THE MISCEGENATION OF WORDS AND PICTURES

Words are different from pictures, which might explain why they have different names.  

Even though words and pictures may never fully combine, their mere frottage (in both senses of the word) can bring a new richness and multi-dimensionality to art. 

Verbal creation and visual creation each contribute different strengths and perspectives to their partnership.  As Swinburne said,

Light is heard as music, music seen as light.   

Through the centuries, illustration is the art form where words and pictures have interacted most closely.  Traditionally, this meant words next to the picture, but still separate:

Comics integrated the words directly into the picture, sometimes with mixed results:

Word balloon competes with drawing (Neal Adams)

MAD Magazine parody

But over the years, artists have found interesting and engaging ways to combine visual thinking with verbal thinking.  No one was better at it than the great Saul Steinberg: 

Commercial artists who used words as graphic symbols became an inspiration for pop art.

Bob Peak employs words as design elements

I do like the way Claes Oldenberg used words as graphic objects, obliterating the meaning of the words:

I've previously outraged readers by publicly admiring Cy Twombly's Orpheus, which-- unlike Oldenberg-- incorporates the meaning of the word, painting it in a way that evokes its rich content:

Orpheus by Cy Twombly

Yessir, people have wrestled with cross breeding words and pictures in all sorts of ways:

But in my view, the marriage of words and pictures remains largely unconsummated in post modern conceptual art.  

Famed artist Jenny Holzer places text side by side with images-- perhaps on a colored background or carved into a bench-- without ever combining or even juxtaposing their different characteristics.  These words would fail as literature so Holzer seeks to find legitimacy by taking up residence in the less discriminating side of town: the visual arts.

Holzer apparently believes that projecting boring platitudes on the side of a building transforms them into Art.

Similarly, many other contemporary artists who are incapable of doing the heavy lifting of combining words and pictures rely exclusively upon words (yet still hope to claim credit as visual artists):

Museum of Modern Art displays pages from the Montevideo phone book with the names of political victims.  

Apologists and pedants have attempted to justify this use of words as a substitute for pictures, claiming in learned treatises that words were simply a cool new form of visual art.  

It may be that in the marriage of words and pictures, some people believe images are the weaker spouse and can be supplanted.  Not me.  Pictures preceded the written word and will be there at the end to receive it.

ERIC DROOKER's MOLOCH

 I love this powerful cover to The New Yorker by Eric Drooker.

The ancient demon god Moloch sits astride the city
for the New Yorker's annual "Money" issue. 

In ancient legend, people hurled their own children into the flames as sacrifices to Moloch.  By the time of the Hebrew bible, the book of Leviticus prohibited making such sacrifices, but the dark god continued to find true believers and lives on in allegory.  He can be found in the works of William Blake, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Fritz Lang's Metropolis.  More recently, Moloch played a prominent role in Allen Ginsberg's famous poem, Howl.  ("What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?")

When Drooker first conceived of this image, he captured it quickly with a ballpoint pen:

In the next version he shed that full moon, choosing instead to illuminate the city from below, under a dark sky-- a masterful touch in my opinion.  He then worked out the perspectives in pencil:

He drew the final version in ink, before adding color:

The New Yorker employs many excellent writers who've contributed strong articles about economics and plutocracy, about venal politicians and rapacious investment bankers.  But no linear assemblage of nouns, verbs and adjectives, policed by punctuation, can possibly deliver a message the way Drooker's cover does.  

Here we see the value of good illustration: an immediate visual impact that grabs you by the lapels, combined with a haunting presence that lingers long after paragraphs of statistics and adverbs have faded. In an instant, the belching smokestacks and steaming nuclear reactor towers are tied to the fiery furnaces of Nebuchadnezzar II, and modern profiteers and collaborators are shown to serve the same dark gods as our primordial ancestors.  No written article could get away with such a message.  

Drooker never dreamed that the New Yorker would accept such an image for its cover.  He didn't draw it for The New Yorker and only submitted it at the urging of a friend.  But I'd like to see the New Yorker run more covers like this, covers that recognize today's peril.  Some of the essays inside, including those by editor David Remnick, employ stern language suitable to the high stakes for liberal democracy,  Yet most of the cover illustrations continue to offer light hearted moments and political jokes.  I would love to see more cover art that corresponds to the seriousness of the time. 

CAN'T DRAW HORSES

Fortunately, Maurice Sendak couldn't draw horses.  

His contract required him to illustrate a children's book called Where the Wild Horses Are, but no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn't draw horses well.  Sendak struggled and struggled, then in one creative leap he substituted wild things for wild horses, and the story took off from there.

Where the Wild Things Are became a landmark in the history of children's literature, a seminal work that inspired an opera and a feature film and sold over 20 million copies around the world.  It made Sendak's legacy.

The artist Jackson Pollock couldn't draw horses either.

Pollock wanted to be a representational painter.  He struggled to paint horses but could never get them quite right.

In 1947 Pollock told a friend, artist Harry Jackson, that he'd tried to paint a mural of stampeding horses to satisfy an important commission but lacked the discipline or skill. 

Finally “he got mad,” Harry recalled Pollock saying, “and started to sling the paint onto the canvas to create the driving, swirling action and thrust the composition and the heroic size demanded.”  Pollock's frustration over his inability to paint horses fueled a creative leap to one of the first important abstract expressionist paintings.  He abandoned horses altogether and pioneered a new kind of art with all of the energy but none of the representational constraints.

Pollock's mural gave the art world a jolt.  The art critic Clement Greenberg wrote: "I took one look at it and I thought, 'Now that's great art,' and I knew Jackson was the greatest painter this country had produced."

Susan Rothenberg couldn't draw horses either, but by that time nobody gave a damn.  

Rothenberg painted in an era when artists no longer needed to feel shame.  She painted horses like this and she painted them real big, with oversized confidence:

The art critic for The New Yorker crowed about the "asteroidal impact" of Ms. Rothenberg's horse pictures:

[T]he effect of the horse paintings that Rothenberg sprang on the world in 1975... was like an asteroid impact....her huge paintings in acrylics made some of us laugh with sheer wonderment....The works conveyed anger, exaltation, and self-abandoning intrepidity. 

Sendak and Pollock recognized that their inability to draw horses was a serious problem.  If they did a crappy job, it would be widely recognized as such, so they twisted and turned and used their imaginations to explore creative, unorthodox alternatives. 

Rothenberg was not flogged to higher creativity by a similar sense of shame or self-doubt, and her work reflects it.  

NOT YET

AI continues to cartwheel through the arts, breaking crockery, toppling pay rates and forcing reevaluations of fundamental epistemological, ontological, and teleological truths.   

Processes that began slowly with the invention of photography continue to pick up speed and today hurtle forward at a pace that leaves no time for thoughtful assimilation. 

AI enables us to plunder the work of previous generations of artists.  Their artistic accomplishments can be purloined, cannibalized, deconstructed and seamlessly reassembled with no talent other than the ability to type on a keyboard. Look at how the following YouTuber can remove Cary Grant from the classic movie Charade and substitute himself as Audrey Hepburn's romantic co-star:  

Charade and other accomplished original films may someday be buried beneath a sea of fan variations.  

Another example: a different Youtuber easily resurrects dead movie stars such as Paul Newman, Marlon Brando or Rock Hudson and makes them actors in a new movie about the Justice League:

 

Paul Newman as Green Lantern

Just as inferior voices can be corrected and enhanced with AutoTune, inferior pictures can be corrected and enhanced with algorithmic technologies.  The need for skill, creativity and imagination have diminished as technology provides a colorable substitute. 

All of which brings me to the new Fantastic Four movie, scheduled to be released on July 25:

Last week I saw an advance screening of the film, which is based upon the 1968 Galactus Trilogy (in Fantastic Four #48 - 50).  Marvel Studios employed thousands of people, hundreds of millions of dollars, and the latest software to enhance and embellish Jack Kirby's 12 cent comic book.  They did everything technology could do to improve the original story.

The movie was bigger and noisier, sure, with plenty of attention-grabbing special effects, but as a work of art it couldn't compare with the power and quality of Kirby's comic book.  

Kirby's dramatic staging has been replaced by faster pacing-- about the speed you'd expect from a video game.  His costumes have been updated, for the worse.  The complexity of his content has been replaced by bland platitudes about the importance of family.  

The movie is entertaining, but with all of its advantages it feels artistically inferior to the hand drawn comic book.  So for those who say that traditional art forms can be replaced in all meaningful respects by new technologies, I say:

Not yet.

MORE ABOUT BEAUTY AND UGLINESS IN ART

The illustrator A.B. Frost drew with a marvelous line.  He had a special knack for infusing animals with character:

Note the unorthodox way Frost depicts that tail, the stance of the barking dog, the way Frost captures the shape of
the dog's skull, the comical exaggeration of the open mouth and those long, droopy ears. 

I'm dazzled by the speed and confidence of Frost's beautiful line capturing this dancer wearing an apron. You have to wonder whether this was drawn with a pen or a rapier.

Note the shading on those shoes; what beautiful ink!

When it came to suggesting a background, Frost knew to use a light touch.  Not too much detail, but he nevertheless understood that the tree trunks required a round line, while the tree branches required a flurry of light scratches.

The drawing was published in Life magazine in 1922, long before the era of videos, yet Frost made the image more dynamic, infused with more energy and speed, than many videos depicting actual movement today: 

I love the powerful shadows under the man's arm, under the flaps of his jacket, and
on his ankle.  Those shoes are sheer poetry! 

SO we can safely conclude that this is a beautiful drawing, right?

Uh oh!

The caption on this drawing was, "Yo’ kin talk erbout yo’ tukkey an’ yo’ chicken an’ yo’ goose. Dem things is good fo’ white folks…”.   

So what do you think?  Beautiful? Ugly?  Both?

________________________________

The drawing was exhibited at the recent show, "Imprinted" at the Norman Rockwell Museum and will be traveling to other museums.  Definitely worth seeing if you get the chance.

UGLY'S GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH IT

In recent weeks, I've received an increasing percentage of comments criticizing pictures for featuring  "ugly" people or "evil" themes, rather than for being "poorly drawn" or "badly painted" or "unimaginative."

• In a recent post about illustrations for the classic novel Lolita, many commenters were uninterested in the creativity or quality of the images because they didn't approve of the book's plot.  None of the images were explicit, but the underlying story was too "depraved."

• In a recent post about an illustration of President Trump, many commenters were less interested in the artistry of the image than in what they suspected were the "totalitarian" sympathies of the artist, or even my own suspected political leanings for showing such a picture  ("You are a Fabian Socialist, a hard leftist, a radical in sheep's clothing. A snooty superior commie pretending not to be, quietly and cleverly trying to undermine our constitution. You are worse than a total partisan hack. You are a Manchurian activist; a deceiver and a traitor.") 

• In a recent post about drawings by artist John Cuneo, a number of commenters criticized Cuneo's pictures for being too ugly. ("It’s hard for me to appreciate Cuneo’s illustrations because they are so damn ugly."  Cuneo is a "a psychosexual slob."  His drawings show "saggy tits" and "flab.")  Even worse, some suspected that Cuneo's admirers have "lib" leanings.

The direction of these comments surprises me; there's plenty of beautiful art about ugly subjects.  Just ask Shakespeare.

My own test for Cuneo's drawings was never, "Would I invite this woman to the prom?" Rather, I feel his drawings are beautiful because their line work is sensitive, complex, thoughtful, probing and intelligent:

Details of Cuneo drawings

Cuneo is not for everyone's taste, but as far as I'm concerned people who dismiss such drawings as "ugly" are applying criteria from a parallel universe. They are likely to miss out on some of the most rewarding material art has to offer.  

So in today's post it's probably worth considering:  what makes a drawing "ugly"?

I've previously written about how much I adore this drawing by Tom Fluharty: 

Readers who sneer at drawings of "flabby" people may be troubled by this picture, but I personally consider it a masterpiece of good drawing: well conceived and designed, with those crisp dark accents shaping and containing that billowing flesh.  Fluharty threw away the anatomy book and drew this with his eyes opened, the way good artists are supposed to.  He was never tempted to let symmetry do half of his work for him.  At the risk of further shocking readers, I would defend this drawing to anyone as "beautiful."

Next, there's artist David Levine, who walked right past the academic models to draw what he called the "shmata queens," the heavy, ungainly women who hung out on a nearby beach. Levine said he was interested in...  

a dwindling group of elderly women: Shmata Queens of Coney. The "shmata," or "rag," not only refers to the head cloth, but also to the bathing suits - faded and misshapen by molding to aged and deformed bodies that have been out under the sun....  Once, as I was finishing a drawing, my model said, "Dere is vun ting you kent ketch about us." When I inquired what that might be, she answered, "How much ve eat."

Again and again Levine drew and painted these women on the beach.  I'm sure if you asked whether he thought they were "ugly" he'd be puzzled by the question.  Certainly they aren't ugly in any sense that should be relevant here.

Still another artist with an observant eye and an interest in less idealized forms of beauty was Andrew Wyeth.  He seemed determined to record every mile that a long, harsh life had left on the faces of his subjects:

We have to be careful about judging art based on the morals of the people depicted, or whether a character has a wart on her nose, or whether the colors are pretty.   Those are all relevant considerations when it comes to deciding whether you should hang a picture in your breakfast nook, but the important aspects of art run a whole lot deeper than that.  

  

ANOTHER GREAT HORSE'S ASS (part 3)

(continuing a series) 

I love this drawing of a horseman by Rodin:

When Rodin was 16, he drew tight academic drawings:

Over the years he evolved from meticulous drawings (usually drawn from plaster casts or classical prints) to loose, fluid drawings where expressiveness was more important than anatomical proportion.  He decided that many of the details he originally labored over were trivial.  He became more interested in "large, rhythmical contours," which were often little more than wispy sketches.  As his drawings became simpler and more abstract they sometimes gained in power.

Rodin took his drawings as seriously as his famous sculptures.  He insisted, "Drawing is the key to knowledge.... Without drawing, no truth." 

For Rodin, the truth about the horseman seemed to lie in the haunches of that horse, which takes up the bulk of the drawing and which forms the base from which the movement (as well as the composition) is driven.  The gesture of the rider is more like a feather in a chapeau.  From his early labors, Rodin understood muscles and skeletal structure and weight; the drawing would not be possible without that knowledge.  But the information is buried so deeply that you'd never single it out.  

Rodin drew as simply and naturally as he was able.  Interestingly, as Rodin became more famous and his drawings became simpler, numerous counterfeiters and fakers tried to imitate his work.  There have been museum exhibitions dedicated to distinguishing Rodin's "authentic" loose, airy drawings from the numerous counterfeit loose, airy drawings-- a challenging task.

NEW BOOK FROM JOHN CUNEO (nsfw)

I just received my copy of the new book by John Cuneo, Good Intentions.

Cuneo has a unique voice in American illustration.  When you think about his work, you need a whole different vocabulary: Penetrating.  Scary.  Brave.  Upsetting.  Frank.  Epic.  Scorchingly honest.  How long has it been since such adjectives applied to illustration, or to any drawing for that matter?  

And funny, lord is he funny.

For decades, scientists have searched for a deep salt mine in a remote location where they might safely store weapons-grade plutonium.  Cuneo packages it in tiny spider web lines.

Despite his mostly dark and trenchant observations, there's even a "yes" to be found in this book.  

 Like Cuneo's other books, we get the feeling that he paid a higher price to create it than we pay to receive it.

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 76

This is a 1933 political cartoon by Vaughn Shoemaker.  It appeared in the Chicago Daily News, which went defunct many years ago:

Look how smart this drawing is.  Shoemaker understands the architecture of a rowboat and knows that the keel would make it tilt on dry land.  He understands the bone structure of ankles and makes those feet tilt at different angles.  He understands how the shoulders would hunch up in this position and he understands how the wrists would curl:

Shoemaker also understands the architecture of a pier.  Look at how the boards sag, how the posts in the foreground are stained by the previous waterline, how the posts in the background are mere black shadows to lend structural strength with no distracting details:

I've never seen a digital tool make marks like this

Notice how the shadow under the pier is cross hatched to stay lively; this avoids a big black blob in the center of the composition.  More importantly, it allows Shoemaker to control the value of the shadow, darkening it as it recedes in the distance: 

Notice some of Shoemaker's tactics to keep the drawing lively.  He clearly understands how a coil of rope would normally hang, but he twists the end of that rope all around.  He understands the anatomy of hands, but he gratuitously lifts that pinky finger to make it more interesting:

Drawing a political cartoon every day, Shoemaker had to work at lightning speed, which meant he had to understand all these lessons before he sat down at the drawing board.  He had no time for a field trip to study how a pier is constructed or how a receding waterline leaves marks on the shore. Yet there's a lot of confidence in his thick, fast brush strokes.

Here's my point:  In 1933 there were thousands of political cartoonists such as Shoemaker working for thousands of newspapers like the Chicago Daily News.  Often these cartoons appeared on the front page, above the fold.  Today there are fewer than 40 full time political cartoonists left, and the number of newspapers is rapidly dwindling.  Daily newspapers have turned into weekly newspapers, and many of them can no longer afford an editorial cartoonist on the payroll. 

Shoemaker was not one of the more famous cartoonists but I think his drawing is noteworthy, so I want to make a point of noting it here.