PAT OLIPHANT AND NEWSPAPERS IN THE GRAVEYARD TOGETHER

 

“You have to wake up every morning angry.” -- Pat Oliphant

Last week I wrote an appreciation of the late great Pat Oliphant (1935-2026) in The Comics Journal.

In the process of writing it, I was struck by the fact that Oliphant's long, successful career was the result of a total fluke of time and place. 

He started out in a small town near Adelaide, Australia where nobody cared about current events.  He worked his way up to a job with the biggest newspaper in town, the Adelaide Advertiser, which Oliphant recalled "came out strongly for the weather." His drawings were heavily censored, not for political content (because there was none) but to make sure his drawings of cattle did not reveal a glimpse of a bull's pizzle.

Following in the footsteps of other great political cartoonists such as David Low, Oliphant fought his way out of rural Australia in 1964 to find a country with a market for his biting political observations and his powerful drawings.  As I wrote in The Comics Journal,

It turned out that Oliphant’s talents were perfectly suited for the U.S. in the 1960s. If he had come to America today, when the newspaper industry is anemic and editorial cartoonists are on a tighter leash, he might have fallen flat and the world would’ve been deprived of thousands of brilliant and witty drawings. But the 1960s were a time of great political ferment and artistic audacity, a time of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam war.... The combination of Oliphant and 1960s America proved combustible chemistry. Within months he was attracting national attention....

Oliphant's cartoons appeared in 500 newspapers around the world.

Today Pat Oliphant is in the graveyard, but so are the opportunities for young, angry, audacious political cartoonists whose barbed opinions and brilliant line once shocked millions of readers out of their reveries.  Where does a political cartoonist with his great talent go today to earn a living?  

Not long ago, Jeff Bezos's Washington Post began following in the footsteps of the Adelaide Advertiser, censoring the brilliant conservative cartoons of Michael Ramirez and the brilliant progressive cartoons of Ann Telnaes leaving editorial cartoons with unchallenging pablum suitable for the rapidly diminishing, addlepated American readership.   Telnaes quit the Post on principle and turned to substack.  

But looking back on 50 years of impressive drawings by Oliphant, it's difficult to think about how all that amazing content might never have materialized if Oliphant was off by a few years, or a few miles.  It's even more difficult to think about where such talent will congregate in the future. To quote my good friend Thomas Gray:

Many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

TRIBUTE TO AN ILLUSTRATED BOOK, part 3

The False Gods by George Horace Lorimer was illustrated in 1906 by a young J.C. Leyendecker.  It is not mentioned in any of the reference books on Leyendecker.

1906 was an interesting moment for the world's perception of ancient Egypt.  19th century colonial exploration had revealed-- but not solved-- many of the intriguing mysteries of that fabled empire.  The discovery of King Tut's tomb, which sparked the international Egyptian craze, was still 16 years away. 

The Riddle of the Sphinx by Elihu Vedder (1836)

Books such as The False Gods filled in gaps between the the initial speculations and the archaeological facts.  Without photographs or scientific evidence, the public had to rely upon the imaginations of artists.  Illustrators were the George Lucases and the Steven Spielbergs of their day, inventing the images for an insatiable public and shaping their fantasies. 

In 1906, Howard Carter was an unemployed artist who had traveled to Egypt inspired by books.  He first found work copying tomb decorations.  During long stretches of unemployment, he supported himself by painting watercolors which he sold to tourists.  He wandered around the Valley of the Kings searching for ancient tombs and eventually became a bona fide Egyptologist.

Funded by British Lord Carnarvon, in 1922 Carter stumbled upon one of the most famous Egyptian archaeological discoveries of all time, King Tut's tomb.

In an era before television or the internet, illustrated books like this one served as a stepping stone to all kinds of explorations and achievements.

COLORING BOOKS FOR GROWN UPS

In the early1960s a flurry of coloring books appeared with grown up content.  Don't ask me why.

Like children's coloring books, they were printed on cheap pulp paper with simple line drawings suitable for coloring in with crayon.  Each page might contain a sentence or two of very simple language, like a child's primer.  

The first major example was The JFK Coloring Book illustrated by Mort Drucker.  It was intended as a cheap novelty item but it unexpectedly became a smash hit. It sold out multiple printings and spent weeks on the bestseller lists. It was covered widely in the press, including Time Magazine and Newsweek. The Smithsonian Institution bought a copy for its collection.

The JFK Coloring Book was quite profitable for the authors (not so much for the artist).  Immediately, numerous imitators stampeded into the market.  Artist Jack Davis quickly illustrated a coloring book about Soviet boss Nikita Khruschev:

 

Drucker was called back for an encore performance with another coloring book about the Kennedy administration.

The same year, artist Shel Silverstein produced the wicked Uncle Shelby's ABZ book, using child-like drawings and language but again, definitely intended for adults.

The glut of coloring books soon saturated the market, and the demand subsided.  Illustrators packed up their tents and wandered off looking for the next big thing.  

Twenty five years later there were a couple of half- hearted attempts at reviving the market, including the Ollie North Coloring Book and The Ronald Regan Coloring Book, both illustrated by Mort Drucker.  The drawings were more sophisticated and the covers were now in color but by this time the moment for such coloring books had passed. 

It's difficult to explain the appeal in the '60s of putting adult content in a child-like format.  Mark Twain effectively showed the adult world through the eyes of an innocent youth in Huckleberry Finn.  In the 1950s, Charles Schulz's strip Peanuts put adult messages in the mouths of small, simply drawn children.  Perhaps these coloring books were a continuation of that device.  In any event, that fad-- like so many others in the history of illustration-- came and went, leaving some nice pictures behind. 

TRIBUTE TO AN ILLUSTRATED BOOK, part 2

Lynd Ward's 1929 book, God's Man, came out at the wrong time and place. 

At a time when full color reproductions on glossy pages in books and magazines were new and wildly popular, God's Man was made exclusively of black and white woodcuts, a medium that predated Durer in the 15th century. 

In a decade when the country was celebrating prosperity and citizens were wallowing in new luxuries and  promiscuity, God's Man was an unwelcome admonition about selling your soul for material gain and the pleasures of the flesh. 

Lynd Ward made his powerful book, consisting of 139 woodcuts-- no words-- when he was 23.  He had just returned from training at the State Academy for Graphic Arts in Leipzig Germany.  There, he developed  an appreciation for German expressionist graphics and he brought that aesthetic back to the US in this remarkable book.

Shortly after Ward's book was published, the stock market crashed, hurling the world into the Great Depression.  This caused many to reflect on the excesses of the "roaring twenties" with a different perspective.

Whatever the reason, Ward's book beat the odds and became famous.  It made his reputation as an illustrator and it encouraged successive generations of artists to experiment in similar ways.  It was reprinted several times,  although the recent paperback reproductions have none of the charm of the original book, which was beautifully printed on thick paper.

Living in an era of digital art and AI, it's easy to conclude that this is not the right time or place to attempt certain kinds of artistic efforts.  But Lynd Ward had strong artistic views and was rewarded for taking chances.

 

WHAT REMAINS AFTER THE 4TH GREAT HUMILIATION?

Done with Chat GPT in 2 minutes

Freud famously claimed that the human race has suffered three great humiliations:

• The discovery by Copernicus that earth isn't the center of the universe, "only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness." Astronomy destroyed our illusion of a safe and stable home at the hub of the universe and left us in an unbounded, decentralized universe where even basic directions such as "up and down" no longer had absolute meaning.  It was the beginning of centuries of warfare between science and religions.  

• The discovery that humans evolved from primitive primates rather than originating in a divinely appointed spot at the top of creation.  The discovery that our fossil trail led not from the Garden of Eden but from a frightened cynodont hiding in the mud rattled faith in humanity's special protected status.  The cultural battles from this humiliation continue to rage today in legal, educational and scientific circles.

• The discovery that humans aren't intrinsically rational beings but instead are heavily influenced by the irrational activity of our subconscious minds.  Psychological sciences shed new light on human nature, transforming our notions of free will, motivation, guilt, identity, responsibility and more.  Based on these discoveries, laws have been rewritten.  Educational practices have changed.  Novels, plays and later movies were written around the new understandings. 
  
  

Years ago I asked on this blog whether AI might become the source of our fourth great humiliation, resulting in comparable social and cultural upheaval.  

It's not too soon to conclude that the answer is "yes."  Our status as creators has long been viewed as central to the glory of being human.  If art becomes a fast, cheap and effortless commodity created by machine, it would be another great blow to human dignity and worth.  

So the question for discussion is: what's a suitable artistic response to this fourth humiliation?

During the lifetime of Copernicus, artists used allegorical representations of high concepts to deal with big issues.  For example, today's artists might look to Mattias Gerung's 1544 The Baptism of the Antichrist:  

From left to right: NVIDIA, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta AI

Wry humor is always a good bet, even on the gallows.  Here is how the prophetic Carter Goodrich welcomed in the new millennium:

Then there's the juvenile response: a "Fuck AI" tee shirt.  I doubt any long term satisfaction can come from this approach. 

One of the most interesting creative struggles about the battle between man and machine is Phil Hale's series of paintings of Johnny Badhair.  Hale painted more than eighty paintings of a ballet between a solitary, half dressed figure and a machine in front of a universal blue sky.  Hale's machines were a sinister metallic conglomeration of sprockets, blades and cables-- an excellent visual representation of John Henry's steam drill, or of AI. 

Each new painting in this series became a fresh experiment with an uncertain outcome.  The paintings are powerful, even savage, and yet at the same time they are riddled with ambiguity; sometimes it seems one combatant has won, but that lasts only as long as the next painting.  It's never too clear what they're battling for or who the victor will be.

I wrote an essay for Hale's 2016 book, Let's Kill Johnny Badhair, in which I quote from Peter Viereck's prescient 1947 poem, Prince Tank: 

During the fourth and fifth world wars, the tanks

Will still obey, still seem to serve their humans...

 The sixth war they will serve more sullenly--

And suddenly will know their day has come.

The birthday of the Prince of all the tanks.

And then will humans all be jitterbugs,

Migrate like locusts from their dance-hall doors,

And sing with insect-voices metal shrill:

"Our god is born!" and roll to him like grapes

Till all their frenzy begs his metal treads:

"Love us to death, love us to death" the day

Creation's final goal, Prince Tank, is born.

These are all possible artistic responses to the fourth humiliation.   None of them so far will be enough to, in the words of Flaubert, "move the stars to pity" us for our situation.  We won't get off that easily.  But at least it's a place to start thinking.

ART FROM THE COMPOST HEAP

"See what forest has arisen from the rot."  -- Susan Barba

The Roman Colosseum was designed for the most brutal entertainments. 

Ancient Romans were thrilled to see victims ripped to shreds by lions and tigers.  The more fortunate victims were permitted to fight back (damnatio ad bestias or "condemnation to beasts").  The less fortunate were left naked and defenseless to be devoured (obicĕre bestiis or "to throw to beasts").

Centuries later, stones from the blood soaked Colosseum were taken down, polished, and used to build the beautiful Basilica of St. Peter:

But the corkscrew had one more twist: in order to raise money to build the Basilica, the church sold forgiveness to sinners.  Martin Luther, in his Ninety-Five Theses, blasted the church for selling "indulgences" enabling sinners to buy their way into heaven. 

That's the way the world goes. Again and again, terrible things somehow morph into things pure and beautiful.

For centuries, sugarcane plantations were among the worst abusers of slave labor.  Artist James Gillray drew the mistreated slaves who were forced to cut and press sugarcane in deadly heat, then boil the crop in hellish furnaces (below left).  Many perished in the process. The result: delightfully sweet sugar. 

Commenters on this blog have decried the disintegration of our culture.  The fine arts have become puerile and decadent; standards have declined; the absence of boundaries has rendered us shapeless;  digital theft, appropriation art, auto-toning and plagiarism run rampant; the odor of postmodern nihilism pervades; economics create all the worst incentives.  

Alarmed voices demand: "once our creative muscles have atrophied, our cognitive functions have diminished, and our taste has been softened by subjectivity, how can we ever go back?  How can standards regain any authority once they've been trampled?  How can innocence, once lost, be recovered?"

No one can say for sure, but on the subject of hope I often turn to the great Walt Whitman who mused about the purity and renewal of common grass:

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?

Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day...

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,

The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
....
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

If there is to be a renewal in the arts, what form will it take? We can't just unlearn what we've learned.  We can't reverse course to Rembrandt or Howard Pyle.  All I can do is direct you-- once again-- to the wisdom of the ancients.  In 700 BC, Archilochus had already discovered that no outcome should be beyond expectations:

Henceforth nothing is certain:

one may expect everything,

and none among you should be astonished to see,

one day, the deer, preferring the sonorous tides of the sea to the land,

borrow from the dolphins their sea pasture,

while the latter plunge into the mountains.