ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part two

This jewel of a drawing by the great Robert Fawcett was a spot illustration for the story Mutiny in Paradise which appeared in This Week magazine in May 1957.

The original magazine was printed on cheap pulp paper, and most copies have long since crumbled into silt. I am posting a scan of the original so that this fine, arrogant drawing will continue to get the audience it deserves. Contrast Fawcett's use of drybush to convey the depth of the jungle outside the hut with the slashing brush strokes of the wall which energize the whole drawing.



Fawcett understood anatomy so well that he was able to depict the feet of the character with speed and confidence, despite their odd angle.



Most important, note how the subject matter was subordinated to the abstract design of the picture. Fawcett always said that the longer an artist could work on a representational drawing at the purely abstract level, the better.

ONE LOVELY DRAWING

While it is great fun to talk about the larger landscape of art, sometimes you can see more by looking through a microscope than by looking out the window of an airplane.

That's especially true when you are talking about the intimate art of drawing. As I have noted elsewhere, I think art critic Roberta Smith got it exactly right when she wrote about the special quality of drawing:

Drawings are the most overtly delectable of all art forms...Drawings in general are like love letters. Personal in touch and feelng, physically delicate, they reflect the artist's gifts, goals and influences in the most intimate terms... [They are] a direct extension of an artists's signature and very nervous system.

So I think it makes sense to take time out from bloviating about the art world to reflect on an individual drawing. I will be doing this on a regular basis, to bring attention to selected examples of long forgotten treasure and to give my detractors a better understanding of what I mean when I write about the great potential of drawing.

The illustrator Austin Briggs was featured this week in Leif Peng's excellent Today's Inspiration blog (http://todaysinspiration.blogspot.com/) which I heartily recommend to you. I am posting here a drawing by Briggs which has hung outside my bedroom door for ten years. This drawing of a World War II monument in Paris was executed with a dull crayon, yet it conveys astonishing subtlety and sensitivity. The virtuoso Briggs could've threaded a needle while wearing boxing gloves.



Notice in the detail above how Briggs has captured the man's stooped posture, his raised shoulder encircling his companion, his neck projecting from his collar, the bald crown of his head, and how efectively the simple indication of an ear conveys the man's reverse profile. With a crude tool and a primitive line, Briggs conveys more wisdom and insight about his subject than a thousand other artists might have conveyed using modern, precise tools and the most labored approach. Now that's drawing!



The statue, too, is rendered in a marvelous, vigorous way. Using nothing but talent and the simplest of tools-- a single black stick of wax-- Briggs created a symphonic range of effects to convey great power: shading, smearing, applying different pressure for different values, all applied with a confidence that reinforces the power of his subject. I hung this simple drawing outside my door ten years ago and I still learn something new from it almost every day.

THE BATTLE BETWEEN GOOD TASTE AND GOOD ART

When the illustrator Robert Fawcett decided to abandon fine art for illustration, His painter friends objected that illustration was coarse, vulgar and tasteless. Fawcett responded that "good taste" is often the enemy of creativity:

the creative act in art involves a kind of courage which good taste might easily modify. It almost seems as if the creative impulse involves a large ingredient of vulgarity to be a vital statement. In drawing, an excess of what we think of as good taste can only result in an anemic product, while the more vulgar statement... is invariably stimulating.

Pulitzer prize winner Michael Chabon sided with Fawcett, praising comic art as straddling "high art and low art [at] the margins of trash and quality....There's something stimulating about hanging out at the borders there."

One of the most marvelous inventions to spring from the borders of trash and quality was Alex Raymond's comic strip, Flash Gordon. These virile drawings with their gorgeous lurid coloring are from a Sunday page in 1935.

Unfortunately, vulgarity has few defenders left these days. The priests of high art have learned to tolerate many forms of marginal art but have never quite overcome their aversion to rocket ships and ray guns. Even illustrators who should know better often pull up the ladder behind them once they achieve some legitimacy. When Edward Sorel, a caricaturist of modest skill, had a show at the National Portrait Gallery he quickly changed uniforms. I asked his opinion of his fellow caricaturists at MAD magazine and he sniffed with derision, "those people are vulgar."

Once upon a time, vulgar (meaning uncouth and unrefined) art was not such a problem. The greatest works of western culture were filled with slapstick humor, violence and sex. Homer, Chaucer and Shakespeare are riddled with vulgarity. Chaucer, for example, loved flatulence jokes more than Howard Stern does. Here he writes about how a woman, after cheating on her husband with one lover, sticks her naked bottom out a window to trick a second suitor who is standing outside begging for a kiss in the night:

Dark was the night as pitch, aye dark as coal
And through the window she put out her hole...
With his mouth he kissed her naked arse
Right greedily, before he knew of this.
Aback he leapt-- it seemed somehow amiss,
For well he knew a woman has no beard...
And said, "Oh fie, alas! What did I do?"

Compared to Chaucer, Flash Gordon seems positively refined. I don't recall Dale Arden resorting to anything so uncouth. Yet, pale critics weighed down by too much history and too much taste look at the excess in Flash Gordon and recoil.







Vulgar art flourishes even without defenders for the best of all possible reasons: because its strength commands an audience. It is robust art in a great cultural tradition. Some of the best ideas come from just outside the borders of good taste, wearing a little too much rouge, and we should not be so quick to take offense .

WOWEE, LOOK AT THOSE HANDS!

Nobody draws hands like the great Mort Drucker.

close up, with pencil lines

If you study Drucker's stories for MAD magazine, you will see a wonderful ballet of hands from one panel to the next. Note in the following drawing how, in a tiny space crammed with Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Al Pacino and other superstars, a hand still dominates center stage.



There are at least two important lessons to draw from Drucker's treatment of hands.

First, Drucker constructs hands like a master architect-- he understands the structural foundation of his subject, and that gives his drawings solidity. But that's only the start. For some artists, extensive knowledge of anatomy can have a deadening effect. It locks them into a certain mechanical way of thinking. It becomes an anchor that weighs down creativity.



But if you're really good-- like Drucker-- your knowledge of anatomy sets you free. Drucker could never achieve his springing, bouncing joyful line if he had to slow down to consult reference every time he drew a hand. He has internalized his knowledge, and it has given him a solid foundation from which he can launch his trademark "slapdash" line with confidence. There's no other way to achieve that effect.





The second lesson is that Drucker did not need to draw all those hands in order to get paid for the job. The picture below would have been quite complete without one hand knocking on the door, a second hand grasping the door knob and a third gesturing in mid air.



Look in the following close up at the work that went into drawing three hands that could just as easily have been cropped from the bottom of the panel. These were not drawn for the sake of the editor.

That, my friends, is the real definition of art for art's sake.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRAGEDY AND MERE MISERY

Fans of Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman and other popular graphic novelists patiently explained to me last week that I am wrong to expect "slick, commercial" design in art that deals with higher truths about alienation and the tortured soul of the artist. Technical skill may be important for commercial art used to sell Coca-Cola, but is less relevant to today's more honest and personal artwork, with its tragic or subversive messages.

I admit it's difficult to criticize Maus or Fun Home merely because the authors do not draw well. But personally, I don't think the epithet "commercial" is a useful tool when seeking out quality art. Many bad pictures of sincere, personal subjects can be found hanging in art museums. Many brilliant pictures of dishwashing detergent can be found in magazine ads. As far as I know, nobody has yet established a connection between purity of motive and quality of picture.

It may be sad that, as Thoreau remarked, "most men lead lives of quiet desperation," but after reading Chris Ware, we might wish that desperate men would be a little quieter.



If artistic purity is what matters to you, I'm not sure you'll find much difference between commercial illustration, graphic novels and the pictures hanging in the Museum of Modern Art. They are all commercial. (Andy Warhol famously remarked that "good business is the best art.") Instead, try setting your sights a little higher and check out the true "outsider" artists. If the stink of commercialism offends you, you have to be prepared to hang around artists who don't use soap regularly.


Henry Darger

Often untrained, working in obscurity and poverty, ignored by the New York glitterati, "outsider" artists work only to serve their god or their muse, or sometimes their alien leaders on the planet Zarbtron.



For example, the artist Henry Darger was an impoverished janitor and dishwasher who lived for 50 years in a shabby apartment so tiny he had to sleep sitting up. He worked late into the night illustrating his magnificent graphic novel, In the Realms of the Unreal.



















Henry Darger

Darger led a life of isolation and pain that makes Jimmy Corrigan's life look like a day at Disneyworld. Yet, Darger's artwork is filled with dazzling images. He did not use his suffering as a justification for ignoring composition, design, color or the other standards inherent in his chosen medium. His beautiful pictures were able to advance, rather than work in opposition to, his troubling personal message.

It is also worth noting that Darger never dwelled on his own suffering and insecurities. Instead, he elevated his personal misery to epic tragedy with his art. You will find no self-obssessed whimpering in Darger's work.


Henry Darger

Darger kept these exquisite illustrations to himself until the day he died. He was not working to impress the critics or harvest royalties. He used art to struggle with his own personal demons.


Henry Darger

Another "outsider" artist, James Hampton, was a janitor who lived a lonely life of poverty. Beginning in the late 1940s, Hampton began writing about his religious visions using pictograms and secret codes.



He drew marvelous symbols such as lightning bolts and omniscient eyes. Hampton spent the last fifteen years of his life integrating these symbols and pictograms into astonishing sculptures comprised of aluminum foil, light bulbs and pieces of old furniture.



He called his strange and beautiful masterpiece, "The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly."

James Hampton

Like Darger, Hampton was not out to impress Art News. He did not whine or complain about the unfairness of life. Hampton's own landlord had no idea what Hampton was up to. After Hampton died, his landlord was shocked to discover Hampton's masterpiece in the unheated garage where Hampton had labored all those years.


James Hampton

The Throne of the Third Heaven is made up of 177 separate art objects, combining words, symbols, drawings and sculpture. Standing before it, the cumulative effect is enough to inspire dread for your immortal soul.



Although they never received recognition during their lives, the work of Darger and Hampton is superior to anything I have seen from Spiegelman or Ware. Darger and Hampton worked with greater handicaps, under more difficult circumstances, and yet made better art.

There is also an important philosophical difference here, which should probably be irrelevant to a blog about illustration, but which I confess colors my judgment. It seems to me that the artistic response of these outsider artists to personal pain and the weight of their humanity was a more noble, less self-indulgent response. The guys who seem to know the most about this tragedy business-- Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes-- remind us that suffering and doom are an inescapable part of the human condition, and that our only meager defense is the tragic hero's capacity to elevate mere misery into the majesty of tragedy. This is done through courage, perseverance and understanding in the face of hopelessness. (Not much of a consolation prize, I admit, but hey, what other options are you offering?) My purely subjective judgment is that Jimmy Corrigan dwells at the misery level, and I find no nutritional content from visiting him a second or third time.



One of my readers, in explaining where I've gone wrong, compared Chris Ware to Shakespeare. In my view, for all his sincerity, Chris Ware's work is artistically feeble compared to Darger's.

There are of course thousands of other "outsider" artists, some making beautiful art, some making terrible art. But if you genuinely reject "commercialism" in art and strive for artistic purity, put down your graphic novels and invest a little time with real outsiders.

ERICH SOKOL

John Ciardi once said, “Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.” Since we've been rambling for the last few weeks about modern art trends, I thinks it makes sense to heed Ciardi's advice and spend a moment visiting the paintings of Erich Sokol, the gifted illustrator / cartoonist for Playboy magazine.





Sokol had a splendid sense of light, color and atmosphere. He was far more talented than traditional pin up artists such as Vargas, whose vacuous paintings now sell for tens of thousands of dollars.





Note the confidence with which Sokol handles the stripes of light on the beach in the following painting, or his treatment of the foliage in the background. Nothing is labored, and no unnecessary details.



Although the beautiful girl was always the centerpiece of the cartoon, if you look closely you will see that Sokol had more fun painting the male counterpart-- the fat doctor, the grizzled farmer, the blustering general all left him more room for creativity.

EXHIBITION OF GREAT ILLUSTRATION ART

If you are located within a thousand miles of New York City, I urge you to make your way to the Dahesh Museum of Art (http://www.daheshmuseum.org) to see a breathtaking collection of 90 original drawings and paintings from the golden age of illustration.



The exhibition is making a rare guest appearance from the private collection of Richard and Mary Kelly. If you don't take advantage of this oppportunity to see them, you may never get another chance.



The exhibit includes superb examples of art from all the greats-- Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Dean Cornwell, Norman Rockwell, J.C. Leyendecker and a host of others. It is impossible to walk through this exhibition, crowded with powerful, vivid images, and emerge without renewed respect for these talented, imaginative artists.



The exhibition continues through May 21, 2006. It is accompanied by an excellent catalog with numerous color reproductions.


In one of the catalog's essays, the chief curator of the Dahesh quotes a letter from Vincent van Gogh in which van Gogh admires Howard Pyle's "wonderful" drawings. When you look at the Pyle drawings in the Kelly collection, I'm sure you will agree with van Gogh.