I like Tomi Ungerer's drawing about the nature of men and women:
The lines may appear light and slapdash, but the ideas have genuine weight. It's an excellent example of conceptual or “idea” art, which transformed the field of illustration in the latter part of the 20th century. This type of art abandoned the traditional, literal approach to picture making in favor of visualizing ideas using metaphors, symbols, visual puns and word play.
Perhaps the greatest conceptual illustrator of all, Saul Steinberg, said: "drawing is a way of reasoning on paper."
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Steinberg explains, "The vulnerable part of the man in danger is the cry for help, which is the part by which the crocodile holds him and which has the function of an appetizer. What do I want to say? That he who cries in terror becomes the victim of his statement." |
Here, Melinda Beck creates a devastating image with the simple line of a twisted coat hanger:
Conceptual illustration began to gain momentum in the 1960s, led by artists such as Steinberg and the gang from Push Pin Studios.
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| illustration of "Impotence" by Push Pin's Seymour Chwast |
Some argue that conceptual art was a life raft for artists in a diminished market for illustration beleaguered by photography, digital art and video. There was no longer a demand for beautifully crafted oil paintings by master painters. Another explanation is that today's dumbed down audience simply lacks the taste or patience to appreciate the kind of art that made the golden age of illustration great.
But even if conceptual art was pushed by those negative forces, it was also pulled by the brilliance of artists such as Steinberg and Milton Glaser. Fans such as Steven Heller argue that "idea illustrations made the art more relevant and thought-provoking."
I like a great deal of conceptual illustration but I have two problems with conceptual illustration as it reigns today.
The first is that the great conceptual artists tended to simplify images in order to highlight an idea-- complex, substantial, playful, clever-- without undue distractions of style, skill and technique. This was an intentional prioritization of elements. But today mediocre concepts are used on a mass scale as a justification for low skill in drawing and painting. For example, the talentless flimflam man and self-professed conceptual artist Richard Prince “redefines the concepts of authorship, ownership and aura.” Not everyone can be an intellectual like Steinberg, but hollow and pedestrian ideas fall short of the original justification of idea art.
My second (and greater) gripe with much of today's conceptual illustration is that as the idea became increasingly important, the visual form began to wither unnecessarily. We’ve lost a lot by devaluing traditional elements such as design, color or a sensitive line. My bias is that artists who elect to work in a visual medium should respect the challenges of form-creating work. Otherwise, why not work with ideas as a writer?
Rather than show a selection of illustrations that embody my two gripes, I thought it would be nicer to end on an upbeat note with a sampling of conceptual artists today who still know how to deal with both form and content.
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| John Cuneo-- one of the smartest and funniest illustrators today-- established himself as a talented draftsman before evolving into in a looser and more expressive style. |
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| A nicely designed Istvan Banyai |
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| You have to look twice to get Antje Herzog's drawing |
23 comments:
It’s possible that drawing is considered now as a "I can do it too" field – like photography - and a lot of people with artistic aspirations try to express their ideas and stories through drawing without any formation - or graphic talent.
A good example of this is Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis comics). She had no interest into comics but met the people of L’Association and was convinced to tell her life through comics - she never drew comics before. Ironically, it was a huge success.
At the end, she stopped drawing - comics or illustration - and tried a movie career.
As a long-time reader of the New Yorker, I've watched the quality of their cartoons diminish in both concept and, even more markedly, in execution. The ideas behind most of their recent panels are largely devoid of their storied wit, and the drawings have dropped to a level of amateurism that makes them difficult to look at, let alone enjoy. Their famous roster of cartoonists, too lengthy to list, were often given a full page to showcase their brilliance- none of today's group could possibly handle such an opportunity successfully. I wonder if, as in other fields, the New Yorker's decision to be more inclusive with the submissions they accept has contributed to its current sorry state.
"Their famous roster of cartoonists, too lengthy to list, were often given a full page to showcase their brilliance-"
Yeah, like Whitney Darrow -- such a genius that I regularly pull out my old moldy copy of "Stop, Miss" and still chuckle audibly at his superb cartoons. As a kid, I loved the drawings even when the sophisticated gag was beyond my ken. Now I get both sensibilities, and marvel at their wit.
Your point can also be seen with drawn animation David. Compare even a still from the 1937 Snow White with one from South Park. The latter is addressing the intellect and its functional info-graphics are sufficient to communicate the content relevant to it. The former is addressing our experiential understanding and so the artwork must infer and imply, by way of its execution, embodiment itself.
I believe the unfortunate state of the cartooning profession is down to the tyranny of intellect over spirit.
Isn't that "nicely designed Mark Ulriksen" by Istvan Banyai?
(Thanks for doing this blog, by the way! I've been reading for years and I've learned a lot. And even when I disagree with you, I appreciate your commitment to having standards, holding a point of view, and writing well about images.)
I personally can't get it up for these artists, but I think that probably has more to do with the ideas themselves than with left-brained cartoons in general.
This week, the left-brained ideas that caught my interest off the top of my head were:
- That chemical evolution in a prebiotic environment is unnecessary in light of the anthropic principle.
- That classical music probably had more in common sonically with courtly Greco-Roman music than we would believe.
- That Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAGs) outperform fine-tuning for all information recall applications in generative Large Language Models.
- That Shakespeare could have been a translator of now lost Iron Age plays, rather than a playwright proper, and that this better explains his propensity for coining new words.
- Etc.
I'm not sure where I'd find a similar thrill from concept art. The idea that GOP policies limiting legal access to abortion could lead to coat hanger abortions is so trite as to seem hardly worth mentioning.
Another explanation is that today's dumbed down audience simply lacks the taste or patience to appreciate the kind of art that made the golden age of illustration great.
To suggest that taste or patience is the limiting factor, I think, overstates the public's ability to comprehend golden age illustration. No amount of patiently staring at a Dean Cornwell piece is going to make Bubba the mechanic or Ndugu the Hunter-Gatherer understand the poetry in it. A poetic soul is more than patient and tasteful.
Jason Das-- Wow, thanks for the correction! I picked the image up somewhere where it was misattributed, and I unquestioningly used whatever name they used. I should've paid closer attention. I've fixed it now, thanks for catching my screw up.
This week, the left-brained ideas that caught my interest off the top of my head were:
- That chemical evolution in a prebiotic environment is unnecessary in light of the anthropic principle.
- That classical music probably had more in common sonically with courtly Greco-Roman music than we would believe.
- That Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAGs) outperform fine-tuning for all information recall applications in generative Large Language Models.
- That Shakespeare could have been a translator of now lost Iron Age plays, rather than a playwright proper, and that this better explains his propensity for coining new words.
- Etc.
Richard, what are the sources for the prebiotic/anthropic and Shakespeare ideas? Both sound bonkers to me.
Minicircle, the plasmid bacterial vector for gene therapy - in various trials at various stages in the experimental micronation of Próspera in Honduras - is what has caught my interest most these last few weeks. (The wild west push to reach the future of medicine is happening in hot spots all over the world, but is utterly handicapped in the U.S. by - insider accounts claim - entrenched interests.)
To suggest that taste or patience is the limiting factor, I think, overstates the public's ability to comprehend golden age illustration. No amount of patiently staring at a Dean Cornwell piece is going to make Bubba the mechanic or Ndugu the Hunter-Gatherer understand the poetry in it. A poetic soul is more than patient and tasteful.
I know some excellent professional scientists and mathematicians who either cannot stand the visual and psychological stressors involved in good art. Or cannot seem to fathom anything that works by visual suggestion and aesthetic force. Thus they cannot discern the value of good art let alone appreciate it.
This is why the matter of aesthetic sensitivity (or insensitivity) isn't simply a matter of IQ (or perceived primitiveness).
I'd like to see those done in picture !
Bill
This is why the matter of aesthetic sensitivity (or insensitivity) isn't simply a matter of IQ (or perceived primitiveness).
Yes, absolutely. That was just sloppy rhetoric.
what are the sources for the prebiotic/anthropic and Shakespeare ideas? Both sound bonkers to me.
Just conversations with friends. The chemical evolution/anthropic principle idea I think is pretty sound.
So, the anthropic principle tells us that we cannot fairly determine the likelihood of an event upon which our existence depends.
In an extreme case, let's presuppose that universally-speaking all planets have a 25% chance of being hit by a life-eradicating asteroid each year. We can only possibly live on a planet on which the annual asteroid missed every single year (no matter how remote that possibility). And as such, we cannot presuppose the likelihood of an Earth-destroying asteroid tomorrow based on the lack of one in human history. If they didn't all miss, we wouldn't be here.
Similarly, our existence depends on the creation of an irreducibly small cellular organism. Our theories of abiogenesis, devised prior to the discovery of the anthropic principle, presupposed that the creation of that organism must have been likely in some way. Our scientists concocted the theory of chemical evolution to explain why obtaining living things in a prebiotic environment should be expected.
However, in light of the anthropic principle, that we wouldn't exist absent the creation of the first single-celled organism, we cannot determine abiogenesis's likelihood based on our existence.
Instead, it may have taken all 21,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets operating over the first 10 billion years before just one of them produced a single-celled organism. Given those scales, it becomes theoretically possible that the first cell did not evolve chemically at all but happened through a sheer infinitesimally unlikely accident.
If chemical evolution were impossible, and the only way to obtain the first cell was through all the oceans in the universe randomly bashing chemicals together for 10 billion years, we could only possibly live on that planet on which the impossible happened — a cell from nowhere.
The wild west push to reach the future of medicine is happening in hot spots all over the world, but is utterly handicapped in the U.S. by - insider accounts claim - entrenched interests.
I dig it.
"However, in light of the anthropic principle, that we wouldn't exist absent the creation of the first single-celled organism, we cannot determine abiogenesis's likelihood based on our existence."
I'm confused by your use of the Anthropic Principle here. But in the way you are generally using it, I don't see the distinction between it and a simple avoidance of a Hasty Generalization fallacy.
Regardless, every running of a Miller-Urey type experiment resulted in Amino Acid production.
And I don't see Earth as some mere one-off data point in the argument about life elsewhere. Earth is a very complex system, built of billions of subsystems, nested and nested, distinct yet interconnected. And every system in the system sustains life in its own organic way.
To me, then, the argument surrounding whether other 'Earth-like' planets would necessarily host life hinge on just how Earth-like they look. Because that translates into the similitude of the systems involved. Which matters because, to some extent, Earth's life makes Earth's systems function the way they do, which causes them to look the way they do.
So, personally, I wouldn't bet a single cent against the proposition that every Earth-like planet (accurately assessed as such) is necessarily teeming with life. And that we couldn't count the number of such planets in a thousand lifetimes. (Unless the theory is posited that the same effects in nature can be made by different causes or different systems can produce the same results. Which I don't buy.)
Li-An-- I think you're right, and for two reasons. First, digital and mechanical aids have become an effective substitute for a lot of earned drawing skills. Second, our standards for good drawing have dropped precipitously.
NC Freeman-- I agree about the quality of the visual arts in the New Yorker. The quality of their writing remains high, but Remnick-- a very bright lad-- has no understanding of, or appreciation for, the visual arts. That seems to be a plague of our time, especially for bad conceptual artists: people think, "I'm so smart I don't have to draw well." Usually, it turns out they're not even so smart.
Wes-- Yes, a lot of great, and still relevant, talent buried back there. That's one of the primary reasons for this blog.
chris bennett-- I've noticed the same thing. You'd think that new technologies would've changed the economics of animation in a way that would set the creative artists free. Instead, animation like Southpark and The Simpsons seems dull and unimaginative-- just enough to get the idea across (even though the ideas are often pretty good).
Disney was just getting started with Snow White, but by the time Pinocchio came along-- wow! I mention that because in recent years two high budget, CGI enhanced versions of Pinocchio were released with all star casts and big shot directors, yet they couldn't hold a candle to Disney's 1939 classic. Human imagination and creative talent trumped money and technology.
Richard-- I'm not sure the left-brained ideas that caught your attention are conducive to visual treatment. There has to be a more effective medium to deal with chemical evolution. Still, there are plenty of other important topics involving human nature worthy of left brain attention. Tomi Ungerer is right when he says that, beneath all the facades and veneers erected by civilization, men are basically brutes who paw the earth and charge, while women are far more clever and know exactly how to wave a red flag to manipulate a bull. Similarly, Steinberg's point-- whining only alerts nearby predators that there is sustenance to be had-- is an important life lesson that some people (including experts on chemical evolution) never quite figure out.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "I know some excellent professional scientists and mathematicians who either cannot stand the visual and psychological stressors involved in good art."
Yes, we've all seen nerds who dress in clashing colors and patterns, grids and stripes that look like a TV test pattern. However, one of the advantages of having a broad and diversified notion of art is that there is not just one "aesthetic force." Cerebral types may like the art of Marcel Duchamp, who may not appeal to fans of Dean Cornwell. Mathematicians may relate to the work of Escher or Albers, even if I don't rank them particularly high on my list. Professional scientists may prefer the art of da Vinci's engineering drawings to his madonnas. And, to end with a topic we've discussed before, I think it requires a certain emotional receptivity to the aesthetics of raw form for people to find the work of Motherwell or Ellsworth Kelly or Frankenthaler fulfilling but some people just can't see it at all.
Bill/Anonymous wrote: "I'd like to see those done in picture!"
I wouldn't. Every once in a while some highly talented comic artist such as Neal Adam or Steve Ditko gets it into their head that they've come up with a unified field theory or a perpetual motion machine or some other great scientific breakthrough, and decide they're going to use their great cartoonist skills to convey their idea. The results are almost always painful.
I mention that because in recent years two high budget, CGI enhanced versions of Pinocchio were released with all star casts and big shot directors, yet they couldn't hold a candle to Disney's 1939 classic.
I'm right with you there David!
About animation. Classic animation at one time was about depicting the unreal in a fanciful but semi-real world maybe limited because of budgetary or technical reasons or artistic choices. Willie Coyote would fall from a colorfully rendered Grand Canyon cliff or be struck by a truck emerging from a just painted tunnel by the road runner. Pinocchio would walk around and interact with Gepetto and the other characters in beautifully rendered background painted on cels. In todays world of CGI animation the characters exist in a photo realistic world that seems more real than our own. Where’s the imagination the beauty or the art?
Movieac,
On one hand we have the reduction of the plastic means tending to the point of poetic sterility and on the other, with 'photo-realism', naturalism let's say, we have complexity tending to overwhelm the ability to structurally organise the plastic means into poetry. Every artist has to tread attentively along an optimal path defined by their ability, talent and temperament, between these two extremes towards each poetic realisation.
This is something even harder to achieve by committee, and the fact that the early Disney corporation were able to achieve this in pretty much film after film is a testament to what can be achieved by a shared aesthetic vision. Replacing this with formula, technical gloss, pandering and political agendas we wind up with shiny pulp propaganda-stamped wallpaper rolled out by a bureaucracy that, once upon a time, was a great entertainment institution.
Movieac: "In todays world of CGI animation the characters exist in a photo realistic world that seems more real than our own. Where’s the imagination the beauty or the art?"
Chris Bennett: "On one hand we have the reduction of the plastic means tending to the point of poetic sterility and on the other, with 'photo-realism', naturalism let's say, we have complexity tending to overwhelm the ability to structurally organise the plastic means into poetry."
Agree with you guys. And I think the pinnacle of the nadir is the superhero films. (Excluding the first Iron Man). Zach Snyder to me is the most egregious example of the problem. He's like Boris on steroids with a quarter of a billion dollars worth of budget. In his efforts to make these wild, sprawling - often cosmic - fantasy worlds as true-to-life as possible - as realistic, naturalistic, believable, consequential, politically-charged, emotion-laden - he seems utterly unaware that what he's making is monstrous, depressing, and exhausting. All the joy of comic books is swapped out for real fear and horror; gods doing Grand Guignal on a mass scale to actual people.
Which is to say, if the artist isn't making some kind of human and personal poetry, some kind of visual music out of it - a song - or a dream or dance, a play of form and sound, where characters and events are implied as much as stated, and represent something other than themselves, then it actually looks like the artist is killing, torturing, and destroying actual people and things. Which makes him a kind of sociopath of spectacle; making hyperreal 'snuff porn' for a deranged and drooling audience rather than poetry, where everything is material and real, blood and pain are actually blood and pain, and nothing is a metaphor for anything. This is the height of nerd-culture left-brain autistic a-romantic anti-art.
"Yes, we've all seen nerds who dress in clashing colors and patterns, grids and stripes that look like a TV test pattern."
I'm talking about actual aesthetic tests and pointed questions about how they are responding to aesthetic stimuli - why can't they read the picture, why can't they feel the movement or mood, why doesn't that pictorial depth effect work on their senses, why do you respond negatively to this image, and so on. There are people who are actually retarded aesthetically while being highly advanced in other ways. Or so hyper-sensitive that they are essentially crippled in the face of even the slightest stress or stimuli.
Such people would prefer a flatly-painted baby blue wall to any Rembrandt you might name. Are we to equate then the baby blue wall to a Rembrandt? Both 'Art' just the same?
Who does such confused categorization - and lack of discernment - help?
"However, one of the advantages of having a broad and diversified notion of art is that there is not just one aesthetic force."
I wasn't intending to use Aesthetic Force in the singular. There are indeed many qualities of effect that can be accomplished via poetic art.
But aesthetic force does require aesthetic means, poetry does require poesis. Part of what I am always trying to explain here is that if the work of art isn't working by means of aesthetic forces and other kinds of suggestion, it must be 'working' - to the extent that it is - by some other means.
Magritte's Treachery of Images - the pipe that he writes is not a pipe - for example, isn't working aesthetically. It is a light piece of frivolous entertainment; a picture-book nursery primer for pseudo-philosophical nerds. To say it is the fundamentally the same thing as Rubens' Descent from the Cross - all 'Art' - is to render the terms meaningless. Which may thrill you, but it does the culture no good at all as far as I can tell. And deranges understanding of Art as a distinct human endeavor.
Hi, I was feeling overwhelmed but strangely empty with the endless art on Pinterest and missing leafing through great art in books pre internet, when I stumbled across your AMAZINGLY brilliant blog. I’ve just read about Austen Briggs and photography from 2010 and am blown away by how much you’ve woken up my brain to some truly great line work.
Thank you! Please keep it up !
P.s. so nice to see illustration being recognized. As a kid I never understood why it was the lesser art form when so much work and skill went into it. Yest it’s totally magical.
I'm really sorry to say that despite the best will in the world, I haven't a clue what's going on in Antje Herzog's illustration. Maybe if I saw it in context with a big headline? I'd really appreciate a hint or two!
Cuneo is a genius. I always refer him to other artists to watch. I wanna draw like John with that squiggly vibe thing he's got going on.
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