ELEGANT COMICS FROM A BYGONE ERA

Fifty years ago, some comic strips presumed readers had a level of literacy, as well as a patience for drawings, that today's readers lack.

You won't find anything on today's comic pages today to resemble this Sunday strip by the great Leonard Starr.  Here, a journalist is smuggling a Chinese defector out through the jungles of Vietnam.  The two have begun to get on each other's nerves.  Starr's smart dialogue combines politics, human nature and humor.  

Note Starr's cinematography,  his facial expressions, his understanding of anatomy and design.  Readers today don't linger over the comic page long enough to appreciate such characteristics.  

I love the elegance of Starr's lines, both written and drawn.

Around the same time, MAD Magazine was producing satires that assumed even children knew the words and music to Gilbert & Sullivan songs.  MAD writers and artists even thought their young subscribers would get jokes about rivalry between Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater.

Here the great Mort Drucker conjured up a crowd scene with caricatures of the extended Kennedy dynasty, in a scene that relies on your knowledge of the wealth and influence of the Kennedy family patriarch, the family's love of football, and the roles of the other celebrities in the family.

Today MAD Magazine has been dumbed down to appeal to a less literate audience, and streamlined for bright readers who process large quantities of information on an accelerated basis.

Karrie Jacobs wrote that in our information era, we have been "seduced into thinking about ideas-- the intangible stuff that comprises our cutlture, our mental universe, our homegrown organic realities-- as information."  This, she objects, is misguided: "information should be our raw material, not our end product.... Point and click is not a satisfying form of interaction.... With information technology our reach is infinite but our grasp is weak."

It is exhilarating to live in the information era but it is important to maintain enough self-control so that we don't let it ruin our attention span for the kind of art that needs to be savored. Some images are best experienced abruptly, but others (such as the drawings of Starr and Drucker above) need to be approached with a level of literacy and patience that unfortunately seems to be waning in popular audiences.

There is a benefit to surrounding ourselves with objects of craftsmanship and beauty, even in morning newspapers and cheap magazines.  In the long run, it helps to shape our reaction to the world around us.  So I offer you these lovely drawings at the end of 2012, as something to consider as you set your pace for 2013.  

LEE CONREY (1883-1976)

 Few people today remember  Lee Conrey, but he drew thousands of lurid illustrations for  The American Weekly in the 1920s and 1930s.

 

The American Weekly was a cheesy supplement for Sunday newspapers, printed by William Randolph Hearst on pulp paper.

Week after week, Conrey drew ambitious, complex drawings with a lot of heart.

 

 

 

Most copies of The American Weekly have crumbled with age, but it would be a shame if Conrey's illustrations crumbled with them.

 You can tell that after thousands of drawings, Conrey still got the same child like pleasure from creating these overdone, dramatic pictures.  A fortunate artist indeed!

AGAINST SCHOLARSHIP IN THE ARTS

"The shudder of awe," wrote Goethe, "is humanity's highest faculty."  This shudder may explain why many people are attracted to the arts.  But others, who aren't so comfortable shuddering, have found more orderly ways to approach art.

For example, art historians try to understand art by researching the lives of artists.  (The new biography of Saul Steinberg, a splendid piece of scholarship, devotes 732 pages to how Steinberg's childhood, his sex life, and his paternal grandfather might have shaped the pictures we think we enjoy today.) 

For a different approach, chemists analyze the composition of pigments for whatever insights chemistry can contribute.  Then of course radiologists x-ray paintings, searching for earlier, discarded drafts.  Psychologists rummage through an artist's underwear drawer for psychological explanations for creative decisions.

But that's not the worst of it.  Prominent economist David Galenson explains that with the benefit of new "quantitative methods," we can now conclusively list the top 25 "most important works of art of the 20th century." (Number one is Picasso's Demoiselles D'Avignon, in case you wanted to know.)

Physicist Charles Falco, an expert in molecular beam epitaxy, won headlines with his "scientific proofs" and "mathematical calculations" explaining how great artists painted pictures. 

Statisticians have even resolved the long debate over the merits of drawing vs. painting.  According to the experts at Artprice.com: 

Drawing is no longer and will never more be considered a poor relation to painting.... [O]ver the last ten years (January 2002 – January 2012) the price index for drawings has progressed more than 197% versus 161% for that of painting.

Don't think for one minute that Artprice.com's researchers shy away from the big issues.  Here they address "the entire anguish of humanity":

Edvard Munch’s The Scream, which condenses in a single image of just 79 x 59 cm the entire anguish of humanity, can be considered the “Mona Lisa of Expressionism.”  In just one adjudication, the Norwegian artist has completely outperformed his 2011 revenue total ($7,645,527 from 82 lots ) and has gained the potential to climb to a substantially higher level in the global ranking of artists by annual auction revenue (219th in 2011).

Ambitious academics, authors and social scientists are emboldened by the triumph of information  technology, clambering over the arts like over-ardent monkeys. They mistake information for ideas, and rarely come into contact with that "shudder of awe" stuff that Goethe wrote about.

 A survey of 230 art critics by Columbia University found that passing judgment on art was at the bottom of their list of priorities, while "providing an accurate descriptive account" was at the top.  Such descriptions provide information, but there is a big difference between information and wisdom.  James Elkins, chair of art history at the Art Institute of Chicago, concluded that "contemporary art criticism is entranced by the possibility of avoiding judgment."

If your prejudices are anything like mine, right about now you should be objecting: "How can more information ever be a bad thing?  Are we supposed to avert our eyes from whatever science might contribute?  Is art just some magic trick we shouldn't spoil by thinking too much about how it is done?"

I am a big fan of scientific research, but science and art seem to work by different rules.  In science, each new fact brings us closer to truth but in art, more facts can take us farther from-- not closer to-- the highest aesthetic experience.  Facts can dilute the most meaningful aspects of art.  They can distract and deceive the viewer.  Art can wilt under the weight of too much empirical data.

Michelangelo destroyed his preliminary drafts because he wanted the final work stand alone;  forensic investigations would only siphon off attention from the important parts.  For the same reason, Matisse claimed that "all artists should have their tongues cut out."  While we should not necessarily limit ourselves to Michelangelo's or Matisse's notions of the best way to experience their art, we should at least think twice before adopting the alternative approach offered by some ambitious economist.

Furthermore, my disagreement with scholarly research should not be viewed as anti-science.  To the contrary, science itself offers us a more suitable model for connecting with art: 

Chemistry tells us that the strongest bond between two substances is formed when their molecular structures are not too complete, and thus they are receptive to sharing pairs of electrons between them.  A substance with gaps in its electrons can fill those gaps with the electrons of another substance.  In this way, two molecules can unite into one bigger molecule-- a connection called a covalent bond, heavily crosslinked and powerful in a way no mere glue can match.  (This is why  epoxy, which combines the electrons of two ingredients, is so much stronger than regular glue applied unilaterally to a surface.)

No matter how much scientific data we compile to understand and capture an art object, we will never bond with it the way we might if we kept our outer electron ring open and receptive.  If we come to art fortified with too much information, we have fewer free electrons available for the new combinations that make so much of art worthwhile.

Ambiguity is the enemy of science, but ambiguity in art is a precious thing; it  provides the space essential for personalizing our reactions.  A covalent bond with art enables us to find greater inspiration than the art might supply if we simply followed a script produced through factual research. 

There's no doubt that research provides genuine benefits to art dealers, historians, grad students, voyeurs and economists.  At the same time, it can hinder a more meaningful relationship with art.  Anyone who still yearns for Goethe's shudder of awe may find scholarship a poor substitute.

NEW BOOK ABOUT ALBERT DORNE

Just in time for the holidays,  Auad Publishing (which brought you last year's Robert Fawcett monograph) has released the first monograph dedicated to master illustrator Albert Dorne, the most successful commercial artist of his day.

The book is hard cover, 9x12" with a dust jacket and 160 deluxe pages. Like the Fawcett book, it was edited by the talented Manuel Auad, who was kind enough to let me write the text again.

Many thanks to Walt Reed, Howard Munce and Leonard Starr who generously provided me with their memories of Dorne.  Here is my favorite anecdote, from Starr:

The artist Andy Warhol explained to Albert Dorne, "Art must transcend mere drawing."  

"Pardon me, Andy," Dorne interrupted, "but there's nothing all that fucking mere about drawing."

Dorne was one tough bird, and as you can tell, completely unapologetic for the "commercial" nature of his work.

Thanks also to Magdalen and Robert Livesey for generously sharing the archives of Dorne's Famous Artists School, as well as to the Norman Rockwell Museum for their archives containing the illuminating correspondence between Dorne and Norman Rockwell.  Introduction by  Howard Munce, with a "graphic foreword" by Jack Davis.

HERCULES TRIUMPHS OVER THE DUMPSTER

Some archaeologists believe that the oldest existing illustration of a fictional work on paper is this drawing of Hercules fighting a lion:
 

Known as the Heracles Papyrus, it was discovered under the desert sands outside the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus (named for a fish which, according to legend, ate the penis of the god Osiris).

The city was once the bustling regional capital of the 19th Upper Egyptian Nome.  For a thousand years, residents dumped their garbage-- including this noble little illustration of Hercules-- in the sands outside the city.  With the fall of the Egyptian empire, the city was conquered by successive foreign invaders (from Alexander the Great in 332 BCE to the Arabs in 641).  Reduced to ruins, Oxyrhyncus was abandoned and gradually reclaimed by the desert.

But it turns out that the climate was perfectly suited for preserving the scraps of paper in the rubbish heaps outside Oxyrhyncus.  The site had virtually no rain, a low water table, and was far from the Nile river (which flooded annually).  The dry sand blew over the tattered bits of papyrus, covering and preserving them until they could be rediscovered by archaeologists.  This was the ancient equivalent of mylar.

Thousands of years later, parents were still throwing away trashy illustrated stories of Hercules.

Hercules rescues Franklin Roosevelt from the Nazis: a comic from the famous "mile high" collection preserved in part by the favorable climate in Denver

But it is all in vain.  Hercules will always triumph over the dumpster. 

Parents hope their children will read something with enduring value, not cheap stories of musclebound heroes drawn on equally cheap paper.  But it's a funny thing about endurance; even the most perishable materials can become darn near immortal when they carry a message that is renewed by each new generation.  The Heracles of the papyrus seems to have outlasted the stone capitals of the mightiest empire on earth.

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 42

The remarkable Harry Beckhoff drew this tiny picture of a man scared by a black cat in 1913.

What a marvelous design.

Many artists would feel constrained by the actual size or shape of a cat.  Or they might struggle over the fact that a cat walks on the ground around our ankles, so you are obligated to draw the entire body if you want to show the face.

But Beckhoff understood that the design comes first.  Everything else flows from that.

BELIEVING IN A RED PIXEL

The computer gaming industry was launched using just a few primitive elements.

Two or three colored pixels were all that was necessary to construct a story in the minds of viewers: a red pixel might represent a missile trying to knock out that green pixel before it hits blue pixel earth.

Later would come photo-realistic graphics, complex story lines and motion sensitive technology.  But the most important step-- turning viewers into believers-- was achieved with just a few basic visual symbols.  Our imaginations did the rest.  

It's amazing how a visual image--even a single red pixel--  gives our minds a starting place for belief in scenarios where mere words might fail to persuade.   Even the most far fetched ideas become more plausible once we can visualize them.

The newly released movie Argo tells the true story of the rescue of American diplomats hiding in the Canadian embassy in 1979 after  a mob of Islamic militants took over the US embassy.  To smuggle the diplomats out of Iran, A CIA “exfiltration” expert made up a wild story about the diplomats being a movie crew scouting locations in Iran for a Hollywood space fantasy called “Argo.”

As one film critic recounts:

“You don’t have a better bad idea than this?” a State Department official asks the CIA.  ”This is the best bad idea we have,” is the reply....   They can’t fake any of the usual identities for the Americans because they are too easy to disprove.  The normal reasons for foreigners to be abroad — teaching, studying, aid — are not plausible.  Only something completely outrageous could be true.

But how to persuade the fanatical Iranian border guards who were skeptical of all foreign devils?   Why should they believe such a far fetched tale?  Because the CIA showed them Jack Kirby's concept drawings for the "film."

They really liked the drawings.

Once the guards saw the pictures, they were able to visualize the movie and became persuaded.  They let the diplomats go.  Whether you're playing video games or smuggling hostages out of Iran, the principle that "seeing is believing" pays off time and again.  People who dismiss pictures as the mere illusion of reality underestimate the reality of illusion.

THE SKETCHBOOKS OF HOWARD PYLE

Howard Pyle (1853-1911) was the father of American illustration.   His powerful compositions (such as these horizontal stripes across a background color field)...

...had their origin in Pyle's small sketchbooks where he developed the designs for his pictures.

In some of Pyle's sketches we see him carefully mapping the placement of figures and objects in space:

But my favorites are the ones where we see Pyle wrestling with the abstract designs of his paintings:

 

These images are courtesy of the good folks at the Delaware Art Museum which owns a treasure trove of Pyle's sketchbooks showing the master at work (Thanks, Mary and Erin!)

Figure study