|
|
News Briefs featuring Art Spiegelman
( back )
The Province on "iconic cartoonist" Art Spiegelman's CO-MIX retrospective
Updated April 4, 2013
"Art Spiegelman blazes colourful trail"
Dana Gee
The Province, 14 February 2013
Iconic cartoonist Art Spiegelman will be celebrating his 65th birthday in style today.
The New York artist and the mind behind the graphic novel Maus will be ringing in the big day with the private opening of his show Co-Mix here at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The exhibit opens to the public Saturday.
“A retrospective of comics, graphics and scraps,” the exclusive Canadian show, which runs until June 9, examines almost 50 years of work.
“This is something he has kind of avoided because it feels so final,” said the show’s curator Bruce Grenville about the show which an electric cigarette puffing Spiegelman toured media through yesterday. “At the same time there is something extraordinary about the opportunity to look back over time.”
Included in the show are over 400 drawings, sketches and panels dating back to his very early underground career, his cover work for The New Yorker magazine, this very personal response to the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York and of course his most famous work Maus.
“He has a massive archive. He also keeps all of his work. He doesn’t like to sell it, which makes for a perfect opportunity to show this kind of thing in-depth,” said Grenville. “So, in fact what you see especially the work around Maus is a real kind of depth.”
Published between 1978-1991, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus chronicles his father’s Holocaust experience and the strained relationship between Spiegelman had with his father.
“There’s a kind of shock in people’s minds when they hear that this story is a comic strip,” Spiegelman has said. “Somebody did a comic strip about the Holocaust?”
The VAG show is packed with Maus insight. There are sketches, photographs, audio recordings, storyboards all related to the project that took 13 years to complete and grew out of over 7,500 sketches and drawings.
A long labour of discovery Maus was a hit from the start something Spiegelman said shocked him at the time.
“I got whiplash of a certain kind. I was walking by a 5th Ave. bookstore by the (Museum of Modern Art),” said Spiegelman referring to seeing his work displayed prominently. “Then there was a scary onslaught (People Magazine, Time to name a few) that made it so hard to do the second book.”
The show starts with the colourful and crazy work Spiegelman did during his 20 years working for the Topps Company. Included in this portfolio are such famous projects as the Garbage Pail Kids series of trading cards.
“They were my Medicis,” said Spiegelman comparing Topps to the famous Italian power family that was a patron to Michelangelo among other famous Italian artists and architects.
Another signpost in Spiegelman’s long successful career are covers he has done for The New Yorker magazine. One of those is given prominent placement as it not only marked a tumultuous time in the city but marked a change in tone for the venerable magazine.
Feb. 15, 1993 Spiegelman waded in on the Crown Heights Brooklyn race riots between blacks and Jews by delivering Valentine’s Day a cover that had a Hasidic Jew kissing a black woman.
“It was more genteel until then,” said Spiegelman about this evocative cover.
“This is rough and tough work. It’s not kid friendly. It’s about a subculture that takes on challenging and problematic ideas. That’s been at Art’s core from the beginning, to ruffle those feathers, to use art as means to offer social commentary and participate culturally,” said Grenville.
Another of those times happened after a fateful and world-changing September day in 2001.
The New Yorker was trying to figure out what to put on their cover. The plan was just a black page but then Spiegelman suggested to his wife Françoise Mouly, who is the magazine’s art editor, the idea of the black on black cover that depicts the outline of the World Trade Center towers.
“We were there. The towers came down around us,” said Spiegelman, who along with Mouly rushed to near Ground Zero to collect their daughter from school. “It was unhinging.”
From there Spiegelman stayed with the topic.
“I was waiting for the other shoe to drop,” said Spiegelman who at the time was convinced New York was going to be obliterated by other terrorist acts.
Those works ended up in the book In the Shadow of No Towers, his first new book of comics since Maus.
As for the future the birthday boy wasn’t too sure.
“That’s hard because I’m trying to find out what is left of me after a retrospective,” he said laughing.
For the record Spiegelman is working on turning a lecture on the relationship between words and pictures into a performance piece.
|
|
|
click here to read more
|
| |
Art Spiegelman in the Dallas Morning News
Updated April 4, 2013
"'Maus' creator Art Spiegelman: Comics can be literary; it comes down to story"
Chris Vognar
The Dallas Morning News, 3 March 2013
Art Spiegelman chuckles as he looks back on the days when comics weren't considered cool. He sounds a little like an older kid telling a younger sibling how easy they've got it now.
"I tell young people about the old days, and they don't understand," he says. "It's as if I'm saying we used to have to go out and kill mastodons for dinner. You couldn't go into a bar and try to pick up a woman by saying you draw comics. You'd be much better off saying you were a plumber or a carpenter."
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the groundbreaking "Maus" realizes his role as evangelist is much easier than it once was. With all manner of comics and graphic novels garnering critical acclaim and comics courses proliferating at universities, the battle for mainstream acceptance has been won.
"At this point it's sort of like a glamour thing, like being part of an indie rock band," says Spiegelman, 65. "The status has changed, and the kind of work that's coming out now is a really wide swath of independent creation."
He's hesitant to take credit, but Spiegelman played a significant role in his medium's triumph. The two volumes of "Maus," published in 1986 and 1991, showed a mass audience of general readers and cultural arbiters that comics could tackle the most serious of stories with narrative and illustrative daring.
On one level it's the story of how his Polish parents survived the Holocaust, with Jews portrayed as mice and Nazis as cats. But "Maus" is also a heartbreaking study of memory and intergenerational communication, structured around Spiegelman's interviews with his father.
"I just thought I was making a long comic book," he says. "I'm astonished at how well it landed. I knew I could possibly find some audience if I followed that basic notion of what a comic should do."
It comes down to story, as Spiegelman learned the hard way. In 1978 he published "Breakdowns," a large-format collection of expressionistic and intensely autobiographical short works (including an early run at "Maus"). The book, re-released in 2008, now reads like a rare glimpse inside the soul of an innovative young artist. But it flopped when it was first published, and Spiegelman rededicated himself to the art of narrative.
In the process, he became a pioneer in blurring the lines between comics and literature.
Dennis Foster, an English professor at Southern Methodist University, teaches "Maus" as well as comic book writer Chris Ware in his literature courses. He sees no need to qualify the inclusion of the once-maligned format.
"They have a depth and complexity that makes use of all the techniques I have developed to read literature," Foster says by email. "If I can get my students to pay attention to such graphic details as the way a writer arranges panels on a page, the often ironic relation of words to the underlying images, or the allusions in a drawing that bring in references from a larger context, I think those students will know how to read everything more attentively."
The introduction to "Breakdowns" shows Spiegelman as a child, falling in love with the early Mad comics. Flip a few pages forward and he's musing on the intersection of form and content in art. Just as the medium's great artists create literature from comics, they also erase barriers between high and low culture.
Spiegelman credits his friend Ken Jacobs, the avant-garde filmmaker, for helping him see that light: "He got me to try to think of Picasso as a cartoonist instead of a sacred figure of modernism. Then I found out what modernism actually was."
|
|
click here to read more
|
Art Spiegelman on CBC's The Current
Updated April 4, 2013
"'Maus' cartoonist Art Spiegelman on finding art in disorder"
The Current, 15 February 2013
When Art Spiegelman started looking for a home for his ground-breaking graphic novel Maus, most publishers just didn't get it. Rejection letters came pouring in. They said things like, "the idea behind it is brilliant, but it never quite gets on track" ... or "my passing has to do with the nervousness of something so new and possibly off-putting."
To be fair, Maus is an illustrated narrative, a comic book really, about Spiegelman's father and his experiences as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust. It mixed historical accounts with personal stories. And it did it all using cartoons. The Germans were cats, the Jews were mice. In the end, Maus was published in 1992 and promptly won the Pulitzer Prize. It is now considered one of the most important graphic novels ever made. Over the years, Art Spiegelman has written other graphic novels, illustrated countless covers for The New Yorker magazine, as well as the satirical collector card series, Garbage Pail Kids.
The first-ever retrospective of Art Spiegelman's 40-year career opens today at the Vancouver Art Gallery. And Art Spiegelman was with us from Vancouver.
|
|
|
click here to read more
|
| |
Vancouver Sun promises "many surprises" from CO-MIX exhibition
Updated April 4, 2013
"Art Spiegelman, Co-Mix at the Vancouver Art Gallery"
Shawn Conner
Vancouver Sun, 15 February 2013
There is something fundamentally challenging about viewing comics on a gallery wall. It’s not that the artwork itself isn’t worthy of the honour. It’s that the eye is always tempted to read rather than just look.
Happily, Art Spiegelman’s work defies these limitations — at least in the way CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps covers the New York City cartoonist’s career.
Preliminary sketches and roughs, actual comic books, enlarged pieces and even a wall devoted to the Topps bubblegum series stickers that paid Spiegelman’s bills for several years are presented, along with the original finished pieces of art.
New Yorker magazine covers, book covers, child-aimed comic strips from the Little Lit anthology series he co-edited with his wife Francoise Mouly are also on display at the show, which runs at the Vancouver Art Gallery until June 9.
The sheer variety of Spiegelman’s work guarantees that even the most casual viewer won’t be bored. From the relatively straightforward narrative of his Holocaust memoir Maus to his earlier one- and two-page experiments in deconstructing the medium, to comic-strip response to 9/11, In the Shadow of No Towers, the artist has explored an ambitious range of ideas in comics art and illustration. Even if, as he says, “I’m not a very good drawer.”
CO-MIX presents examples of all of the above, including a wall devoted to Topps’ Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids stickers. A visitor could spend hours perusing these unabashedly satirical, Mad Magazine-like images, many of which were conceived but not necessarily drawn by Spiegelman.
Outside of the Topps wall, and a room devoted to the Little Lit stuff for kids, CO-MIX takes the viewer on a more-or-less chronological tour of Spiegelman’s 40-year career. In what senior curator Bruce Grenville referred to as the “junvenalia” section, we see the teenage Spiegelman’s initial forays into creating comics.
Nearby, pages from The Malpractice Suite and other formalist experiments that would eventually be collected in his book Breakdowns lead to covers and other images from Raw. The ’80s comics anthology series published by Spiegelman and Mouly helped revive the dying underground comix scene.
A room devoted to Maus includes page after page of original art. These are no larger than the format in which they first appeared (that is, approximately 5”x7”; Spiegelman chose to draw the pages in the same size they would be published, in a bonus pamphlet included in issues of the large-format Raw). In some instances, notebook pages covered by preliminary sketches and dialogue accompany the finished work, so we can see what Spiegelman calls “thought made visible.”
In a vitrine, the passports of his parents — both concentration camp survivors — are displayed.
In the decades following the publication of Maus, Spiegelman has had a second career as an illustrator. Despite feeling “I just wasn’t made for the Harvard Club,” as he put it at a Thursday media preview for the show, he has done numerous covers for The New Yorker. These include the famous image of a black woman and a Hassidic Jew kissing that was published 20 years ago Friday, on Feb. 15, 1993. Spiegelman credits the cover for helping make the magazine “less genteel.”
The show also features his illustration work from a 1994 reissue of The Wild Party, a lengthy prose poem from 1928. Spiegelman chose the project to follow Maus “as a way of reinventing myself,” he said. The art he did for Joseph Moncure March poem “was everything that Maus wasn’t — decorative, sexy, playful.”
For those who know Spiegelman only from Maus, it’s one of many surprises CO-MIX has to offer.
|
|
click here to read more
|
Art Spiegelman's CO-MIX exhibition featured in The Globe and Mail
Updated April 4, 2013
"Art Spiegelman retrospective: A look back on a career that’s been all about looking back"
Marsha Lederman
The Globe and Mail, Vancouver, 16 February 2013
There’s an episode in Art Spiegelman’s autobiographical and Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus in which Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, has a dream. Imprisoned as a slave labourer during the Second World War, working for a big German company, Vladek dreams of his dead grandfather. “Don’t worry, my child, you will come out of this place – free!” his grandfather promises. And it will happen, he says, on Parshas Truma.
The reference is to a section of the Torah. A different segment – called a parsha in Hebrew – is read each week. In the Parshas Truma (spellings vary), read once a year, God instructs Moses and the Israelites wandering in the desert to construct a tabernacle, a temporary sanctuary, with various materials including gold, silver, colourful wool and precious stones.
In Maus, and in his life, Vladek was indeed released from that labour camp on Parshas Truma – finding sanctuary in the desert of Nazi Germany, but it, too, was only temporary. There were many more troubles to come – including Auschwitz. Still, he survived, and after the war, he had a son, Art, born the week of Parshas Truma. When Art turned 13, this was the Torah portion he recited at his bar mitzvah.
And this is the Torah portion that will be read in synagogues this Saturday, the day after Art Spiegelman turns 65, and as a retrospective of his extraordinary career opens at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
“That’s auspicious, having an opening like that,” said Spiegelman this week, during an interview at the VAG (conducted on a rooftop deck so he could smoke).
But wait, there’s more: It’s also exactly 20 years since his first New Yorker cover – Feb 15, 1993. A shocker of a Valentine’s Day illustration early in the magazine’s Tina Brown era, it featured a Hasidic Jew kissing a black woman, inspired by New York’s Crown Heights riot two years earlier. “That cover entered the DNA of the New Yorker and changed it,” says Spiegelman, who should know: His wife, Françoise Mouly, is the magazine’s art director.
The illustration is one of more than 400 works that form Art Spiegelman CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps.
Spiegelman was born in Stockholm in 1948 and immigrated with his parents, both Auschwitz survivors, to the United States in 1951. As a child in New York, he devoured comics, and started his own fanzine in junior high. He was 15 when hired by Topps Bubble Gum Co., which became, he says, his “Medici” for 20 years. The steady work, including creating the parody series Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids, allowed Spiegelman to focus on his first love, comics.
He began in the underground scene, and founded the comics magazine RAW with Mouly in 1980. But it was Maus that changed everything – for him, and the art form. “Art hates it when we call him the first graphic-novel artist, but of course he invented the genre,” says Bodo Von Dewitz, CO-MIX coordinating curator in Cologne.
Maus, which was initially serialized in RAW and published as Maus I in 1986 and Maus II in 1991, can only be described as groundbreaking. Portraying Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs, Maus was rejected by many publishers, but was ultimately an enormous critical and commercial success. The work not only brought new attention to that horrific chapter in history but mainstream literary respect to the art form. In 1991, Spiegelman had a solo exhibition, Making Maus, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
It took the “visceral shock” of his Holocaust comics for graphic art “to move into another zone,” Spiegelman says. “So that’s been useful to the world and to a degree useful to me, although I’ve been left with the aftershock of that.”
That aftershock has meant acclaim and financial freedom. But it has also meant everything else he subsequently created would be compared to Maus. “I feel like … a blues musician who had one crossover hit, so they just ask you to play that at every concert,” he says.
In 2011, he was awarded the prestigious grand prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, an award that entailed the creation of the retrospective now visiting Vancouver. The exhibition opened in Angoulême just over a year ago and travelled to Paris and Cologne. After Vancouver, it will move to the Jewish Museum in New York.
The exhibition is a comprehensive career retrospective – from Spiegelman’s juvenilia to RAW to other comic works such as Breakdowns and his post-9/11 stunner, In the Shadow of No Towers. There is his graphic work, his New Yorker covers (including a 1993 one featuring schoolchildren carrying guns, which has received a lot of attention post Newtown), his children’s literature, and of course, a strong focus on Maus – walls of studies and finished pages; artifacts related to his family; audiotape of interviews with his father, who died in 1982.
“I wanted to show this process of work that I found very important,” said curator Rina Zavagli-Mattotti, from Paris this week, “the fact that to make one image that will be printed, he maybe does the work, the sketches, 100 times.”
VAG senior curator Bruce Grenville, who had worked with Spiegelman on the 2008 VAG show KRAZY!, contacted Spiegelman after the 2011 publication of the author’s book MetaMaus to congratulate him, and asked if he would consider doing something else at the VAG. Spiegelman suggested bringing CO-MIX to Vancouver. “It was really just the right moment, because he swore up and down he would never do a retrospective,” says Grenville.
“Disaster is my muse,” Spiegelman declares in the introduction to In the Shadow of No Towers. So how does he continue to create when life is so good? “Fortunately,” he quips, “disasters can include hangnails for me.”
He’s quick with the joke, but it seems that dark thoughts are never far from his mind.
“I was realizing I’m thinking about death a lot these days, because turning 65 is a big deal. But then I’m looking back over my journals, [and I realize] I’ve been thinking about death since I was 15 or something.” He continues, ambivalent. “There is something epitaph-like about a retrospective. But here it feels like an interesting coincidental confluence to have it happen on my birthday. And I’ll take it as a gift, rather than as a curse.”
|
|
|
click here to read more
|
| |
Inside Vancouver takes a look at Art Spiegelman's CO-MIX exhibition
Updated April 4, 2013
"Art Spiegelman At the Vancouver Art Gallery"
Shawn Conner
Inside Vancouver Blog, 15 February 2013
Best-known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, Art Spiegelman is one of the most respected comics artists/illustrators in the world.
In CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps, the Vancouver Art Gallery presents a retrospective of Spiegelman’s 40-year career. The show marks the North American premiere of the exhibit, which has traveled from Angouleme to Paris to Cologne before landing here, where it will run Feb. 16 – June 9 2013.
The exhibit’s Vancouver stay has its origins in KRAZY!, a 2008 exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery co-curated by Spiegelman. Thanks to the artist’s relationship with the gallery and senior curator Bruce Grenville, visitors to the VAG will be treated to this first retrospective of the cartoonist’s work. CO-MIX isn’t limited to finished pieces; sketches and rough drafts of Spiegelman’s work will give a glimpse into the artist’s process at work.
Spiegelman’s career spans the underground comix movement of the ’60s and ’70s to the anthology Raw to the Holocaust memoir Maus to covers for New Yorker magazine and his response to 9/11, In the Shadow of No Towers. Along with his wife Francoise Mouly, he’s also edited the “Little Lit” series of anthologies of comics for kids.
|
|
click here to read more
|
Slideshow of Art Spiegelman's work on Globe and Mail website
Updated April 4, 2013
"In pictures: A selection of Art Spiegelman's work"
The Globe and Mail, 15 February 2013
|
|
|
click here to read more
|
| |
CBC: Art Spiegelman is "subject of a major new exhibition in Vancouver"
Updated April 4, 2013
"Art Spiegelman's boundary-stretching comic art in Vancouver"
CBC News, 15 February 2013
Art Spiegelman's dark, powerful and boundary-smashing comic artwork is the subject of a major new exhibition in Vancouver.
Spanning the pioneering graphic artist's diverse, decades-long career, the Vancouver Art Gallery's CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps is the first retrospective devoted to the Swedish-born American.
The show brings Spiegelman back to the VAG, where he served as a curator as well as a featured artist for the 2008 exhibit Krazy: The Delirious World of Anime, Comics, Video Games and Art.
"It was such a wonderful opportunity to work with a man who has such insight into the history of comics and insight into his own work, which doesn't always go hand in hand," said VAG curator Bruce Grenville.
"I couldn't believe it when he said there was a possibility for a retrospective and that we could bring it here."
CO-MIX features more than 400 preparatory drawings, sketches, studies and panels, from fanzines Spiegelman created in his teens through his pioneering underground comics of the 1970s to his acclaimed later work, including children's books. And there are excerpts of his landmark, Pulitzer Prize-winning opus Maus, based on his father's experiences as a Holocaust survivor.
Over the years, Spiegelman has published influential work for very different settings.
He's had success in the commercial world through his long association with Topps (where he created his satirical Wacky Packages and gross-out Garbage Pail Kids trading card series). He's created controversial and political editorial covers and comic strips for publications ranging from The New Yorker to Playboy. He's also won acclaim for his autobiographical creations, such as Prisoner on the Hell Planet, a response to his mother's suicide.
The New York-based artist has long explored the boundaries of his art.
"What happens when you move as far away from narrative as you can? At what point does it stop being a comic and just start being a graphic? These were concerns for me," he told reporters in Vancouver on Thursday at a media preview of CO-MIX.
Studying modern artists and writers (such as Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce) as an adult helped him approach his cartooning in a different way, he added.
He explained the unusual approach he took in a set of panels on display in Vancouver.
"It has almost no movement — it's a completely still comic that only has one movement in time, which is a ball bouncing outside a window," he said.
"Everything else is an uncoupling of the words and pictures to make something else happen, to make you move around the room that the protagonist is in, in a certain way. It just doesn't use the same operating system [as other comics]. It's just not what comics do."
The piece was subsequently republished in Marvel's Comix Books series and, with a laugh, Spiegelman recalled his favourite criticism of it.
"In the letters column, someone said: 'I liked most of the pieces and Spiegelman's piece was OK, but it didn't go anywhere.' And it's true. It didn't go anywhere except way off the page and into a dialogue about high and low art when it wasn't part of the conversation."
CO-MIX: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps opens Saturday and continues through June 9 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The international exhibit, which originally debuted in France and has also been shown in Germany, will then travel to New York's Jewish Museum.
|
|
click here to read more
|
Jewish Currents profile on Art Spiegelman
Updated April 4, 2013
From "Art Spiegelman"
Lawrence Bush
Jewish Currents, 15 February 2013
(...) Comic book artist and comic history meyvn Art Spiegelman (Itzhak Avraham ben Zev), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his Holocaust chronicle, Maus, was born in Stockholm on this date in 1948. The son of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors (temporary survivors, anyway; Spiegelman’s mother committed suicide when the artist was 20), he was inspired as a kid by the intensity and insurgent spirit of MAD magazine, and joined the underground comix world in the 1970s with autobiographical strips that presaged Maus. Published in two volumes in 1986 and 1991, Maus was an international sensation that finally established the comic book as literary genre, richly artistic and worthy of adult and critical attention. Spiegelman and his wife Françoise Mouly also produced Raw in the 1980s and early ’90s, which helped launch several writer-artists in their careers. From 1992 to 2001, he was a contributing artist for the New Yorker and saw twenty-one covers published, including his wonderful, notorious Valentine’s Day cover of a Black West Indian woman and a khasidic man kissing (in the wake of the Crown Height black-Jewish tensions of 1991). Spiegelman has also created several New Yorker strips celebrating comic book history. He received his second Eisner Award and was inducted into the Comic Books Hall of Fame in 1999.
“Comics are a gateway drug to literacy.” —Art Spiegelman (...)
|
|
|
click here to read more
|
| |
Ilium Gazette: Art Spiegelman featured in non-fiction book on comics
Updated April 4, 2013
From "Book review: “Superman is Jewish?” by Harry Brod"
Ilium Gazette, 2 February 2013
What really makes this book worth reading is Brod’s description of Jewish comics creators deploying all of their talents to tell Jewish stories. He makes a convincing argument not just for the literary merit of Will Eisner’s Fagin the Jew or Art Spiegelman’s Maus, but also describes the importance of the graphic novel medium to the structure of those works.
|
|
click here to read more
|
|
copyright ©2010 drawn & quarterly
|
|
