// literary & arts //
Winter 2006
No Maus in the House
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Masters of American Comics
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Move over Desmoiselles D'Avignon, here come the Fantastic Four! "Masters of American Comics," the joint exhibit currently on view at the Jewish Museum and the Newark Museum, originally curated for the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, will surely catch even the art snob's eye. There is no four foot height limit for entering the show, nor must you wear thick glasses and watchSmallville, all the curators ask is that you leave any preconceptions about art being esoteric and confusing at the door and embrace the quality of drawing and storytelling in the show.
"Masters of American Comics" may well benefit from a recent upsurge of interest in what has traditionally been a low-art form: bookstores now have an entire sections dedicated to graphic novels and comic books, Hollywood has produced an abundance of superhero-inspired films, and the internet offers an immeasurable audience to anyone willing to post their comics online. But the show is not satisfied with displaying comics as simply accessible, popular "American folk art," as R. Crumb, a sixties comic book artist, dubs it. The wall texts baldly establish that the show "has been founded on the premise that comics are a cultural and aesthetic practice with their own history, protagonists, and contribution to society, on a par with music, film and the visual arts."
The show traces the development of comics by featuring original drawings, sketchbooks, and old newsprint from the early 20th century incarnation of the comic strip, usually featured in the Sunday newspaper, moving on to the strip's younger cousin, the comic book. Like the Los Angeles version of the show, the two forms are split chronologically between two museums: the Newark show focuses on the strip, while the Jewish Museum on the East Side spotlights the comic book. The distance between the two museums, and the typical New York aversion to traveling out-of-state, may deter the curious visitor from visiting both sites, but this would be a mistake. To truly appreciate the development of this art form, it is necessary to view the work of the forefathers who invented the idiom at the Newark Museum, in addition to the more recent pieces at the Jewish Museum, like the ironic Superman Suicide (2000) by current comic superstar Chris Ware. But if you are expecting to find original drawings for Maus, Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer prize winning comic book about his father's experience surviving the Holocaust, at the Jewish Museum, don't hold your breath. Included in the Los Angeles show, Spiegelman pulled his work from the New York exhibit at the last minute, because he percieved the context of the Jewish museum as a threat. Spiegelman feared the worst, wary that the comics would be spun as an "ethnic production" instead of an independent art form. Was Spiegelman's move warranted? Can the comics on display maintain their artistic integrity despite their contexts? Before answering such questions, we must first take a look at the content of both exhibits.
Will Eisner, Self-Portrait, 1942.
Charles Schultz, Peanuts, 1968.The artists displayed across the river at the Newark Museum are those who established the comic strip form: neither illustration nor storyboarding, but an art form which combines text and image, using panels to create compelling stories. Expect to find your grandparents with their noses up to the walls, celebrating with wonder the comics from their childhood on display. Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905) deserves this attention. Its combination of art nouveau inspired lines with modernist cityscapes makes for undeniably beautiful images. The star of the Newark show is certainly George Herriman's extremely popular strip, Krazy Kat (1913-1944), a tale of role reversals where Offissa Pup, a dog, falls in love with Krazy Kat, an audacious feline who herself is in love with the curmudgeonly mouse, Ignatz. Herriman's drawings are breathtakingly innovative in their composition and use of space. He manages to integrate word bubbles as if they are another character in the story, while at the same time, bopping the reader over the head with politically incorrect ideas about race, ethnicity, and gender. Herriman's work proves that comics are not just for kids--they can function as social commentary and a measure ofzeitgeist too.
For the visitor interested in more recent popular comic strips, the Newark Museum has C. Segar's drawings for Popeye (1929) and Charles Schultz's drawings for Peanuts (1950). The arrangement of the latter emphasizes the evolution of form (Charlie Brown used to have a tennis-ball head and Snoopy was very beagle-like) and character development (Charlie wasn't such a wimp in the early days and Snoopy wasn't nearly as important to the story). For the casual visitor the main premise of the show becomes obvious when viewing comics that one actually recognizes: When you take the time to look at them, you realize that these images are so fully integrated into our visual culture that we have lost track of their inherent beauty and the skill they display. We are so used to seeing Charlie Brown that we usually forget the elegance of Schultz's visual haikus—comic build-up and dénouement succinctly established in just four panels with minimal drawings. Just because comics are popular—now, perhaps, more than ever—does not mean they do not belong hanging on museum walls.
The Manhattan half of the show is dedicated to the comic book and may be the target destination for super-hero aficionados. It appropriately begins with the natural bridge between the comic strip and book, showing some of Will Eisner's The Spirit (1940's). Distributed inside newspapers, Eisner's slim comic booklets have a deeper plot than the strip, while maintaining the strip's high aesthetic standard.
The most widely recognized artists in the Manhattan show, Eisner and Jack Kirby (Captain America and The Incredible Hulk) certainly deserve a round of applause for translating cross-cultural myths of good battling evil into the American vernacular. If you are especially interested in a sociological analysis of supermen, a smaller exhibit entitled "Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics" sits at the Jewish Museum in the shadows of "Masters." A Jewish-centric exhibit emphasizing comics as an expression of the Jewish immigrant experience, "Superheroes" benefits from the visitors who are already there, visiting the more universal and formal "Masters." Viewer beware: the cross-over between the two exhibits is misleading, for both shows display comics and brandish many of the same names, but the "Masters" exhibit promotes an understanding of comics as art—tracing their development through a lineage of great creators--while "Superheroes" highlights how comics can be read as sociological documents, reflecting the Jewish immigrant experience of the 1930s and 1940s. The viewer walks away from "Masters" in awe of personal visions and technical skills. From "Superheroes," one becomes aware of the Jewish creativity behind this pantheon of god-like crime fighters.
Besides targeting dedicated comic book fans, who certainly celebrate the opportunity of seeing the carefully inked drawings, this show seems to function as a long-awaited response to "High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture," the controversial 1991 show at MOMA that enraged many people for its evaluative categories. While the 1991 show was often criticized for emphasizing modern art's appropriation of popular culture, and not the opposite, "Masters" proves that popular culture can be art as well. Comics are not just raw material for Roy Lichtenstein masterpieces, comics constitute art itself. To encourage seeing comics as art, both the Jewish Museum and the Newark Museum invite the viewer to get up close and personal with the original drawings for the mass-produced comic. Examine the perfect black line! Notice the non-reproducible blue pencil! Ah, even the genius makes a mistake, look at the streaks of white-out! The only difference between the comic book you can buy for $1.50 at the corner store (or the $2,000 collectible on eBay) and the original on the wall is a slight trace of process.
For the comic book fan, getting this close to original pieces can be exhilarating because the drawing represents the transition point between the original idea inside the artist's head and its mass production in comic book form. But in general, fascination with the original doesn't quite fit a medium that was supposed to be commercialized and often involved the collaboration of a team of artists with expertise in draftsmanship, layout, dialogue and color. More emphasis could have been put on the formal qualities of comic book illustration, teaching the viewers something about the art itself. The curators also could have concentrated on the nuts and bolts of any good introduction to comics, like the special interaction of text and image, or our culture's consistent interest in the simplified reality of cartoon, as Scott McCloud does inUnderstanding Comics (1994) a comic book about comics themselves.
The comic book, like its cousin the comic strip, is delightful precisely because it is so accessible—both in terms of its price and its portability. Even the comic book fanatic, who will certainly get a thrill from seeing the originals, would most probably prefer to permanently own the catalogue of Masters of American Comicsthan to rush through the ephemeral museum visit. The same would not be true of a painting or sculpture lover: experiencing the materiality of the original painting or sculpture cannot be reproduced in any catalogueraisonné, no matter how good the color photographs are. This is not because comics are a lesser art form, it's just that their strength lies in the fact they are best enjoyed at home, read in bed.
It is not only the materiality of the comic that is lost under glass. Just consider how the verbs in this review change: one reads a comic book or strip, but one views it on the wall. Unless the intended audience for this show is the person who will recognize each and every drawing at first glance, the method of display prevents new readers from enjoying this art form. Comics are meant to be read sequentially. Yet in the museum, one cannot take the time to read all the comics without risking a fight with the security guard at closing time. If you can't actually read the comic, what's the point of looking at it? While the double exhibit certainly extols comics as art, it robs them of their inherent accessibility and statically reifies them behind glass. Comics should be displayed in ways faithful to the characteristics of the medium. A reading room of comics, like the miniature one offered at the Newark Museum, would be a good place to start.
Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland, 1905.Though some complain about the absence of a female voice in this exhibition of male characters, superheroes, and artists, the most glaring hole in the comics canon is Art Spiegelman's groundbreaking Maus. A little noseying around on the internet brings up an enlightening letter published on www.comicsreporter.com from Spiegelman to Ann Philbin and Michael Darling of MOCA, expressing his frustration at being kept out of the loop about the show traveling from Los Angeles to Milwaukee, and finally to New York. He first claims that the extended exposure of his original risks ruining them. But later in the letter, his real gripe emerges: "[t]he fact that the Jewish Museum will be the site within the NYC limits for the seven comic book artists to be exhibited there brings another issue to the fore, making central a subtext that was invisible at MOCA: the early comic book (unlike its more upscale cousin, the comic strip) was a largely Jewish creation." Spiegelman expresses concern that while the show was originally planned for two museums, engendering a split between comic strip and comic book, the locations in New York and New Jersey would change the meaning of the show. Specifically, given the central location of the Jewish Museum and the New York mentality that anything beyond the river is hinterland, Spiegelman worries that the Manhattan half will get more attention than the Newark half. For him, this becomes a problem because the context of the Jewish Museum creates a subtext that comic books are actually a Jewish creation. It doesn't help that at least three of the six artists at the Jewish Museum are of Jewish origin and that "Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics" suggests something similar.
The show at the Jewish Museum suffers without Maus not just because it holds an almost iconic status in both the Jewish art and comic art landscape. Spiegelman created Maus but he also founded RAW with his wife Francoise Mouly, the famous magazine of underground comix. R. Crumb, Gary Panter and Harvey Kurtzman, artists on display in the exhibit at the Jewish Museum cannot be properly understood without Spiegelman's RAW, an organized forum and breeding ground for underground comix artists.
In his letter Spiegelman further justifies the withdrawal of his work by pointing to its subject matter: "SinceMaus looms so large in the public's perception of the comic book's recent apotheosis, the subject of the Holocaust can trump considerations of form in this museum's context. The statement intended by the Masters show, an exhibit formed to postulate that comics can actually be some sort of... Art, would be undermined by presenting the medium as some sort of 'ethnic' phenomenon."
Would this subtext necessarily arise had Maus stayed in the show? Certainly it seems ironic that the artist who spawned a generation of Holocaust literature and remains one of the most well-known living Jewish artists, refuses to be part of the show at the Jewish Museum. But Spiegelman's discomfort at being pigeonholed as a Jewish artist is already apparent in a 1989 letter to the Village Voice, republished in Art Spiegelman: Comics, Essay, Graphics & Scraps (1998). He explains that originally he used a "clean universalist message" for Maus I, yet he quickly found that this kind of thinking was "fuzzy-minded, that [he] couldn't legitimately narrate the specifics of what happened to [his] family without referring to their Jewishness, that it was intrinsic to what happened to them...Somehow doing Maus involved coming out of the closet as a Jew." Perhaps it is not the Jewish Museum, which usually lets its temporary exhibits speak for themselves in terms of Jewish content, but Spiegelman's Maus that has an "ethnic" dimension regardless of its context.
Spiegelman's concern for the misconstruing of the comic book as a Jewish production may be viewed as an excuse for a continuing discomfort regarding his iconic status as a Jewish artist, a discomfort well depicted in several scenes in Maus II. And yet, he recently published In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), a book about the events and aftermath of September 11th, commissioned by The Forward, a Jewish New York weekly—a foray into a Jewish context not unlike an art exhibit at the Jewish Museum. However nuanced Spiegelman's reason for pulling his work, the move's political message is harsh for it implies that the Jewish Museum as an institution functions as a tool of identity politics instead of as a showcase for good art. In the colorful, deceptively simple two-dimensional world of comics, the viewers lose an opportunity to see great sketches because of what may be frankly called a prima donna move.
"Masters of American Comics" may well benefit from a recent upsurge of interest in what has traditionally been a low-art form: bookstores now have an entire sections dedicated to graphic novels and comic books, Hollywood has produced an abundance of superhero-inspired films, and the internet offers an immeasurable audience to anyone willing to post their comics online. But the show is not satisfied with displaying comics as simply accessible, popular "American folk art," as R. Crumb, a sixties comic book artist, dubs it. The wall texts baldly establish that the show "has been founded on the premise that comics are a cultural and aesthetic practice with their own history, protagonists, and contribution to society, on a par with music, film and the visual arts."
The show traces the development of comics by featuring original drawings, sketchbooks, and old newsprint from the early 20th century incarnation of the comic strip, usually featured in the Sunday newspaper, moving on to the strip's younger cousin, the comic book. Like the Los Angeles version of the show, the two forms are split chronologically between two museums: the Newark show focuses on the strip, while the Jewish Museum on the East Side spotlights the comic book. The distance between the two museums, and the typical New York aversion to traveling out-of-state, may deter the curious visitor from visiting both sites, but this would be a mistake. To truly appreciate the development of this art form, it is necessary to view the work of the forefathers who invented the idiom at the Newark Museum, in addition to the more recent pieces at the Jewish Museum, like the ironic Superman Suicide (2000) by current comic superstar Chris Ware. But if you are expecting to find original drawings for Maus, Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer prize winning comic book about his father's experience surviving the Holocaust, at the Jewish Museum, don't hold your breath. Included in the Los Angeles show, Spiegelman pulled his work from the New York exhibit at the last minute, because he percieved the context of the Jewish museum as a threat. Spiegelman feared the worst, wary that the comics would be spun as an "ethnic production" instead of an independent art form. Was Spiegelman's move warranted? Can the comics on display maintain their artistic integrity despite their contexts? Before answering such questions, we must first take a look at the content of both exhibits.
Will Eisner, Self-Portrait, 1942.
Charles Schultz, Peanuts, 1968.The artists displayed across the river at the Newark Museum are those who established the comic strip form: neither illustration nor storyboarding, but an art form which combines text and image, using panels to create compelling stories. Expect to find your grandparents with their noses up to the walls, celebrating with wonder the comics from their childhood on display. Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905) deserves this attention. Its combination of art nouveau inspired lines with modernist cityscapes makes for undeniably beautiful images. The star of the Newark show is certainly George Herriman's extremely popular strip, Krazy Kat (1913-1944), a tale of role reversals where Offissa Pup, a dog, falls in love with Krazy Kat, an audacious feline who herself is in love with the curmudgeonly mouse, Ignatz. Herriman's drawings are breathtakingly innovative in their composition and use of space. He manages to integrate word bubbles as if they are another character in the story, while at the same time, bopping the reader over the head with politically incorrect ideas about race, ethnicity, and gender. Herriman's work proves that comics are not just for kids--they can function as social commentary and a measure ofzeitgeist too.
For the visitor interested in more recent popular comic strips, the Newark Museum has C. Segar's drawings for Popeye (1929) and Charles Schultz's drawings for Peanuts (1950). The arrangement of the latter emphasizes the evolution of form (Charlie Brown used to have a tennis-ball head and Snoopy was very beagle-like) and character development (Charlie wasn't such a wimp in the early days and Snoopy wasn't nearly as important to the story). For the casual visitor the main premise of the show becomes obvious when viewing comics that one actually recognizes: When you take the time to look at them, you realize that these images are so fully integrated into our visual culture that we have lost track of their inherent beauty and the skill they display. We are so used to seeing Charlie Brown that we usually forget the elegance of Schultz's visual haikus—comic build-up and dénouement succinctly established in just four panels with minimal drawings. Just because comics are popular—now, perhaps, more than ever—does not mean they do not belong hanging on museum walls.
The Manhattan half of the show is dedicated to the comic book and may be the target destination for super-hero aficionados. It appropriately begins with the natural bridge between the comic strip and book, showing some of Will Eisner's The Spirit (1940's). Distributed inside newspapers, Eisner's slim comic booklets have a deeper plot than the strip, while maintaining the strip's high aesthetic standard.
The most widely recognized artists in the Manhattan show, Eisner and Jack Kirby (Captain America and The Incredible Hulk) certainly deserve a round of applause for translating cross-cultural myths of good battling evil into the American vernacular. If you are especially interested in a sociological analysis of supermen, a smaller exhibit entitled "Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics" sits at the Jewish Museum in the shadows of "Masters." A Jewish-centric exhibit emphasizing comics as an expression of the Jewish immigrant experience, "Superheroes" benefits from the visitors who are already there, visiting the more universal and formal "Masters." Viewer beware: the cross-over between the two exhibits is misleading, for both shows display comics and brandish many of the same names, but the "Masters" exhibit promotes an understanding of comics as art—tracing their development through a lineage of great creators--while "Superheroes" highlights how comics can be read as sociological documents, reflecting the Jewish immigrant experience of the 1930s and 1940s. The viewer walks away from "Masters" in awe of personal visions and technical skills. From "Superheroes," one becomes aware of the Jewish creativity behind this pantheon of god-like crime fighters.
Besides targeting dedicated comic book fans, who certainly celebrate the opportunity of seeing the carefully inked drawings, this show seems to function as a long-awaited response to "High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture," the controversial 1991 show at MOMA that enraged many people for its evaluative categories. While the 1991 show was often criticized for emphasizing modern art's appropriation of popular culture, and not the opposite, "Masters" proves that popular culture can be art as well. Comics are not just raw material for Roy Lichtenstein masterpieces, comics constitute art itself. To encourage seeing comics as art, both the Jewish Museum and the Newark Museum invite the viewer to get up close and personal with the original drawings for the mass-produced comic. Examine the perfect black line! Notice the non-reproducible blue pencil! Ah, even the genius makes a mistake, look at the streaks of white-out! The only difference between the comic book you can buy for $1.50 at the corner store (or the $2,000 collectible on eBay) and the original on the wall is a slight trace of process.
For the comic book fan, getting this close to original pieces can be exhilarating because the drawing represents the transition point between the original idea inside the artist's head and its mass production in comic book form. But in general, fascination with the original doesn't quite fit a medium that was supposed to be commercialized and often involved the collaboration of a team of artists with expertise in draftsmanship, layout, dialogue and color. More emphasis could have been put on the formal qualities of comic book illustration, teaching the viewers something about the art itself. The curators also could have concentrated on the nuts and bolts of any good introduction to comics, like the special interaction of text and image, or our culture's consistent interest in the simplified reality of cartoon, as Scott McCloud does inUnderstanding Comics (1994) a comic book about comics themselves.
The comic book, like its cousin the comic strip, is delightful precisely because it is so accessible—both in terms of its price and its portability. Even the comic book fanatic, who will certainly get a thrill from seeing the originals, would most probably prefer to permanently own the catalogue of Masters of American Comicsthan to rush through the ephemeral museum visit. The same would not be true of a painting or sculpture lover: experiencing the materiality of the original painting or sculpture cannot be reproduced in any catalogueraisonné, no matter how good the color photographs are. This is not because comics are a lesser art form, it's just that their strength lies in the fact they are best enjoyed at home, read in bed.
It is not only the materiality of the comic that is lost under glass. Just consider how the verbs in this review change: one reads a comic book or strip, but one views it on the wall. Unless the intended audience for this show is the person who will recognize each and every drawing at first glance, the method of display prevents new readers from enjoying this art form. Comics are meant to be read sequentially. Yet in the museum, one cannot take the time to read all the comics without risking a fight with the security guard at closing time. If you can't actually read the comic, what's the point of looking at it? While the double exhibit certainly extols comics as art, it robs them of their inherent accessibility and statically reifies them behind glass. Comics should be displayed in ways faithful to the characteristics of the medium. A reading room of comics, like the miniature one offered at the Newark Museum, would be a good place to start.
Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland, 1905.Though some complain about the absence of a female voice in this exhibition of male characters, superheroes, and artists, the most glaring hole in the comics canon is Art Spiegelman's groundbreaking Maus. A little noseying around on the internet brings up an enlightening letter published on www.comicsreporter.com from Spiegelman to Ann Philbin and Michael Darling of MOCA, expressing his frustration at being kept out of the loop about the show traveling from Los Angeles to Milwaukee, and finally to New York. He first claims that the extended exposure of his original risks ruining them. But later in the letter, his real gripe emerges: "[t]he fact that the Jewish Museum will be the site within the NYC limits for the seven comic book artists to be exhibited there brings another issue to the fore, making central a subtext that was invisible at MOCA: the early comic book (unlike its more upscale cousin, the comic strip) was a largely Jewish creation." Spiegelman expresses concern that while the show was originally planned for two museums, engendering a split between comic strip and comic book, the locations in New York and New Jersey would change the meaning of the show. Specifically, given the central location of the Jewish Museum and the New York mentality that anything beyond the river is hinterland, Spiegelman worries that the Manhattan half will get more attention than the Newark half. For him, this becomes a problem because the context of the Jewish Museum creates a subtext that comic books are actually a Jewish creation. It doesn't help that at least three of the six artists at the Jewish Museum are of Jewish origin and that "Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics" suggests something similar.
The show at the Jewish Museum suffers without Maus not just because it holds an almost iconic status in both the Jewish art and comic art landscape. Spiegelman created Maus but he also founded RAW with his wife Francoise Mouly, the famous magazine of underground comix. R. Crumb, Gary Panter and Harvey Kurtzman, artists on display in the exhibit at the Jewish Museum cannot be properly understood without Spiegelman's RAW, an organized forum and breeding ground for underground comix artists.
In his letter Spiegelman further justifies the withdrawal of his work by pointing to its subject matter: "SinceMaus looms so large in the public's perception of the comic book's recent apotheosis, the subject of the Holocaust can trump considerations of form in this museum's context. The statement intended by the Masters show, an exhibit formed to postulate that comics can actually be some sort of... Art, would be undermined by presenting the medium as some sort of 'ethnic' phenomenon."
Would this subtext necessarily arise had Maus stayed in the show? Certainly it seems ironic that the artist who spawned a generation of Holocaust literature and remains one of the most well-known living Jewish artists, refuses to be part of the show at the Jewish Museum. But Spiegelman's discomfort at being pigeonholed as a Jewish artist is already apparent in a 1989 letter to the Village Voice, republished in Art Spiegelman: Comics, Essay, Graphics & Scraps (1998). He explains that originally he used a "clean universalist message" for Maus I, yet he quickly found that this kind of thinking was "fuzzy-minded, that [he] couldn't legitimately narrate the specifics of what happened to [his] family without referring to their Jewishness, that it was intrinsic to what happened to them...Somehow doing Maus involved coming out of the closet as a Jew." Perhaps it is not the Jewish Museum, which usually lets its temporary exhibits speak for themselves in terms of Jewish content, but Spiegelman's Maus that has an "ethnic" dimension regardless of its context.
Spiegelman's concern for the misconstruing of the comic book as a Jewish production may be viewed as an excuse for a continuing discomfort regarding his iconic status as a Jewish artist, a discomfort well depicted in several scenes in Maus II. And yet, he recently published In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), a book about the events and aftermath of September 11th, commissioned by The Forward, a Jewish New York weekly—a foray into a Jewish context not unlike an art exhibit at the Jewish Museum. However nuanced Spiegelman's reason for pulling his work, the move's political message is harsh for it implies that the Jewish Museum as an institution functions as a tool of identity politics instead of as a showcase for good art. In the colorful, deceptively simple two-dimensional world of comics, the viewers lose an opportunity to see great sketches because of what may be frankly called a prima donna move.