recognizable caricatures of dictators dressed as juvenile delinquents, dancing in front of photos of the United Nations. Earlier MAD artists couldn't do this.

The movie, Fiddler on the Roof was converted into Antenna on the Roof, a commentary about the culture shock of Jewish families who came to America and found "success" to be a mixed blessing. Earlier MAD artists could never support such a story.

Drucker's drawings were crucial to introducing young readers to strange new settings, some of them real and some of them not so much.   For example, Drucker's drawing of a crowded wedding buffet (below) helped readers understand a world they might not have personally experienced but which nevertheless rang true.

Or look at how Drucker takes us to the other side of the world, showing the plight of laborers crowded into the hull of a 19th century southeast Asian steamer ship:

Or into a frontier saloon.  Note the gilded tacky decor and the ornate cash register:

MAD readers were transported into hundreds of such scenes, made more believable by Drucker's details.  And this is the crucial point: Drucker believed that accurate drawing would make the most preposterous premises seem more real.  He felt that if he followed the laws of realism most of the time when it came to anatomy, perspective, time, space and gravity, he might buy himself a longer leash when it came to strange and loony situations.  

Drucker: making the nutty drawings believable by alternating them with accurate ones.

Mad became great and influential by offering a menu of talented artists and writers working in a variety of styles.  Some fans will always love Don Martin more and some will always love Wally Wood.  

But it seems to me that MAD became a more formidable cultural force not because its writers suddenly became smarter or more talented; it was because the quality of the art suddenly enabled the writers to present smarter, more talented ideas.  Art was always the pathogen that carried MAD's humor and made it so infectious, spreading rapidly from schoolchild to schoolchild around the world.  Once the art was good enough to host a wider range of content, it set MAD's humor free to infect the world.  

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 77

In one of the greatest passages of western literature, Dante begins The Divine Comedy:

Midway through the journey of life, I found myself in a dark wood where the right way was lost. 

For me, this lovely etching by Martin Lewis, titled Which Way? is the visual equivalent. 

We all set out on life's path eager to digest the world, but there comes a point midway through the journey when we realize that the world has been quietly digesting us all along, and that it's likely to win the race.  

Like Dante's dark woods, Lewis' blanket of snow covers the road and obscures the landscape. Our puny headlights are outmatched.  The road ends ahead but is that a cross or a telephone pole?  

I love the mood of this drawing, the fear rising in our chest from uncertainty and the lump in our throat from those stars in the sky.  

This image wouldn't be nearly so meaningful if it wasn't handled so effectively.  The lighting is brilliant.  The control of value is extraordinary.  Compare the information Lewis shares (the sharp details in the snow, for example) with the information he withholds (the silhouettes in the car).  

A beautifully orchestrated piece.