A GALLERY OF PAUL COKER ART FROM MAD MAGAZINE

Paul Coker's art was not as broad or slapstick as the art of most other MAD artists, but in his own quiet way he was every bit as brilliant. 

Look at this lovely little drawing of a boy standing. He's not being carried off by a gorilla or balancing a ball on his nose.  Yet, Coker keeps his subject from being dull and symmetrical by adding a dozen charming touches: notice the unusual shape of the bottom of his sweat shirt, or the interesting shape of his collar, how only one pant leg is rolled up and the other has a patch.  Notice the confidence of Coker's folds over the boy's stomach or at his elbow.  

In an era when the New Yorker features a bevy of untalented cover artists who use lifeless mechanical circles for heads, look at how much sensitivity Coker puts into this "almost' circle head-- the subtlety of that chin, those little boy cheeks, the treatment of that vacant ear, the shape of that hat-- all before you even get to that marvelous facial expression described in so few lines.  In my opinion, Coker's better than all of them.

Another splendid drawing now shows the boy in motion.  Notice how beautifully Coker captures the running figure, with those over-sized shoes kicking up pebbles.

You won't find the silhouette of that leg and disjointed ankle in any anatomy book.

If you have any question about how many of the subtle touches in that figure are intentional, look at the way Coker used white paint to trim back that shoe on the left.  He felt that 1/64 of an inch made enough difference that it was worth going back to tweak.  Clearly Coker is performing micro-surgery in these drawings.

It's to MAD's credit that, amidst all the clang and clatter of the Don Martin and Al Jaffee and Prohias, it appreciated the quiet brilliance of Coker.

Here's a gallery of other Coker drawings, enlarged so you can better see what he was up to.

Note how Coker handles the small boy clinging to his mother's leg: no eyes, just nostrils and a very unusually shaped mouth.  There are great powers of observation and great artistic courage in these small choices.

The father's eyes might be a predictable facial expression, but his nervous smile is quite an innovative design. 
And dig those shoes!

A GALLERY OF WALLY WOOD ART FROM MAD MAGAZINE

Wally Wood's art is guilty of some of the same flaws I've criticized in other artists.  His figure drawings retain some stiffness and anatomical awkwardness; there can be an excess of detail and a lack of prioritization; particularly in later years he could draw with a heavy hand and recycle gimmicks.

Yet, Wood's redeeming talents are so original and weird and bountiful, they more than offset any mere technical inadequacies.  Wood did some of his best work for MAD.  In honor of the late great MAD Magazine, let's revisit some examples of Wood's humorous art:

Here are some examples of preliminary sketches contrasted with final art for Wood's wonderful story, "What Do You Do For A Living, Daddy?"

Who could draw children like Wood?

Some of Wood's best works for MAD portrayed the annoyances and micro-aggressions of middle class existence in the 1950s.  He would frequently pack his backgrounds full of strange goings on:

A day at the beach

Relatives come to dine.  Note Frankenstein and the Wolf Man

Often these background drawings were published in a size too small for MAD readers to understand and appreciate.  I'm reproducing them here in a size that I hope will allow you to enjoy Wood's stream of consciousness drawing.

Wood also did a great job depicting the Madison Ave. executives of the 1950s and 60s who would later be depicted on the show,  Mad Men.

   
Finally, here are a few more examples of Wood's characters:

R.I.P. MAD MAGAZINE

Starting as a ten cent comic book for children in the straight-laced 1950s, MAD Magazine faced a hundred obstacles.  Surprisingly, those obstacles are what helped make MAD great.

The limitations of its medium (stationary drawings poorly reproduced on cheap paper and distributed through local newsstands between four and seven times a year) and the repressions of its society (newsstands would not carry or sell controversial material to kids) elicited the most extraordinary creativity from the writers and artists of MAD.  Today the children who were once an audience for MAD are able to create their own advanced computer animation and give it instant global distribution.

The creators of MAD were constantly breaking the fourth wall of its limited medium using imagination rather than technology.

Of course the male staff of MAD obsessed about women within the limitations imposed by a 1950s comic book for children: 

"Rowrrff!!"

A day would come, years later, when all societal constraints would be banished and MAD artist Wally Wood could freely publish hard core pornographic drawings.  Unleashed to show every orifice from nostril to haunch, Wood produced drawings that were far less sexy or interesting than his early drawings of women for MAD.  

In a culture where anything goes, robbed of the resistance provided by a "creeping meatball" society, it became more and more difficult for MAD to preserve its initial qualities and it became more difficult to find a substantial readership with the cultural literacy that MAD readers once had.  

"To have limits, to need limits, to choose our limits, to be defined by those limits, and to learn to love them."                  -- Michael Downing

All this week I will be paying tribute to the brilliant artists of MAD who I admire so much.  They filled their moment in time with excellence, and who could ask more from an artist? 

BURNED TWICE IN ONE LIFETIME

The writer Arthur Koestler fought fascism in the early 1930s.  He courageously wrote against Nazism in Germany and was imprisoned on death row for his stand against fascism in Spain.  Communists hailed him as a hero.

A few years later, Koestler spoke out again, but this time against communist oppression.  His classic novel, Darkness at Noon,  exposed Stalin's show trials to the world.  Now the communists too hated Koestler, and burned his books.

German political poster from the 1950s showing Koestler being hated equally by book-burners on the left and the right.

Koestler reflected, "To be burned twice in one's lifetime is, after all, a rare distinction."

The illustrator Arthur Szyk was also burned twice.  Szyk's scathing pictures attacking Nazis during World War II were powerful tools for fundraising for US war bonds, training soldiers and rousing awareness.  Eleanor Roosevelt called Szyk a "one man army" for America.  Hitler put a price on his head.

After the war was over, members of the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee began to wonder if Szyk was sufficiently anti-communist.  Despite his obvious patriotism, the Committee suspected Szyk of once belonging to an organization that served as a "Communist front."  Besides, he had drawn cartoons about civil rights for negroes,  and wasn't that kind of communist? 

White soldier: "What would you do with Hitler?"
African-American soldier:  "I would have made him a negro and dropped him somewhere in the USA." 

The distraught Szyk protested that he wasn't connected with any Communist organization, but a few months after the investigation began he died of a heart attack at age 57.

Szyk had been burned once by America's enemies and then again by jerks purporting to be America's "friends."

Which bring us to Victor Arnautoff, another artist interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s because it didn't approve of his left wing views.  Arnautoff had drawn an unflattering picture of Richard Nixon.  He also painted prominent historical murals in the San Francisco area, some of which were critical of slavery, genocide and colonization.

Arnautoff's art survived his right wing inquisition.  Today the question is whether it will survive his left wing inquisition.

Last week, the school board in San Francisco voted to destroy Arnautoff's 1936 mural about the life of George Washington because the murals included images of African-American slaves and a dead Native American, which might traumatize high school students.

Note the slaves working the fields in the background.

Washington High School convened a  "Reflection and Action Group" to consider the issue. That group ruled that the mural “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy [and] oppression"-- a grossly ignorant mischaracterization of Arnautoff's work.

Speaking of ignorant, School Commissioner Faauuga Moliga defended the destruction, saying his concern was that "kids are mentally and emotionally feeling safe at their schools."  The school board's vice president declared that destroying the mural counted as "reparations."

Koestler wrote that having your work burned by extremists on both sides is comparable to "a professional diploma, certifying that its owner has passed his examination and is entitled to exercise his craft." It seems that Arnautoff has passed that test.

It's ironic that extremists fail to recognize themselves in their opposite extremes.  There are legitimate questions about dealing with art that glorifies abhorrent content, but no meaningful answer can result from such blatant ignorance.  As the great Seneca wrote, "If you would judge, investigate."

SELECTING THE RIGHT PORTION OF THE SKY

When ancient Rome needed guidance on crucial issues such as whether to go to war or whether crops would fail, a priest called an augur was summoned to interpret the will of the gods by studying the flight of birds.

The augur would look for omens in the direction that birds were flying, whether they flew in groups or alone, and the noises they made as they flew. These observations required great skill and inspiration.

If you think about it, this system would make no sense if the augur tried to watch the entire sky: he might spot one bird or a thousand depending on where he looked or how long he remained. The behavior of the birds could appear to signal good omens or bad depending on whether the augur happened to view them from the right or left.  Such a system would be completely arbitrary.

That's why the whole key to the augur's art was choosing the right portion of the sky to observe. The augur used a stick called a lituus to mark out the sacred part of the sky.

Lituus held by an augur

The passage of birds through the selected space determined the life-or-death outcome.

Like an augur, an artist's decision to draw a perimeter around a selected space in an otherwise  seamless  universe may be the single most important decision in the creation of a work of art.

Just as the sky has no obvious boundaries, the world around us can be seen as either infinite or infinitely divisible.  The artist's decision to select some of the features from that world, choosing  what to include, what to exclude, and how to crop it, determines where the rest of the world ends and the art begins.

The great illustrator Al Parker would've made a dandy augur.  Look at the portions of the world he has chosen to frame here:

Parker chops away the entire background, silhouetting his subject against a plain white background.  Then he chases his dramatic content off the edge of the page, using that big chunk of nothing to push our eyes right to the crisis in the upper right hand corner.

Despite the fact that Parker has excluded a background, look at the odd items he has chosen to include in the foreground: a cuckoo clock and an old fashioned phone.

Their content may have little significance, and they may even seem counter-intuitive because they distract from the high emotion of the scene.  But visually these items are crucial to the composition, scooping up our eyes and leading them along the floor and up to that upper right corner.
   

When Parker used his lituus to cordon off a meaningful part of the universe, some of his selections were for purposes of telling the story and some of them were for purposes of composition.  Some of them were patterns and colors for purposes of design. You can see him thinking through some of his choices in this prelim:

Parker got rid of that attention-getting pattern on the rug,
so it wouldn't slow down the movement of your eye upward and to the right.

Parker was good with anatomy and perspective and color, but so much of the strength of this image comes from his threshold decisions about what to include in the frame and what to leave out.

TWO VACUUM CLEANERS

Very few artists have been stirred by the challenges presented by a vacuum cleaner. 

Here are two:

Jeff Koons

Phil Hale

The mountebank Koons, mayor of Niflheim, offers the unremarkable insight that industrial design does, in fact, incorporate "design." His marketing genius can be observed at work in this presentation:

Renowned herpetologist Graham Peck has observed a comparable technique at work in the snake kingdom:  

There Is a certain power to fascinate in a snake's eyes and movements.... I saw a ground squirrel fascinated by a black gopher snake. The forked tongue darted out of the snake's mouth almost as regularly and rapidly as the needle of a sewing machine rises and falls. The squirrel seemed to watch it spellbound... I believe implicitly that all snakes have a certain degree of power to fascinate their victims to death. 

In contrast to Koons, Phil Hale uses a vacuum cleaner-- a routine object from daily life that you or I might step around-- as an opening to the unknown. His beautiful painting is reminiscent of the lines from poet Peter Viereck:

So many dark things are not night at all:The cupboard where the cakes and poisons are.... 

Hale's vacuum cleaner is a potent original vision. His powers of observation are transferred to us through his strong personal choices and probing brushwork.

Koons too wants to elevate our attention to a vacuum cleaner but he does so by placing someone else's design in a lucite showcase and shining a spotlight on it. This antiseptic presentation offers no original opinions in the form of composition or palette, creative distortion or expressive energy, angle or design. In fact, any contribution that wasn't stolen from the original designer comes solely from Koons' accompanying jabber.

Artists love to paint flowers and landscapes and nudes but they've been remarkably silent on the subject of vacuum cleaners. As Hale proves, there is meaningful content even there. As Koons proves, even if you come up with nothing meaningful there are still a nice couple of bucks to be made.

THE VIRTUES OF DUMB DRAWING

Young artists are impatient to find a distinctive voice or style.   They distort what they see, not out of any expressive need but rather to develop a trademark "brand."  To accomplish this they often try borrowing eccentricities from mature artists.  Unfortunately, unearned and imitative styles often look inauthentic and unpersuasive.

The comic book artists in the golden age were not concerned with developing a personal style, they were concerned with drawing so they didn't starve.  Jules Feiffer fondly recalled cranking out pictures fast enough to survive:

Artists sat humped in crowded rooms, knocking it out for the page rate.  Penciling, inking, lettering in the balloons for $10.00 a page, sometime less.... Working blind but furiously, working from the advice of others who drew better because they were in the business two-weeks longer...

Reading old crime and horror comics, I was struck by the strange, interesting drawings that emerged not from a self-conscious search for a "style," but from untrained artists working in a pressure cooker.

Detail 

I've previously quoted a friend who said, "Bad drawing, even bad bad drawing, almost always has character.... the vision has a weird purity you kind of have to admire, no matter what."

Quickly drawn faces by unskilled, underpaid artists ...

...sometimes resemble the studied, careful distortions in the mature styles of fine artists:

Saul Steinberg 

Seymour Chwast 

Even without trying to build a brand or a trademark style, many of these crude comic drawings have undeniable power that makes them the envy of "high class" artists.

Basquiat

Returning to the memories of Jules Feiffer, the early comic book artists didn't acquire that power, or improve their drawing, by searching for a distinctive trademark "look."  They did it by drawing all the time:

[O]ne suddenly learned how to draw. It happened in spurts.  Nothing for a while: not being able to catch on, not being able to foreshorten correctly, or get perspectives straight or get the blacks to look right.  Then suddenly: a breakthrough. One morning you can draw forty percent better than you could when you quit the night before.  Then, again you coast.  Your critical abilities improve but your talent won't.  Nothing works.  Despair.  Then another breakthrough.  Magically, it keeps happening.  Soon it stops being magic,  just becomes education.