THE MAD ECCENTRICS

Critics argue constantly about whether comic art qualifies as a fine art. Rather than debate which kinds of art win the "Fine Art" trophy, it is more interesting to compare the different strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of art.

For example, there are ways in which comics can be the ideal art form, better suited than painting or sculpture to bring out the strengths of an artist. It seems to me that no other art form in history has provided such fertile soil for true eccentrics to develop and display their personalities.

There is only a handful of truly famous eccentrics in art history: William Blake, the 18th century English mystic, recorded his dreams and religious visions in drawings and poems. Blake and his wife used to sit nude in front of guests and recite passages from Paradise Lost.



His distinctive artwork reflected his own odd personality and was not part of any school.



Other famous eccentrics include Richard Dadd, who was mentally ill, and Salvador Dali, who probably feigned being mentally ill. These noted eccentrics saw the world through a peculiar filter, often speaking in a language of their own. We pay attention because we learn something by viewing humanity from the outside.

I suspect that the comics medium has a higher ratio of true eccentrics than any other art form. George Herriman's Krazy Kat, Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, Gary Larson's Far Side, Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie, Bill Holman's Smokey Stover, and many other strips display deeply odd and irrational ideas, using highly personalized artwork.

Krazy Kat is not just your typical love triangle between a cat, a mouse and a dog of indeterminate gender. Herriman's art was as peculiar and insular (and profound) as Blake's. Here Herriman talks about the beginning of the world, taking a slightly different approach from Blake's biblical version.

Chester Gould's Dick Tracy is equally bizarre. In this sequence, the criminal Mr. Bribery takes a break from murder and extortion to drown his cigar smoking cat because he can't stand the cat's breath.

Bribery's sister, the aptly named Ugly Christine, gets into a fight with Bribery because she does not want him to use her new $17 steam iron as the weight for drowning the cat. As the panel at the beginning of this post indicates, the cat gets the best of Mr. Bribery.

These stories go far beyond mere whimsy. No normal mind could make this stuff up. It is like a cross between Edward Albee and the Marx brothers. And Gould's art, like Herriman's, is really good.

For a while, Gould kept a graveyard in his backyard with a tombstone for each of the villains that he killed off. In addition to his odd characters and stories, Gould regularly used his strip to lobby for crackpot causes, such as industrial control of magnetism, or not using psychics for crime detection:

Gould also diagrammed his philosophy on crime detection and other newsworthy subjects:

In the course of just 100 intense years, comics have displayed the personalities of some deeply odd people with excellent but Quixotic art-- a far higher ratio than would ever surface through art museums.

Why is this? Perhaps the medium combines the privacy for artists to sit alone at their drawing board-- a little incubation chamber for their neuroses and quirks-- with a wide daily audience for the resulting work product. Or, maybe the pressure of putting out a daily strip for decades simply drove them nuts.

CHEERLEADERS FOR MODERATION

You will be tempted to skip over this post because it has the word "moderation" in the title, and instead go looking for some juicy blog about extreme misbehavior.

You should resist that temptation, at least for a few paragraphs.

We tend to bristle at anything smelling like censorship or restraint. Moderation is contrary to the freedom that all artists crave, even when they have no important use for it.

In a recent post I quoted the war cry from the Futurist Manifesto which ushered in the art of the 20th century:

We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks....Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry...To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action.... We want to demolish museums and libraries [and] fight morality... .

20th century art seemed to race through one extreme style after another:

Futurism
Fauvism
Dadaism
Surrealism
Orphism
Abstract Expressionism
Op
Pop
Minimalism
Neo-expressionism
Conceptualism
Magic Realism
Patternism
Graffiti
Color field
Performance
Post modernism
Installation
Deconstructionism

Each of these styles (along with many others in between) flashed and cooled after only a few years. Many of them were intellectually invigorating and fun. Very few of them were interested in moderation or the patient search for lasting value.

Those who focus on what is new and hot usually develop short attention spans. They lose patience for moderation, nuance and context. But the old masters recognized that-- in the end-- moderation is all there is. As Shakespeare exclaimed, everything is a matter of degree:

Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark, what dischord follows! Each thing meets in mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores And make a sop of all this solid globe

In this painting by Vermeer, the girl's eyes and pearl earring really stand out, despite the fact that they are painted in quite moderate colors. The earring is not extremely white, nor is her eye extremely dark.



Both colors seize your attention because of their context. Vermeer has placed the light earring against a dark shadow and the dark eye against light skin. That's the way to achieve real highs and lows. In art, as in life, context is everything.

All of this brings us back to last week's post about moderating pornography. The metaphors of extremism are alluring, both in art and in sex. It is fun to contemplate a painting made up of nothing but highlights, or a state of perpetual ecstasy without all those "boring parts" in between. But as George Eliot warned, "all of us get our thoughts entangled in metaphors and act fatally on the strength of them." Pornographers and artists who need to chase novelty inevitably become colossal bores.

Those who say "I'll try anything once"
Seldom try anything twice
Or three times
Arriving late at the Gate of Dreams Worth Dying For.

---Carl Sandburg

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DRAWING THE LINE

Viewer warning: to illustrate our continuing discussion on censorship, art and pornography, this post contains a few images that are more explicit than usual. None of them qualify as "hard core." All of them are readily available to our children, so I figure you should be capable of dealing for a few minutes with what they are seeing.

A number of you seem to share my view that government censorship of art is unacceptable. At the same time, you also agree there are lots of trashy pictures circulating freely that might mislead or even damage young people in their formative stages.

As one of the commenters on my last post noted,

Young women, being more often than not blissfully unaware of the content of average pornography, are in no position to discover their sexualities with men of their own age who have already been exposed to objectifying depictions of the female body. And young men develop an unhealthy and false image of women through their exposure to this same pornography.

The following pictures are benign versions of images that are easily available to most children:

Children who consume such stuff may have a harder time developing the patience and sensitivity to search out the genuine poetry and lyricism in sex.

If we don't believe laws or moral standards are a suitable way of limiting the adverse effects of such material, do we have to accept it as the inescapable price of free expression? Or can we turn instead to the language of aesthetics for help?

Neither law nor morality are useful tools for policing art, but artistic standards don't have to be based on laws or morals. Personally, I don't view the above pictures as immoral, just stupid. Rather than making such art illegal or saying that people will burn in hell for viewing it, maybe it's enough to condemn such pictures as artistically shallow, lacking in taste, judgment and other aesthetic values.

The art critic Clement Greenberg made a similar criticism of modern art, saying that a "relaxation of standards" has led many to accept cheap thrills as a substitute for profound artistic value:

It's not just tastelessness. It's when instead of aesthetic pleasure you settle for kicks.

To me, the vast majority of explicit illustration today settles for kicks without aesthetic pleasure. This is not an indictment of explicit art, only bad explicit art. Compare the impoverished images above with the splendid historical sampling below. Some of the greatest artists in history, from Rembrandt to Hokusai to Picasso, have imbued explicit subjects with profound aesthetic sensitivity:

I think profound art-- no matter how sexually explicit-- enhances us.

As the old saying goes, morality-- like art-- simply consists of drawing the line somewhere. Here is where I draw that line:

Art offers a wonderful spice cabinet for people whose relationships have enough nutritional content to withstand the seasoning. But for children who have never had such relationships, images can delude them in ways that hamper their ability to have real relationships going forward. Arsenic taken in small doses is a wonderful stimulant, but change the proportions and it has the opposite effect.

To try to censor or abolish such pictures is silly. Rather than demonizing pornography, it makes more sense to ridicule it, along with the arrested emotional development of its purveyors. The best boundary line I know between pornography and literature comes from the sage Lee Siegel:

Disclosing the drama of personality succumbing to desire-- that's been the challenge to modern writers free to describe sex on the page....Erotic writings preserve the inner lives-- the individuality of men and women; pornography obliterates them....There is, in fact, nothing secret about pornography. It is the public caricature of a private act.

This distinction should be conveyed to young people to help fortify them and to put the images that surround them in perspective. But to fear such pictures is to legitimize them, and to enhance their appeal. We are far more likely to reach a sensible result by channeling human desires than by denying them.

THE GAZE OF YOUNG GIRLS

In 1913, a pernicious little busybody named M. Blair Coan spied on visitors to an art exhibit in Chicago. Coan, an investigator for the State Vice Commission, was upset by the "immorality" of modern paintings and suspected that Matisse's painting of nude dancers might even be "attracting the gaze of young girls."



Coan stirred up a great public outcry against immoral art. He then turned his talents to spreading alarm about the imminent communist takeover of the United States. In one of his books, The Coming Peril, Coan warned that socialism would ruin society by encouraging free love and giving women the right to vote. For Coan, the most "monstrously immoral" threat was that socialism might permit white women to consort with men of other races:

The negro and the white woman, the white woman and the Chinaman, They draw no race line or color line in the [Socialist] party.

Each new generation must battle its own versions of Coan. Personally, I wouldn't know "immoral art" if I saw it. Rodin used to say, "There should be no argument in regard to morality in art; there is no morality in nature." But even if we all agreed on one standard for morality in art, the law is just not well suited to prevent people from drawing dirty pictures. Author Stephen Becker wrote about the futility of using law as a tool to shape human nature:

Man comes first with his lusts, and then the law, usually in the form of an infinitely reticulated mechanism that serves variously as strait jacket, leg iron or chastity belt. Or that should so serve; but in its preventive function it usually fails and thus becomes merely punitive, the rationale for thumbscrew or dungeon or guillotine.

Today, organizations such as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund do excellent work helping to keep that punitive function from getting out of hand.

That's the easy part.

Now let's turn back to the gaze of young girls.

I may have trouble recognizing when art is immoral, but I have no trouble recognizing when art is coarse, shallow or laughably immature. A number of popular artists such as Serpieri, who is an able draftsman, have a penchant for drawing beautiful women being gang raped by monsters.



Dozens of other best selling artists, such as Manara or Noe, make a fine living selling highly explicit pictures of adolescent male fantasies. And these are the best of the bunch. There are hundreds of artists out there who, judging from their work, seem to be training to illustrate gynecology textbooks.

I am not morally or legally opposed to this kind of art. I sometimes have aesthetic objections, but not enough to merit burning the books or jailing the artist.

At the same time, we let ourselves off too easily if we deny that there are gentle young things in the world (girls or boys) that deserve a chance to find their footing unmolested. And you don't have to be Coan to conclude that easily accessible extreme images from books, magazines and the internet can distort that process.

That's what I would like to chat about in the next few postings: the artistic quality and social impact of this kind of art, the virtues of extremism and the virtues of moderation. I trust that, as usual, you will have some strong opinions to express and some good artists to recommend.

ASHLEY WOOD'S TELEPHONE LINES

These pictures by illustrator Ashley Wood are a cross between drawing and knife fighting.

Wood is one of those artists whose drawings benefit from controlled accidents. His slashing lines and spattered ink are part skill, part chance and part hydrological experiment. When you work that way, you can't be too picky about your materials. The reverse side of the above drawing shows how some of Wood's more fortunate accidents take place on stray scraps of paper:



I like Wood's work. I like that he seems to draw on every available surface, from the backs of envelopes to waste paper, sometimes taping pages together when his experiment runs out of room.

I find his emphasis on telephone lines in these drawings worth noting for two reasons.

First, they show the importance of individual perception in composing an image. In most photographs, phone wires are so thin and insubstantial they don't even show up. In the following painting Edward Hopper ignores the phone wires:

They are almost never an important compositional element such as Wood has made them. It takes a human brain to fix upon a physically insignificant object and amplify and distort it into a major part of the drawing.

Second, Wood's awareness of the telephone lines reveals the sensitivity necessary to make a "spontaneous" style effective. Despite the vigorous, almost violent appearance of these drawings, it required a subtle eye to notice a detail like telephone lines and a thoughtful mind to play them up this way.

THE BLACK AND WHITE OF COLOR

I recently posted some illustrations by the great watercolor artist John Gannam, who had an astute eye for color.

But before he became famous for his use of color, Gannam did hundreds of black and white spot illustrations in the 1930s and 40s for lesser publications.





Many artists treated such assignments as hack work to rush through. However, Gannam applied himself and learned valuable lessons from black and white pictures which served him well when he later painted color illustrations.

Specifically, he learned from black and white illustrations to master value, which refers to the darkness or lightness of a color. Working in black and white, Gannam taught himself to control the "value structure" of his pictures, balancing blacks and whites and grays. He mastered tonality and contrast and learned to make his pictures eminently readable.



I find Gannam's control over the value scale in pictures such as this one absolutely astounding:



If you don't think this is hard to do, try it sometime.



For years, Gannam refined his color skills by doing black and white pictures.





As Gannam's career advanced, color slowly crept into his illustrations:



When Gannam later graduated to full page color illustrations, he had great appreciation for the values of the colors he used. Much of the strength of his color paintings came from the lessons he learned during that long apprenticeship doing black and white pictures.

ARTISTS IN LOVE, part eleven

James Montgomery Flagg had an ugly view of beauty.

"I have never had any slight interest in homely ladies," he said, "no matter how charming and intelligent they are reputed to be. They do not exist for me." And even if a woman satisfied his standards for beauty, she'd better not nag or be jealous about his many infidelities:

[I]f I ran the world...I'd have my FBI corral all the ugly people [along with] all nagging and jealous women,...and take them out to Death Valley and drop an atomic bomb on them.

He also believed that beauty, at least in women, diminished as they approached middle age:

Usually former models of mine whom I don't see for a quarter of a century have become distinctly middle aged.... in an almost invariably shocking way....I occasionally tell these dames they look like zombies. They naturally resent it and usually come back with "Well, you don't look so hot yourself!" But that has no sting whatever....

Flagg never ran out of of girlfriends to mistreat (will some kind female reader puhleeze write in and explain this?), but toward the end of his long career, Flagg fell head over heels in love for the first time.



In his autobiography Flagg described Ilse Hoffman, a young model and photographer, as "the most important thing in my life." Newly humbled, Flagg admitted, "I shall have to testify that there is such a thing as love at first sight. And I do mean love." The two had a passionate romance. He painted her as often as she would permit.

Ultimately, Flagg was too much of an emotional miser for a successful relationship:

After about three years there came a change in our relations-- a shadow hard to define... a contributing cause may have been ...a growing feeling on her part that she wanted to get married. I didn't....Gradually Ilse's attitude toward me began to change.

Ilse moved into an apartment of her own.

When I asked if she'd give me an extra key, she refused with obviously false excuses. I reminded her that she had a key to my place that made her welcome at any time, night or day. I told her I had no notion of using it, that I wanted her to make the gesture. Nothing doing. Then I knew.

Flagg became deeply despondent over losing the love of his life. "I walked and walked, uptown, not really knowing were I was going. I was hurt to death." One would hope that this painful experience caused Flagg to know moments of thoughtfulness. However, all evidence points to the contrary.

When Ilse found another man who was willing to commit to her, Flagg had a bitter and typically clueless reaction:

I was saturated with disgust for Ilse...I said to myself: 'I truly loved Ilse. No other woman has meant a thing to me-- from the moment I saw her.' Eventually she married this young man, who was some sort of stock market runner. Yes, she was a married woman. She'd got what she desired. A wedding ring.

Flagg never loved again. He had a sour and lonely old age. He said at the end of his life,

I can't stand the look of my present age. All my life I have been a worshipper of that beauty of the human form you see in some men and women....Is it any wonder that I don't like to look at the physical mess and mental dullness that has set in for me? As far back as I can remember, I have been in the limelight; now I'd rather be dead than be passed by, ignored.

Flagg's final self portrait is haunted by the painting of Ilse over his shoulder, and the life that might have been. The old man ruminated, "A roll in the bed with honey isn't love. And the tragic part of it is that you never learn this until you're past the age for it to happen to you again."

We sometimes like to believe that art sensitizes us and heightens our awareness of the beauty around us. But Flagg had a circle of compassion no wider than one of his pen nibs, and he paid the price for it.

JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG

James Montgomery Flagg (1877-1960) drew the same way that he lived: brash and arrogant.



Flagg's confidence was understandable. He worked at a time when illustrators were national celebrities. His famous poster, Uncle Sam Wants You, made him a household name. The press sought him out for his strong opinions. He consorted with hollywood stars, judged beauty contests, seduced young and impressionable models, frolicked at bohemian parties, and traveled back and forth to Europe with the beautiful people.



I like his work a lot. My biggest complaint is that Flagg rarely let a single well-considered line suffice where five additional lines might fit:



In this way, his style reflected his personality: never waste a minute reconsidering your initial line-- just keep underscoring it again and again.



Flagg led a privileged life and had little understanding or sympathy for those who did not. He was a member of exclusive men's clubs from whose barricades he merrily indulged his sexist and racist views. His invitation to the annual minstrel show at the elite Lotos club in New York was a beautiful painting of an odious subject:



No fan of government welfare programs, here is Flagg's sketch of the government after sodomizing the people.



Life was mighty fine for Flagg. But like many people who happened to be born at the right time, it never occurred to him that luck might have played a role in his success, or that the conditions that catapaulted him to fame might someday change. Flagg began his career when technical improvements in the printing process and the rise of popular magazines created a huge new market for his work. But his pictures that once commanded the public's attention were eventually eclipsed by Hollywood pictures that moved and talked. Flagg found himself on the wrong side of history. He did not respond well to public neglect, and died a sour and bilious old man. But his terrific drawings from his peak period stand alone and untarnished.