2018 Don Simpson Interview

Don Simpson interview from Comic Book Cartoonist, volume 1, number 1 (Comic Art Press, summer 2018), conducted by “Ski” Suharski. © 2018; used without permission.

DandyDonTV: Dr. Don Simpson Comics and Stories on YouTube

Here is a partial but growing list of YouTube videos featuring interviews with me or responses to my comics, me and other artists inking my drawings, and more, in apparent order. Hopefully I will add to this list and put it into some coherent order. (Please add videos I've overlooked in the comments below! Thanks.) Listen at your own discretion:

Why the 1963: WhenElse?! Annual—and Why Not

As followers of my Facebook page may know, I’ve recently opened a can-of-worms project with the working title 1963: WhenElse? Annual. What they may be asking is: What triggered this? Why now?

Who's the Greatest Artist Alive Today? Meet Arne the Android!

I've written elsewhere on the death of drawing; suffice it to say, over the course of my lifetime, I've watched hand drawing go from just about its midcentury peak in Western Civiliation to its virtual extinction in the twenty-first century. Hand drawing (and its offshoot, painting) once appeared in and on everything including newspapers, magazines, hardcover dustjackets, paperback, editorial illustration, advertising, album covers, billboards, signs on the sides buildings, and everywhere else. Except for a few specialty purposes like children's books, comics, and The New Yorker, imagery of the hand has almost completely disappeared as photography and digital technologies have conquered every realm.

King Kong Cover for Amazing Heroes!

Originally posted July 13, 2017; updated with an addendum below, August 5, 2019.

Perhaps the best piece of art I created for the entire King Kong adaptation I drew for Fantagraphics' Monster Comics imprint in the early 1990s never appeared as part of the series. Instead, it was the cover for Amazing Heroes, the little sister publication to their more upscale publication, The Comics Journal. Here is a look at the original colored blueline.

For more on the art of my Kong adaptation, visit my King Kong blog!

When a Giant Pencil is Worn to a Nub on South Craig Street: Yet Another Pittsburgh Arts Casualty

Just two weeks after the announcement that the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (once the flagship of a national chain of trade schools), and only a week after a realigned Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media tacitly announced a downgraded role for traditional manual arts such as drawing, painting, and sculpture in their newest incarnation, an iconic Pittsburgh art supply store has abruptly announced it will be going out of business after 48 years.

PCAM: 21st C. "Arts" .org Too Ashamed to Mention Drawing, Painting, or Sculpture by Name

If you want another sign of how completely debased the word "art" has become in our twenty-first century civilization (not to mention the intellectually corrosive effects of an MFA in the visual arts), herewith the Friday, February 8, 2019 email announcing a new local arts .org (note the words drawing, painting, and sculpture are completely absent):

Spectrum Disorder: Whither Drawing? Part 2

Another sign that drawing is withering away from our culture: The newly-rebranded Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media, ostensibly a fine arts .org composed of the ashes of Pittsburgh Filmmakers and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, issued a press release today touting its "agenda for advancing excellence in film, digital video, photography and the spectrum of visual arts." Drawing, painting, and sculpture, once a mainstay of classes at the old PCA are never mentioned by name, presumably falling under the "spectrum" category.

Presumably, such quaint traditional arts too insignificant anymore to break out individually.

Update: read the entirety of their press release here. 

Full disclosure: I took all three kinds of classes and taught several cartooning workshops there myself over the decades.

Some latter-day student work from the Carnegie Museum of Art adult studio program, before 2014.

This demotion of actual art in favor of recording media follows the news of the closing of the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, flagship for a chain of design schools that abandoned traditional art in favor of digital animation and other newfangled media at the turn of the millennium. (I once attended and taught there as well.)

Less than a year ago, the Toonseum shuttered its downtown gallery location and entered what was described as a year-long "curtains drawn" hiatus. Whether it will ever draw anything again besides curtains remains to be seen. (I was shown there and participated in a drawing workshop.)

Less than six years ago, Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art discontinued its adult studio art classes, including drawing. (I taught several cartooning, drawing, and sketching workshops there.)

As I remarked on Facebook, Pittsburgh, once a haven of culture, is becoming a drawing desert.

More: Whither Drawing? Part I

Of Pot-Shots and Parodies: The Illusion of Critique!

Reproduced here is one of the panels (from Megaton Man #2, Kitchen Sink Press, February 1985) that gave rise to the idea that Megaton Man was parodying the contemporary comic book industry circa 1984-1985. As I've explained elsewhere, this was an erroneous perception.

Panels like this one - pot-shots, really - gave fans (and the publisher) the impression I was making fun of the current comic book market, like Jim Valentino was in normalman. Far from it; I was basically trying to integrate and burn off the influences I had absorbed from reading comics a decade earlier. From Megaton Man #2 (Kitchen Sink Press, February 1985). ™ and © Don Simpson 2018, all rights reserved.

I was parodying the Silver Age comics of the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, the material I grew up reading. I got hooked in the summer of 1972, but there were still comics circulating among older kids in the neighborhood dating back at least five years. The mid-seventies was also the heyday of "Giant-Size" and "Treasury" reprints, Origins of and Son of Origins by Stan Lee, and even monthly reprint series -- all of which looked dupey and blown out (the reproduction was terrible).

However, to the extent that the major companies were still mining the same Lee-Kirby-Ditko veins in the 1980s as they had been for fifteen years, it was possible for Megaton Man to be mistaken as a critique of current comics. Throw in a few pot-shots like this one (of the still-recent Secret Wars) and a few other jabs at current creators and controversies, and it might of seemed I was conducting an aesthetic war on the 1980s industry.

In a sense, I certainly was, but I was seldom seeing more than the covers of any of the books that were coming out of New York; I had outgrown superheroes and really couldn't stomach the work of a bunch of derivative hacks whom I regarded as inferior to industry stalwarts and workhorses (and well-rounded craftsmen) like John Romita, John Buscema, Gil Kane, and Jack Kirby.

I recall an interview in Amazing Heroes in which John Byrne, a fan of Megaton Man #1-2, speculated that perhaps, for all he knew, I was satirizing some of the things he had been doing on his titles, in addition to what Stan and Jack had done. Sorry, no; I never regarded any of the late-70s or early 80s perpetuations of any of the mainstream superhero comics to be anything other than counterfeit.

Kirby monsters meet Steranko, Neal Adams, and Berni Wrightson inking influences, with some Artie Simek lettering (talk about a melting pot!). From Megaton Man #2 (Kitchen Sink Press, February 1985). ™ and © Don Simpson 2018, all rights reserved.

I had outgrown superhero comics by the time I had "turned pro," although I still was trying to rid myself of all the stylistic influences - from Jim Steranko to Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Anatomy series of how-to books - in my cartooning. To some extent, I never would accomplish this, and as I look back on my early work from this period, it's pretty clear the superiority complex I suffered from was unearned. My work was just as crude, derivative, hackneyed, deficient, and neurotically overworked as the mainstream work-for-hire work of my contemporaries that I thought I was putting to shame.

What endures for me about this work is not the parody aspects - the overt references to popular icons - so much as my assimilation of technique, and ultimately, the flecks of character and personality that begin to emerge in my cast of characters, even at this early stage. Although diamonds in the rough and encrusted with gratuitous stylistic quirks, Trent Phloog (Megaton Man), Stella, Pammy, Preston, Bing (Yarn Man), Rex Rigid, and even Kozmik Kat seem now to me to be wholly original in personality, even if trapped in the makeshift roles and costuming of parody.

Read my YA prose experiment: The Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series!
First Chapter | All Chapters | Latest Chapter  

Also: Will the Real Megaton Man Please Stand Up? | More on Megaton Man and Why I'm Still Drawing Him!

Whither Drawing?

Here's what the 2016-2017 Handbook of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design has to say about a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in drawing (p. 103-104):

a. Understanding of basic design principles, concepts, media, and formats. The ability to place organization of design elements and the effective use of drawing media at the service of producing a specific aesthetic intent and a conceptual position. The development of solutions to aesthetic and design problems should continue throughout the degree program.
b. Understanding of the possibilities and limitations of the drawing medium.
c. Knowledge and skills in the use of basic tools and techniques sufficient to work from concept to finished product. This includes mastery of the traditional technical and conceptual approaches to drawing.
d. Functional knowledge of the history of drawing.
e. Extensive exploration of the many possibilities for innovative imagery and the manipulation of techniques available to the draftsman.
f. The completion of a final project related to the exhibition of original work.

Note that there is no mention of human anatomy, figure drawing, or manual perspective drawing (although computer-aided perspective is an advised competency).

From "Teaching Cartooning" in Streetwise (Two Morrows, 2000).

Here's what the handbook says about computers in general (p. 101):

Digital Media. The Bachelor of Fine Arts is appropriate as the undergraduate degree in which digital technology serves as the primary tool, medium, or environment for visual work. Titles of majors for these degrees include, but are not limited to: digital media, media arts, media design, multimedia, computer arts, digital arts, digital design, interactive design, Web design, and computer animation.

No mention of mastery of traditional fundamental drawing principals, and digital technology is the "primary tool."

This is why I am a self-taught figurative artist, and why I advise students to make the most of their college tuition pursuing a well-rounded "book-learning" liberal arts curriculum (English, languages, history, philosophy, sociology, etc.), and skip the BFA.

Art school in the broadest sense only makes sense for a profession that requires actual accreditation, such as architecture or interior design.

See also: The Withering Away of Drawing

For Drawing-Based Art: A Manifesto of Sorts

Drawing is the foundation of art—the basis of painting, sculpture, architecture, fashion, theatrical design, film storyboarding and production design, industrial design, picture storytelling, and so on.

The various Neo-Dada and “new media” practices which comprise Contemporary Art (installation, performance, concept, video, et al), lacking a basis in drawing, are in themselves insufficient to sustain the traditions and historical trajectory of visual art.

Drawing is the direct expression of the mind through the hand; mindful composition is inherent and native to drawing.

Critical theory, expressly antagonistic to the graven image, posits the text as the only valid form of mindful composition, as the only possible expression of thought.[1] Contemporary art practices subserve critical theory by providing a steady stream of novel conversation pieces for verbal exegesis that on their own would provide a feeble aesthetic experience, let alone thoughtful communication. Promised a shortcut to significant form, contemporary artists eschew the difficult burden of providing meaningful content, which the critical theorist is only too happy to retroactively supply through the back door. This is bad art and bad philosophy.

Contemporary art can be exhausted by words; drawing-based art cannot. Contemporary art cannot exist without words; drawing-based art can. Drawing-based art is perceived as being a threat to the word; contemporary art is utterly dependent upon it. And yet the word and image have never been in competition, but along with music, dance, and other creative arts form a holistic expression of communication. Such an imagined or manufactured opposition as dominates contemporary artistic discourse can yield only creative sterility.

Evan Dorkin's Milk and Cheese, drawn by Don Simpson.

For Katy Siegel, art “is the discipline where one can exercise any other discipline—from cooking to sociology to architecture to biology to theater—free of the normative rules proper to those disciplines, professions, schools.” Art is therefore “useful to individuals who want to engage [in] these other activities without really learning them […], as amateurs who won’t be judged as architects or actors but as artists.”[2] Contemporary art therefore comprises a range of practices best described as amateurish versions of other creative categories, and which those categories at their most accomplished and professional for the most part want no part of.

No one expects performance art to be good in the dramatic sense, and theater history wants no part of it. Likewise, video installation is not a part of cinema history, just as conceptual art is not philosophy. Yet these practices have wound up inhabiting the art world, supplanting drawing-based art, an aberration of history spawned by the rise of photography and related media and a willful corruption of art enabled by historians and intellectuals who either lost sight of this basis or for whatever reason have always been hostile to it to begin with.

Avant-garde posturing and art student experimentation may offer a travestial rebuke of the excesses of handmade illusionism, but to persist in such ironies beyond a certain moment of historical or personal development, and to reduce all possible art to such a sterile strip of creative enquiry, is to wallow in hopeless immaturity. Artlab is over.

Art, pace Raymond Williams, is exceptionally fine, worthwhile, and enduring communication of which all human beings to some degree are capable (dance, music, poetry, and so on). Without this communication, there can be no art. For Williams, art is

the substantial communication of experience from one organism to another. Art cannot exist unless a working communication can be reached [...]. When art communicates, a human experience is actively offered and received. Below this activity threshold there can be no art.[3]

But as Williams warns,

There is great danger in the assumption that art serves only on the frontiers of knowledge. It serves on those frontiers, particularly in disturbed and rapidly changing societies. Yet it serves, also, at the very center of societies. It is often through the art that the society expresses its sense of being a society. The artist, in this case, is not the lonely explorer, but the voice of his community. Even in our own complex society, certain artists seem near the center of common experience while others seem out on the frontiers, and it would be wrong to assume that this difference is the difference between ‘mediocre art’ and ‘great art.’

For Williams, the notion that “ creative’ equals ‘new’ […] is a really disabling idea, in that it forces the exclusion of a large amount of art which it is clearly our business to understand.”[4]

The alliance between the art world and academic art history and its emphasis on the auratic presence of the original work and its verbal interpretation inevitably leads to an emphasis on the museum and gallery space and the irrelevance of the creative work itself. The cultural center, to the extent that it is a modern manifestation of the sacred center, emphasizes the church building over the church, the sermon over the religious experience, the palace of culture over culture itself. Originally built to house drawing-based art, these structures have learned that such works are not essential, making possible art’s substitution by pseudo-artistic conversation pieces. The emphasis on auratic presence is a corruption of art and a hindrance to the historical development now possible especially through means of reproduction.

Drawing-based art has never been dependent on the elitist museum or gallery space for its display and public adortion, and in the age of mechanical reproduction, is certainly not dependent on the auratic presence of the one-of-a-kind object. Like the word, the image can be transmitted and distributed democratically, in reproduction; the product of the hand is no more constrained than the product of the vocal chords, or of the body. The apparent imbalance of these sensory extensions through the uneven development of disparate media now appears simply the accident of a certain technological history, to which McLuhan still offers useful insight. The scholarly display and archival preservation of original art remains desirable and important for research, but the sacralization of original art as an act of public, communal worship can never be anything other than exclusive and exclusionary.

Photography is by its nature a recording medium, not an art. To argue for photography’s status as art on the basis that its technical parameters are set by humans and specific to human perception is specious. If photography is not a recording medium, then there is no such thing as a recording medium, outside of an indexical footprint in the sand. To be well done, photography requires a selective eye, just as sound recording requires a selective ear and cinematography a directorial touch. But these are recordings of artistic compositions, not artistic composition itself. Photographers who are considered artists are artists by virtue of these other considerations, not because of their mastery of the technical aspects of photography. Mindful expression is not native or inherent in recording media.

The insistence that drawing is merely manual photography, and therefore irrelevant to art today, is the most fundamental and willful misunderstanding posited by logocentric critical theorists, that has catastrophically deformed and debased notions of art in the modern period.

Since the inception of photography, the market has steadily replaced the hand of the artist with the camera, and the manually-generated image with the mechanically-recorded image. Ostensibly hostile to market values, critical theory imagines drawing-based art, visual poesis, as superfluous to contemporary art, thus paradoxically furthering market aims. In lockstep with capital in its repudiation of cognitive manual skill, critical theory replicates market values in the realm of art, exiling the draughtsman from Contemporary Art. This double-barreled assault on drawing by capital and critical theory amounts to shooting the wounded.

Larry Marder's Mr. Spook, drawn by Don Simpson.

In contemporary art, drawing, visual composition, is forbidden and only writing, textual composition, is permitted. This alliance between the museum and gallery-based art world and academic art history has only achieved total dominance quite recently, but is only the most recent chapter in a long and hard-fought struggle. For the moment, Talmudic, Puritanical iconoclasm has gained the upper hand over the sensualism of the eye and hand, and the Judao-Christian word appears ascendant over Greco-Roman image, an age-old tension in Western civilization.

The attack on drawing as thoughtful composition is specific and unmistakable, the settling of an old score by grudging writers who jealously claim the text as the only form of thoughtful composition. It is an internecine knife-fight in a prison riot, a shiv between the shoulderblades of the visually adept by the verbally adept, rendered moot in a culture that is completely visual and overwhelmingly dominated by mediated images. To face a deluge of mediated imagery with only words is to fight with one arm tied behind one’s back. Drawing-based art, as vital as language in processing and communicating human experience, is even more crucial to navigating the mediated, virtual world. Writing and drawing must join together if the mind is to survive, and our notion of art must be reconstituted accordingly.
____ 
[1] Max Horkheimer explicitly claims the Second Commandment as the basis of critical theory. See Max Horheimer, letter to Otto O. Herz, September 1, 1969, in Gesammelte Schriften, volume 18, Briefwechsel 1949-1973 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996) p. 743; cited in Sven Lüttken, "Monotheism à la Mode," in Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 304, 310, note 11. Frederic Jameson, among others, has made the claim that "thought is linguistic or material and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression," i.e., that communication of the mind by any other means is impossible, a curious stance for one who comments so authoritatively on art. See Frederic Jameson, "Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?" Critical Inquiry 40 (Winter 2004), p. 403.
[2] Katy Siegel, "Lifelong Learning," in Dumbadze and Hudson, op. cit., pp. 408-419; quote p. 410.
[3] Raymond Williams, “The Creative Mind,” The Long Revolution (Columbia University Press, 1961), p.42.
[4] Ibid, p. 47.

Conventions of Contemporaneity: An Anxiety Dream

I had a dream last night that I attended a current San Diego Comicon (in reality I have not attended the biggest comic book convention in the world since 1996, and by all accounts it is now almost ten times bigger than it then was). Upon entering, one was completely overwhelmed by an island of booths containing a Wonder Bread display, of all things (simulated loaves of Wonder Bread stood as pillars holding up a canopy over the space), followed by islands that were fully-furnished convenience stores so that attendees would not have to go outside the hall and out into downtown San Diego to shop for necessities. (No doubt this symbolized how commercial and insular comic book conventions have become -- you don't even get to experience the wonderful city you are visiting at all.) With my portfolio, I finally found my way to artist's alley (I had not bothered to reserve a space in advance); I did not recognize any of the younger people there, and nobody recognized me, although only a few artists had set up this early in the show.

Patrick Daugherty, director of the Frank L. Melaga Art Museum, pondering the placement of my work yesterday. Some of Frank L. Melaga's paintings from the permanent collection are on the facing walls, while my works are on the floor waiting to be hung and in the showcase in the background.

I saw a group of artists seated on a raised podium, about eight or ten young people, mostly male but some female, all dressed remarkably alike in black with ball caps or berets like a paramilitary volunteer police militia, and thought I spotted Billy Tucci among them, but he kept disappearing behind the heads of other people. This group must have been his entourage, although they all seemed to be sketching or autographing, although no fans were yet present.
 

Pages from Alan Moore's "In Pictopia," which I drew in 1986, and two Megaton Man splash pages, one from 1989 and 1999.

I finally ended up in an internet cafe somewhere in the dealer's room, populated mostly by young Asian men, who were all buzzing about their laptops. (I suppose mobile device now dominate comic book conventions as they do everything else, although this had not been the case the last time I was at the San Diego Comicon). For some reason I was table hopping -- I'm not sure if I was giving advice, showing my work, explaining how to find my stuff online, or just trying to get connected myself. When I finally sat down to get online myself, I realized my laptop was missing. I looked everywhere for it, and came to the realization that it had been stolen. (Why would any of these people with their much slicker devices steal my old clumsy thing with nothing on it?) Then I woke up.

The showcase is a mixture of artists and comics that influenced me as well as some of my own art, including "Batman Upgrade 2.0" from DC's Bizarro World (2005).

No doubt this dream came to me because I had been helping to hang my gallery exhibit of old and new cartooning and life drawings last night, and had attended a small comic book show in Youngstown last weekend. I have been doing a great deal more cartooning since this past spring than I have in many a year, since I returned to college and earned my PhD. I don't think of any of this as a "comeback," in part because I have little idea what I would be coming back to. Am I being sucked back into the scary world of comics, and is this dream a portent of what it will be like? Anxiety!

Fun With Texture: Demo from a Cartooning Workshop

This sheet was drawn on Strathmore medium drawing 400 series 9" x 12" creme paper as a demonstration for a cartooning sketchbook workshop at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2008. I enjoyed those workshops immensely. They were usually held in summer, although in recent years I became too busy with graduate school to be able to offer them. For years the museum refused to offer cartooning instruction, insisting by policy that educational offerings coincide with works on view in the museum galleries. Finally, in 2004, with the R. Crumb retrospective as part of the Carnegie International that year, I was invited to give instruction.

 
Since then the museum has canceled adult education workshops in drawing, painting, ceramics and other traditional media in favor of lectures relating to contemporary works of art. It is nothing short of tragic to see the museum art world forsake interactive drawing, the basis of all the visual arts (including architecture, cinematic storytelling/storyboarding, theatrical set and costume design, etc.) for passive dispensation of theory. The proper response to art is artmaking, not idle attendance at a lecture.

Two CMAs and the Second Commandment: A Digression

The current artworld, centered in public museums housed in large, monumental neoclassical buildings, have run the risk of succumbing to an ideology centered on their own self-importance as elite palaces of culture rather than democratic institutions of municipal and civic engagement. Cleveland's museum early in its history built a palace but emphasized education for all classes of Clevelanders, and despite the impulse to move to the right, has managed to successfully balance the two; but Pittsburgh, unfortunately, has not. Under its current leadership, Pittsburgh's CMA (as opposed to Cleveland's CMA) has embraced the ideology of contemporaneity in which various pseudo-Dada practices form the basis of high-flown intellectual discourse. But such mere pseudo-political conversations as can result from the contemplation of found objects, installations, performance and the like, while often interesting and verbally challenging, are rarely as rich as the contemplation of visual art that are works of the mind, as manually-generated images almost by the very means of their origins almost inherently are.

The mistake that over-educated, verbally-adept critics, curators, theorists, and art historians continually make is to disregard visual composition such as only the hand produces as thoughtless, or at least not as thinking on a level comparable with words. Old-fashioned craft, according to this ideology, is reserved only for the wordsmith and never the image maker, who is invariably regarded as a capitalist sell-out for rendering illusions corresponding to apparent reality, or at the very least mechanical and uncritical like a camera. Likewise, such honorifics as thinker and genius are reserved for the writer of texts, and even the title artist, when bestowed upon maker of conversation pieces, is not done without the most arch and patronizing irony. The bias for text over image runs very deep in our culture, going back at least to the Judao-Christian second commandment, which Max Horkheimer claimed as the basis and justification for contemporary critical theory.*

In any case, one hopes that the ascendance of logos and the iconoclastic impulse that has subtended much enthusiasm for modern and contemporary art over the past century or more will prove to be only a temporary aberration in our culture, and for a return of drawing to the educational environment of the city of Pittsburgh, and to the artworld nationally and internationally, in the very near future.

*See Max Horheimer, letter to Otto O. Herz, September 1, 1969, in Gesammelte Schriften, volume 18 Briefwechsel 1949-1973 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996) p. 743; cited in Sven Lüttken, "Monotheism à la Mode," in Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 304, 310, note 11. Lüttken attempts to make the rather unconvincing argument that a total ban on representative art is a valid form of criticism of the image and the proper role critical inquiry, suggesting the temperament of critical theorists.

For more on drawing, see The Withering Away of Drawing. For more on the Dumbadze anthology, see After Critical Thinking.

American Moebius: The Fosterian Kingdom of Jack Katz

The Space Explorer's Club, the fifth volume in Titan Comics' complete First Kingdom by Jack Katz, is out. Not only is it another handsome volume in the series, but my favorite so far, offering the first new installment of the cosmic saga in a quarter century. His cosmic vision might best be described as that of an American Moebius (Jean Giraud), except that rather than the intermittent and ecstatic burst of insight of his French counterpart, Katz has been carefully constructing an epic he has been committed to for more than 40 years: part Hugo Gernsback old-school sci-fi, part Jack T. Chick New Age Hell-and-Brimstone gospel tract.

I have been a fan of Katz since the original First Kingdom was issued as 24 single issues by Comics and Comix and later Bud Plant in the 70s and 80s, and completed my collection only belatedly in the 1990s. In the late 70s when the work began to appear, it would have been described as groundlevel, a term suggesting something in between underground and mainstream. Other titles that were grouped in that amorphous genre were Cerebus, Elfquest, Star*Reach, otherwise underground titles such as No Ducks, and titles from that Michigan company Power Comics like Kevin Hyde and Mike Gustovich's Cobalt Blue as well as other creators such as T. Casey Brennan. Steve Gerber's Howard the Duck and Marvel's adaptation of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian, particularly as illustrated by Barry Smith, seemed to offer a mainstream bridge from superheroes to that quasi-illicit world of the slightly-more risque material.

Katz' work was never explicitly sexual, although the nude figure was and is central to his conception, with particular emphasis placed on the covered pubic region (I have always called his work groinal). I have to admit I have never read much of it; a self-described "Fosterian," Katz adopted a practice of pasting on huge chunks of text that appear to have been generated by an IBM Selectric typewriter, in a not-particularly attractive face, and pasted those onto his artwork, degrading what would otherwise be quite beautiful tableaux, in emulation of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant. Aside from the aesthetic or formal objection I have to this practice (it is just hard to digest unrelieved blocks of text coupled with little else but mise en scene master shots), both Foster and Katz assume a pretentious, pseudo-literary voice which makes their text not only difficult to process with the images, but almost impossible to comprehend in any case. Titan has wisely upgraded the text in their reprints, but have chosen a pseudo-hand-lettered font that emulates comics lettering, instead of an attractive typeface. If you're going for bookishness, why not go all the way? Also, the new lettering is extremely small.

The Space Explorer's Club, however, has much bigger type, which is easier to read, and far more attractive. I still haven't read it all, but I have dipped into it extensively. It is the somewhat Gnostic story of a human couple who are journeying through the universe and perhaps more than one reality to discover their demiurgic programmer's intentions, and the meaning of life. This has always been Katz's obsession, and part of the mystique and grandiose ambitions that even fans of First Kingdom, like myself, who actually have only looked at the art, admire about the series.

The new volume also demonstrates an improvement over the earlier work in that the art is drastically simplified. Katz's imagery was always as dense as his prose, and here the claustrophobic backgrounds and rich textures give way to offer a clearer view of his compositional strengths. His figure drawing, never exactly graceful but always majestic (an anatomically-obsessed combination of the stumpy George Bridgman and the elongated El Greco), manages here to be at least more fluid and free; it's some of his best work ever. The first 90 pages or so appear to be either scanned pencils that have been darkened to a higher contrast digitally, or inked with something like a Uni-Ball roller-tip pen, rather than the crowquill or brush of the earlier work. For the remainder of the book, Katz seems to revert to a brush, spotting blacks more frequently along with employing a thicker outline, but refrains from congesting his visuals to the degree of previous decades. Certainly this is as much a symptom of Katz's advancing years as it is a conscious streamlining, but nevertheless it is a welcome development.

Not everyone will like the new, more simplified Katz, but Katz is an acquired taste anyway. The art of The Space Explorer's Club evokes large-scale cartoons for WPA murals, and his multi-figure compositions and especially his spaceships (which resemble the mobiles of Lee Bontecou) are incomparable. There is nothing like Katz in comics, or for that matter in American or contemporary art, and it is great to have more of his work available now more than ever.

Dead End: Why Art History is No Longer (and Perhaps Never Was) an Academic Discipline

When I decided to stop my adult life and return to college, I did so for many reasons, including the desire to widen my career options and a more general desire to satisfy my intellectual curiosity. I chose the history of art and architecture as my undergraduate major and subsequent area of graduate research specifically to answer a number of immediate questions I harbored as a life-long artist. On social media not too long ago, I remarked that I deeply regretted that decision from a professional as well as intellectual standpoint, for, while I had diligently finished what I started and despite having satisfied my intellectual curiosity in regard to particular questions pertaining to art early on, I found the discipline dogmatic, constrained, and for all practical purposes exhausted (art history moreso than architectural history, although for all intents and purposes my dissertation was in urban planning history), and wished that I had taken a more general course of study such as history, urban policy and planning studies, languages and literatures, or philosophy. The grass may not be any greener in those disciplines, but after eleven years of mid-life college, I felt entitled to indulge briefly in a bit of buyer’s remorse (although one of my advisors regarded my remarks as a personal and permanent betrayal); in any case the lawns certainly seem wider. I am of the growing conviction that art history as an academic discipline is a completely exhausted field of study that for all intents and purposes could be hermetically sealed, requiring only a few caretakers to tend to the classified, archived, and salted away extant body of knowledge.

In one interdisciplinary conference I attended just prior to receiving my doctorate, it was claimed that what made art history an indispensable academic discipline was its unique emphasis on “visual analysis,” learning to describe objects verbally, and elicit increasingly probing questions about their facture and purpose, characterized as a vital and necessary skill in our increasingly mediated world. This I thought rather weak tea, a feeble rationale accounting for only a miniscule portion of the skills demanded by the field, and hardly a convincing justification for the immense energies expended on grasping theories, styles, and archives of key works a (what used to be called canons). Besides, the same skills can be acquired in English 102 by describing a dried leaf, to say nothing of film or media studies. It is analogous to claiming that the study of the history of world religions is justified because after all we all can all use a quiet moment of prayerful meditation now and then in this stressful, frenzied world. In other words, on that score, there is nothing about the study of art history that is not shared by many other academic disciplines.

Art history, as I have found it to be practiced, is a narrow and constricted discipline, an academic ghetto. Art history is to history, to paraphrase Mark Twain, what a lightning bug is to lightning. Although there are many histories and manifold interpretations thereof, there is only one art history, dogmatically dispensed and disciplinarily policed. The general narrative proceeds teleologically from the Venus of Willendorf and the caves of Lascaux to the Acropolis and the Sistine ceiling, ending with elephant dung paintings and a shark in a tank of formaldehyde. It is a story that, to say the least, does not have a happy ending.

Donald Simpson (American, b. 1961), Still Life with Bust of Venus de Milo from Pier One Imports, 2007. Charcoal on paper, 18" x 22". Collection of the artist.

Miss Helen Clay Frick, the American art historian and founder of the department in which I earned by BA, MA, and PhD in history of art and architecture, believed art history to have come to an end by the Civil War, or at least that there had been little art produced since that time worth serious study. The mid-nineteenth century date for the end of art history is not far from a general consensus among figures as diverse as Hegel and Hans Sedlmeyer, whom, for different reasons, regarded art as having disappeared some time since the middle ages. But one need not be an avowed anti-modernist like Miss Frick; the consensus even of modernists is that a certain tradition of art came to an end in the nineteenth century with the dawn of modernism. This admittedly loose periodization comports with a general view that in the nineteenth century, with the advent of the public art museum and the formation of the academic discipline of art history, art history itself, paradoxically, had come to an end.

Art, as it were, having become historically conscious of itself by collecting and studying its own past, at the same was inherently incapable of collecting and judging the art of the present, or of adding any of it to art history, at least with the same authority as the unfolding of history itself. To claim certain works of living artists as of historical importance without the passage of time as proof of enduring value, it was clear, would have been to pick winners and losers with the imprimatur of history, a de facto illegitimate procedure. Museums and art history therefore created “museums of living artists,” quarantined holding tanks for new art, so that this new work could be viewed and appreciated by the public but also so that the final verdict of art history (inclusion in the encyclopedic museum) could be postponed at least until an artist’s death. Until at least that much time had passed, the jury was considered still out.[1]

This self-imposed restriction on including living artists in the newly-forming encyclopedic art museum was short-lived, lasting little more than a generation or two; but it was sufficient time to create a permanent rupture in art history. Paradoxically, anti-modernist collectors such as Henry Clay Frick, his daughter Helen Clay Frick, Samuel P. Huntington, and J. Pierpont Morgan, whose private collections became the founding permanent collections in a network of museums in the United States, essentially starved out a generation of traditional figurative painters by denying them commissions while sinking millions into Old Masters, antiques, and rare manuscripts. This perverse neglect, along with the inexorable conquest of photography, removed any incentive for artists to master such representational skills as perspective and anatomy. John White Alexander, a painter once as famous as Sargent, spent the final 15 years of his life on a mural that, while on public view to this day, languishes in art historical obscurity: The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh, for the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. For this monumental masterpiece, Alexander received $175,000, a large sum for a living artist, to be sure, but a mere pittance approximating the amount a Frick or a Morgan habitually spent on an Houdon bust or a Gobelin-manufactured piece of Louis XIV furniture, which they in fact bought by the carload, sometimes from each other.[2] Artists with representational skills and inclinations naturally migrated to where the money was: illustration and other forms of commercial art; galleries that served collectors and the museums they fed were surrendered to the avant-garde. With friends of traditional art like Frick and Morgan, who needed enemies? Anti-modernism produced its opposite, modernism, almost without any help. In any case, academic art history faced a choice: follow classically-trained figurative artists into new media (print) with its alien editorial-advertising model of patronage, or remain with the easel painters and the familiar system of galleries and collectors (and ultimately museum patrons). And the changing stylistic tastes? Progressivism.

By the mid-twentieth century, museums had gotten over their reluctance and began adding works of art from the late nineteenth century to the present into their collections and narratives, only somewhat belatedly incorporating modernism into art history. This work was all of a certain ideological character, namely socially progressive in terms of content or avant garde in terms of form, and its inclusion was strictly on the basis of adding something to the constructed narrative of art history that had never been seen before, like adding newly discovered atoms to the table of elements. What is significant about this move, as Boris Groys has pointed out, is not so much what was added to the art historical narrative but what was excluded: works that were deemed visually repetitive in that they carried on traditional representational practices and/or were created for a popular audience or served a commercial purpose. Groys calls this the “museum taboo”: after the mid-nineteenth formation of the museum, new additions to art history could not look like anything that had come before. A new work had to be something apparently different, novel, that in some way expanded the meaning of, or our understanding of, art. Art history is thus reduced to a chronology of scientific breakthroughs, or as Gabriel Tarde put it, “history above all is a record of inventions.”[3] But this is to make of art history nothing more than an inventory of neologisms compiled in a dictionary quite for their own sake, regardless of whether or not anyone ever puts these new expressions or idioms to practical use. Indeed, as Groys formulates it (although he does necessarily endorse this view), the museum taboo virtually prohibits artists from adopting the language or style of another artist.[4] Once something has been invented, like penicillin, the invention cannot be repeated. But while penicillin is still manufactured and in use, who can possibly drip after Pollock?

If such a taboo of apparent repetition, of art not being allowed to “look” like previous art, were extended back in time, it would eliminate much of the art prior to modernism. The Renaissance, the Baroque, and neoclassicism, to say nothing of the classicizing tendency of later Bauhaus architecture, are all reiterations or reinterpretations of classical antiquity that on some level “look” like ancient art. To eliminate works such as Soufflot’s Ste. Geneviève, a work that consciously tried to “look” Greco-Roman, from the canon of works deemed worthy of art historical study would be to ignore how Soufflot sought to outdo the Greeks and Romans in terms of structural engineering and scale. In other words, there is always more going on in art than meets the eye, and the exclusion of decades of representational work from art history on the grounds that it “looks” like the art of the past is more than an irrational taboo; it is intellectual laziness.

But this is only one instance of the double-standard that pertains to art created since the advent of art history. Another example would be the grounds upon which commercial illustration has traditionally been excluded from the museum: because it was not created with the gallery wall in mind, but rather for reproduction on a printing press, and not for the delectation of an elite audience, but a broad public.[5] This denies the fact that Norman Rockwell, trained as a painter along with legitimate “gallery” artists of his generation and an assiduous museum-goer, certainly was acutely aware of the gallery wall at his easel, whether he was painting a Saturday Evening Post cover or a coffee advertisement, and nursed a barely-concealed ambition that at least some portion of his work would one day grace the gallery wall, while a great many artists of the past, such as icon painters, never had the least intention that their sacred works would ever be exhibited as purely aesthetic objects in a profanely secular space. Indeed, most modern and contemporary work that has been included in art history has the distinction of having been explicitly intended for the gallery wall. If works not so intended were to be expelled from art history, major museums around the world would have to deaccession much of their holdings and sit emptied and bereft of sizeable portions of their permanent collections.

There is no greater divide in art history than that marked by the rise of art history itself. Premodern art, the only kind thought valuable by Miss Frick, is held to an altogether different set of standards than art since the late nineteenth century, the kind of work that is implicitly subject to Groys’ museum taboo. From this view, premodern or what might be termed precritical art forms a sort of primordial unconscious to the more acutely self-conscious modern and contemporary period. Modern and contemporary art is nothing if not conscious (and critical) of itself and previous art history, positioning itself against the past or freely (and usually without a trace of cleverness) appropriating it. Anti-modernists like Frick saw art history coming to an end with the advent of modernism, while modern and contemporary theorists see art history beginning with the same moment of rupture.

For Arthur C. Danto, modernism and contemporaneity are the two eras surrounding “the end of art,” distinguished by their attitude toward the premodern art of the past. For Danto, modernism is characterized by celebrate “a repudiation of the art of the past,” while “Contemporary art, by contrast, has no brief against the art of the past, no sense that the past is something from which liberation must be won, no sense even that it is at all different as art from modern art generally. It is part of what defines contemporary art that the art of the past is available for such use as artists care to give it.”[6] To use a theological metaphor, modernism is the Old Testament and contemporaneity is the New Testament in a new dispensation that has transformed the current art history Master Narrative. Within this dogma slight denominational and doctrinal differences can occur, but no great deviations of dissent or heresy.

To return to the example of commercial illustration, art that persists in “looking” like the art of the past, e.g., representational art, is relegated to Visual Culture Studies, and art historians who choose a topic like the posters of Alphonse Mucha are not so much permitted to pursue such research as discouraged to pursue it, in that they are encumbered by the additional superfluous methodologies pertaining to visual culture. That art historians cannot simply consider such material as a part of art history with methodologies acquired by the study of premodern art demonstrates how the boundaries of the discipline are so thoroughly ideologically policed.[7]

The problem is not what is included in art history (the elephant dung paintings, the shark in the tank of formaldehyde) so much as what is excluded: mountains of creative visual material that do not suit a preordained set of ideological assumptions and scholarly methodologies. As Raymond Williams writes,

There is great danger in the assumption that art serves only on the frontiers of knowledge. It serves on those frontiers, particularly in disturbed and rapidly changing societies. Yet it serves, also, at the very center of societies. It is often through the art that the society expresses its sense of being a society. The artist, in this case, is not the lonely explorer, but the voice of his community. Even in our own complex society, certain artists seem near the center of common experience while others seem out on the frontiers, and it would be wrong to assume that this difference is the difference between ‘mediocre art’ and ‘great art.’

For Williams, the notion that “ creative’ equals ‘new’ […] is a really disabling idea, in that it forces the exclusion of a large amount of art which it is clearly our business to understand.”[8]

In such a case, as someone once said (I think it was Mark Kingwell), art history becomes little more than a chronological listing of works whose sole interest lies in the fact that at one time they were considered authentically modern. One has to explain to the undergraduate that Duchamps’ urinal or Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs was once cutting edge, and Andrew Loomis was not an “artist” because his work was published in magazines, all of which is dutifully noted without question (other than, “Is this going to be on the test?”).

A substantial survey in the journal Visual Resources entitled “The Crisis in Art History,” paints an even more dire picture. Patricia Mainardi points out “the skewing of academic art history and museum exhibitions toward contemporary and away from historical art,” and that “The tail of contemporary art is now wagging the dog of art history,” resulting in a neglect of archival research in favor of superficial gallery-hopping. Pepe Karmel reports that “Quietly but rapidly, there has been a broad loss of interest in older art—meaning art made before 1980.” Both Mainardi and Karmel note the huge amounts of money and students gravitating toward the study of contemporary art, to the neglect of “historical art” and its methodologies, resulting in the loss of a sense of history as well as tenured positions in pre-contemporary art, and a general dilution and cheapening, if not dumbing down, of the discipline. Still, Karmel sees little choice but for the discipline to increasingly serve this growing market.

It seems likely that, in years to come, there will be more and more money available for the study of contemporary art, and less and less for the study of everything else,” but if art history does not service this market “another department will.” Still, Karmel argues forcefully that the study of contemporary art should be relegated to a certificate in which “There would be a capstone project requiring research and writing on a particular artist or movement. However, this would not be a doctoral dissertation, and the resulting degree would be a certificate in contemporary art, not a PhD. Such a degree would not qualify graduates to teach at a university level.[9]

But even if the field of art history were to eschew contemporary art for a return to hardcore “historical art,” it begs the question as to how it can be justified as an autonomous academic discipline.

In his early (1939) essay “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” Erwin Panofsky describes the work of the art historian as a fusion of rational archeology and sensitive connoisseurship. Or as he puts it, “the art historian subjects his ‘material’ to a rational archaeological analysis […] but he constitutes his ‘material’ by means of an intuitive aesthetic re-creation,” rather like “a loquacious connoisseur.” In other words, the art historian “constitutes his object” of art historical study by first recognizing in it its “demand to be experienced aesthetically.”[10] (Panofsky recognized that every art historian may be limited in terms of aesthetic sensitivity by experience and “cultural equipment,” but that this can be broadened by erudition.) As an ideal, this is perfectly plausible—although no example is given to illustrate, one imagines an art historian going out into the world, digging up a find from a tomb or rummaging through an attic, and recognizing a work of art worth that both arrests her aesthetic sensibility and demands further documentary investigation.

However, even in 1939, when Panofsky was writing, it was becoming increasingly unlikely that many hitherto undifferentiated objects awaited in the natural world for art historians, uniquely qualified by virtue of their sensitivity and training, to come along and declare them works of art. This is even moreso in the twenty-first century, especially for the undergraduate student in a typical survey course, in which any objects or works to come under discussion have already been declared works of art by virtue of having hung in museums for decades or having been included in the latest contemporary art texts. The material of art history already comes pre-constituted, as it were, under what Jonathan Culler calls “the hyper-protected cooperative principle.” In simple communication, we assume that our interlocutors are trying to cooperate with us, that is, make sense, even if we don’t immediately understand their vocabulary or idiomatic phrasing. In the case of literary texts, especially obscure or difficult ones, the assumption is that they are worth study, if only by virtue of being on a course reading list.[11] When a work of art comes to us already in an art history textbook, a museum, or other consecrated artworld space such as an art fair, biennial, or remote location (e.g. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty or James Turrell’s Roden Crater), Panofsky’s aesthetic recreation never comes into play; indeed, aesthetic sensitivity is not required at all. Art history is merely a form of archival (in the case of historic art) or gallery- or biennial-going (in the case of contemporary art) archeology.

This is crucial particularly in the area of contemporary art, where aesthetic criteria are not even a consideration, and the status of the work of art as such is beyond question. How is one to even know if the object differentiated from the natural word is even a work of art? The answer is one cannot, and the student who studies this area has no recourse but to simply accept the dogma of their professors and their textbook materials. As Mark Kingwell writes, “Art is simply whatever the art world talks about.”[12] Under such dogma, the study of contemporary art operates not so much under a hyper-protected cooperative principle, but a hyper-protected conformity principle.

Like the evaporation of the American frontier in 1890, art history is a closed book.

[More on "The Crisis in Art History" here.]

---

[1] For the firewalling of living artists from Old Masters in a kind of farm-club system of museums in Paris in the nineteenth century, see Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago, 2009), pp. 39-40.

[2] On the mania for Old Masters and the formation of collections that served as the basis for several large public museums in the U.S., see Meryle Secrest, Duveen: A Life in Art (University of Chicago Press, 2004).

[3] Quoted in Jean-Philippe Antoine, “The History of the Contemporary is Now!” Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, ed. Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 32.

[4] On the “museum taboo,” see Boris Groys, “On the New,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 38 (Autumn 2000), pp. 5-17, reprinted with minor modifications in Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 23-42.

[5] On the unsuccessful campaign to persuade the Metropolitan Museum of Art to collect and exhibit illustration art, see Michele H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 43-47.

[6] Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 5.

[7] See a previous blog post.

[8] Raymond Williams, “The Creative Mind,” The Long Revolution (Columbia University Press, 1961), pp.

[9] See Patricia Mainardi, “Art History: “Research that ‘Matters’”? (pp. 305-307) and Pepe Karmel, “Just What Is It That Makes Contemporary Art So Different, So Appealing?” (pp. 318-327) in Patricia Mainardi, “The Crisis in Art History,” Visual Resources, vol. 27, no. 4 (December 2011), pp. 303-343; quotes from pp. 305, 306, 320, 323, and 326.

[10] Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Doubleday Anchor, 1955), pp. 1-25; quotes from pp. 14, 20, 16 and 12, respectively.

[11] See Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 25-26.
[12] Mark Kingwell, “Art Will Eat Itself,” Harper’s (August 2003), pp. 80-85; quote p. 82.

An Abrasive Myth: Women Are Fired for Traits Men Are Admired For?

A great deal of speculation has swirled in the media in the wake of the firing of The New York Times' first female executive editor, Jill Abramson, and whether and to what extent gender played in this move. One theory has it that Abramson became increasingly contentious with her bosses after realizing that male predecessors in her position received greater financial compensation, even hiring a lawyer; another has it that she took umbrage at the increasing intrusions made by the business side of the operation into the journalistic sanctity of the newsroom. It was frequently remarked that Abramson had a personally gruff and insensitive management style that inspired little loyalty among her staff and strained relations with partners on the business side of the operation. Of course, this is a situation where those with the most knowledge aren't talking, and those who are talking the most know next to nothing. Commentators may never have enough facts about this matter to support the level of significance they want to read into it, but that isn't stopping them.

Jill Abramson © Don Simpson, all rights reserved. Layout and ink.

I don't read The New York Times  on a regular basis, and know of Jill Abramson only from her one or two appearances on Charlie Rose in recent years. From this fleeting exposure, I found her to be intelligent and likeable as a media personality. Personally, I find the narrative of an inevitable conflict between business and journalism sufficient to explain her misfortune. My curiosity, which is not high, is satisfied with this.

What I find outrageous about this situation has nothing to do with the particulars of the matter, but with some of the speculation, which, as noted, can only be made in ignorance of the particulars.

Inevitably, the trope has been floated, on NPR and in other media outlets that, once again, a woman has been fired for demonstrating traits that are found to be wholly admirable in men. These traits include an autocratic management style, insensitivity, callousness, a tendency to run over opposition, generally obnoxious behavior, pushiness, etc.

Again, I have no particular knowledge of Jill Abramson's personal management style, or to what extent it may have played in her termination; in any case this is beside the point.

But what I would like to know is, who are all these men who are supposedly admired for being rude, obnoxious, autocratic, etc., and who are these people who are doing all the admiring? In my experience, no one finds such abrasive traits admirable in anyone, male or female. Indeed, people in positions of authority (and even people not in positions of authority) who demonstrate such traits may be suffered or endured. But admired? I hardly think so.

On the other hand, it is easy to see why certain people may want to believe this old trope. The prospect of evening up real or perceived past injustices, endured when men presumably behaved like untrammeled pigs in some mythical Madmen era, top the list.


In my last workplace, the overwhelming majority of my coworkers were polite, considerate, and cooperative to a fault. The rare few who exhibited the kinds of negative traits described above were certainly not admired. And it so happens that they were not male. In fact, in my experience in the modern grown up workplace, there has been zero tolerance for male misbehavior of any sort, whereas rudeness, obnoxiousness, bullying, etc. seems to be tolerated if not enabled in women, presumably out of fear of facing the kinds of accusations of backlash that have surfaced in the Abramson case. Such enabling made my last workplace, otherwise congenial and collegial, terribly uncomfortable and at times utterly demoralizing, not only for myself but for many of my coworkers.

This is more than a shame. It is a tragedy. Most of all for the women who are encouraged and enabled to be rude, obnoxious, abrasive, etc., because, according to the myth, we admire these traits in men. Such traits are repulsive, in male and female alike. No one admires these traits in anyone, and we need to retire this old trope.

American Illustration and Modern Art: Mind the Gap

Here is my letter to the editors of The New York Review of Books, in response to Christopher Benfey's article on Norman Rockwell ("An American Romantic," December 19, 2013). Since I've never had a letter to the editor published in a national periodical (and don't expect this one to be published either), I've decided to peremptorily blog it here.

To the editors:

[Norman] Rockwell's body of work will compare poorly with [Edward] Hopper's as long as it goes unremarked that the greatness of such artists as Hopper has largely been constructed in opposition to the popularity of artists such as Rockwell to begin with. The modern canon after all exists only in opposition to that which is outside the canon. Never mind Hopper's beginnings as an illustrator, or the fact that by now he can be relied upon to sell a comparable number of calendars. If you’ve seen six great Hoppers, you've pretty much seen them all; whereas you need to see several dozen Rockwells before you can say the same of his career. In other words, as important as Hopper’s view of America, it is rather simple if not monotonous (composed as it is of alienation, unfulfilled desire, and large empty voids, even when more than one human figure is present on a canvas), while Rockwell’s America is far more varied, subtle, and complex. It may be a largely contrived and sentimental complexity, in a Dickensian sense, but it is a complexity that can no more be grasped by the handful of images circulated around the holidays than the literary scope of Dickens can be fully derived from A Christmas Carol.

Alas, "the old battles" over canonical modernism have not waned nearly so much as Christopher Benfey suggests. As an art history instructor, I can report from the front lines that the most daring young researchers wishing to study American illustration end up getting diverted by their advisers from straight art history into "visual culture studies," a circuitous theoretical slog presented as tolerant and open-minded interdisciplinarity, but which in reality is a ham-fisted effort to defend and keep pure the realm of high art at all costs. It is a move sadly rendered necessary only because [Peter] Schjeldahl’s "gap" between illustration and high art is still reified as "a battle line," blinding art history to material the study of which clearly belongs in its domain.

This despite the fact that the conveyance of such narratives of exclusion has become increasingly untenable in the twenty-first century classroom. Fewer and fewer undergraduate art history majors today are equipped to grasp unaided the concept of print distribution, let alone any rationale for the exclusion from consideration of an entire class of imagery created for such bygone artifacts as mass-market magazines. Particularly when the work is as demonstrably fecund and accomplished (use of the word talented being forbidden) as Rockwell's. Many students, of course, will accept that Rockwell is "not an artist" in the modern sense if that is what they are told (and understand will be on the exam), just as many will accept at face value the narrative in which Maya Lin is the hero and Frederick Hart the villain of the 1980 Vietnam Veterans' Memorial competition. But those students who think at all critically (or simply for themselves) about such assertions, as we ask them to do, will see no more validity in academia’s blatant discrimination against proletarian (i.e., working professional and almost always representational) artists of the modern era than that suffered by females prior to Linda Nochlin’s 1971 "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?," an essay that suggested for the first time that the problem may not have been with the quality of the art so much as with criteria that had been meticulously stacked.

It is only when the gap itself can be seen as entirely illusory that it may begin to close or completely vanish, and an assessment of the full spectrum of artistic practice in the twentieth century become possible. Until then, any history that picks winners and losers (as art history has so blatantly done over the past generation or two), instead of supplying an objective and critical account of what actually transpired, is a history unworthy of the name.

Sincerely,

Donald E. Simpson, PhD
History of Art and Architecture
University of Pittsburgh

See also: The Withering Away of Drawing

The Colors of Shakespeare!

Okay, so I lied. I couldn't sketch Romeo and Juliet just once, so I went back Saturday for a longer rehearsal, using Prismacolor sticks and pencils to capture the Pittsburgh Shakespeare in the Parks' production. It was another, final, glorious summer afternoon in Frick Park, and it was a privilege to draw these talented performers. Sketching is such sweet sorrow! But students flock to Oakland, and it is time to bid summer's follies and frolics adieu!

(Actually, I suggested that the Capulets and Montagues be updated to rival Mexican drug cartels, who off the Prince in Act I, but this idea was rejected, so you could say I am parting ways with the production over creative differences!! Just kidding.)

Warm ups: 50 jumping jacks!

More circle warm-ups.

The personalities of Chuck and Jeff emerge.

Street brawl in fair Verona!

Pre-rehearsal notes.

Chuck as a Falstaffian Mercutio.

Jeff Chips as the Prince following the script; Danielle Powell wondering, "Wherefore art thou, Romeo?"; and Mike Magliocca as Paris.

Ron Siebert as the Friar, harvesting his narcotizing blossoms.

Andy as Romeo; Andy and Chuck after Mercutio gets sliced.

Andy Miller as Romeo, Danielle Powell as Juliet, in the bedroom scene.
Previously, the Friar tells the banished Romeo to pull himself together!

Juliet dies, then Romeo dies, then Juliet dies again!

Michael Mykita and an overworked sketch of Danielle during notes.

Andy stretching out during notes.

Danielle during notes.

See also: Romeo ... Banish-ed!