First sequential art9/3/2023 Next up was Larry Rivers and his collaboration with the poet Frank O’Hara, “Stones.” Replete with word balloons the reference to comic strips appear throughout. One page clearly is intended as sequential as the character depicted deconstructs (to put it mildly). Still, the page itself was included in the book, so it is unclear what his intentions, or influences were.ĭirectly across the gallery was a book by David Hockney, Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, 39 etchings, some with aquatint, from 1969-1970. Or was it? Like the Van Gogh page, on further examination it appears to be 12 thumbnails for his illustrations for the book The Unknown Masterpiece from 1931. As I entered the room, much to my surprise, I was greeted by a Picasso comic page. There I attended the exhibit Off the Shelf: Modern & Contemporary Artists’ Books, which is comprised of renowned artists’ books, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, David Hockney, and Ed Ruscha. That was until I visited the Baltimore Museum of Art last month. However I was ready to dismiss this as an anomaly and move on. Certainly the form began decades earlier in Europe, created by practitioners such as Rodolphe Töppler, John Tenniel, Charles Ross, John Mclenan, George du Maurier, William Hogarth, Richard Doyle, Gustave Doré, et al, although none of that early work resembles a modern comic book page as much as Van Gogh’s. Whether that was his intent we will never know. The reason for the interest was how much it resembled a comic page. We are the stories we tell and retell, from sacred narratives inherited from tradition and passed down through the generations, to more recent histories, fictions, and fantasies.Recently the page shown below from one of Vincent Van Gogh’s sketchbooks, dated 1883, made the rounds on Facebook. The exhibition explores how sequential art functions to visualize narrative, wherein images and texts about the past inform our present sense of our selves, thus contributing to the narrative construction of identity. Taken together, the works touch on the plurality of Jewish identities and experiences: struggles with alienation and assimilation, a spectrum of religious observance and indifference, and the knotty intersections of race, gender, and class. The artists in Graphic Jews build on the emergence of overt Jewish characters and content in comics that began in the 1970s. Along with copies of graphic novels by Corman, Davis, Katchor, and Sturm, Eisner’s and Spiegelman’s two novels are available for visitors to explore in the exhibition. Two important graphic novels from this period signaled the transition: Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978), considered by many to be the first graphic novel, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-1991). Cultural shifts in American society in the 1960s and 1970s took pressure off Jewish immigrants and their children to assimilate into American society, and, as result, both long-time comics professionals and younger artists began to draw comics in which Jews and questions of Jewish identity figured more prominently. Yet for much of the twentieth century the actual scale of Jewish involvement in the medium was not obvious, as neither the creators or their creations were marked, let alone marketed, as Jewish. Jews played an outsized role in the history of American comics, creating, writing, illustrating, and publishing some of the best-known comics during the medium’s Golden Age in the 1930s and 1940s. Graphic Jews builds on a long history of Jewish Americans and comics. These works combine words and pictures into what Will Eisner, one of the masters of the form, called “sequential art”: telling stories by putting one image after another after another. Graphic Jews presents a selection of graphic novels and original pages by contemporary Jewish artists Leela Corman, Vanessa Davis, Ben Katchor, and James Sturm that tell stories about Jewishness and explore some of the many ways Jews have figured and reconfigured their Jewish identities.
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