The Good Book: Barry Moser, Bookwright

In the beginning, God separated the light from the darkness, and it was good. Growing up a Bible-thumping, Southern-bred, segregation-approving Fundamentalist, Barry Moser became a licensed Methodist minister at the tender age of 19. Separating himself from what he saw as that dark genesis, Moser turned to art, eventually becoming an artist, an engraver, and a full-blown book designer. Although never giving up the Good Book entirely, Moser devoted his life to creating good books—works of art full of his illustrations designed, printed, and bound with the highest craftsmanship. In Barry Moser: Bookwright (at the Brandywine River Museum until May 22), the good book lives on in the age of the Kindle and the Nook. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Good Book: Barry Moser, Bookwright."

[Image: Barry Moser (B. 1940), Self Portrait with Burin (2nd State) (ca. 1987) (detail), wood engraving on paper, 10 ¼ x 8 ¼ inches, collection of the Brandywine River Museum, Gift of Justin Schiller, 1989.]

[Many thanks to the Brandywine River Museum for providing me with the image above and press materials related to Barry Moser: Bookwright, which runs through until May 22, 2011. Many thanks also to Kessler Brothers for providing me with a review copy of their documentary film A Thief Among the Angels: Barry Moser and the Making of the Pennyroyal Caxton Bible.]

New Horsemen, New Whores: Michael Caines “Revelations and Dog”

I always chuckle at the old joke about the dyslexic atheist holding up a sign saying, “There is no Dog!” Whenever talk turns to revelations and apocalypses, we all seem to be reading things backwards and upside down in hopes of making sense of the unknown, usually with comic results. Michael Caines’ Revelations and Dog riffs on the familiar song of the Book of Revelation to come up with a new tune for today’s topsy turvy world on the brink. It’s an almost perverse presentation to publish with Easter coming up, but Revelations and Dog’s joking may be the perfect antidote to the humorless, febrile dreams of religious radicalism. Caines comes up with the perfect new Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Whore of Babylon for today’s faithful, and unfaithful. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "New Horsemen, New Whores."

[Image: Michael Caines, Revelation chapter 6, ink and gouache on paper, 9.5 x 14 inches, 2009.]

[Many thanks to Mark Batty Publisher for providing me with a review copy of and the image from Revelations and Dog illustrated by Michael Caines.]

Troubling the Waters

When Art Young published his political cartoon titled Poisoned at the Source (above) in the July 1913 issue of The Masses, The Associated Press sued him for libel. Born January 14, 1866, Art Young fought against the establishment at every turn, taking on the compliant media that Young saw assisting capitalism in its oppression of the people. Young married his passion for justice with his passion for art at a young age. After looking at a book illustrated by Gustave Dore, Young decided to become an illustrator himself, eventually studying at the Art Students League of New York, where he may have encountered several of the members of what later became known as the Ashcan School. Whereas the Ashcan School artists sought to depict the new urban existence of big American cities such as New York at the beginning of the twentieth century, and some of those artists, such as John Sloan and George Bellows dabbled in what could be called Socialism, none of them took their art as far left politically as Young. Sloan, the art director of The Masses, left over the ideological breach. "To me this magazine exists for socialism,” Young then said of The Masses. “That's why I give my drawings to it, anybody who doesn't believe in a socialist policy, as far as I go, can get out." Young believed in The Masses as an antidote to the “poison” spread by the AP and other mainstream media outlets.

Young truly saw the battle for social justice as a religious crusade. “I think we have the true religion,” Young told an interviewer in 1940 in his defense of his Socialism. “If only the crusade would take on more converts. But faith, like the faith they talk about in the churches, is ours and the goal is not unlike theirs, in that we want the same objectives but want it here on earth and not in the sky when we die.” In A Compulsory Religion (above, from 1912), Young portrays capitalism as the great god mammon, before whom the masses must bow out of fear of poverty and sickness. It’s amazing that we face the same concerns today, nearly a century later, as health care and bankruptcy haunt Americans as the twin specters of economic recession. Young uses amazingly deep blacks to depict the dark mood and ever-present fears of the people, whom he dwarfs before the gluttonous, grotesque god of greed. Although surrounded by the Impressionist-influenced Ashcan School artists, Young instead approaches the techniques of the German Expressionists in visually plumbing the depths of the collective American psyche.

I find Young’s illustrations still fresh and relevant today. Although he points to specific concerns of his time, those concerns still remain with us as long as social and economic injustice reigns. The timelessness of Young’s crusade coincides with the eternal message of Christianity in Young’s He Stirreth Up the People (above, from 1914). For Young, Jesus is “The Workingman of Nazareth” speaking to other workers to stand up for their rights. Here is Jesus the community organizer and rabble rouser causing trouble who refuses to be silenced. The U.S. Government tried to silence Young and The Masses in 1918 under the Espionage Act, claiming that Young’s anti-war comics interfered with the draft for World War I. The charges were eventually dropped, but The Masses ceased publication soon after. Young, however, continued to stir up trouble in other publications, practicing his personal brand of Christianity that placed the Beatitudes over the Ten Commandments. “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled,” said Jesus. Art Young lived those words and drew them until the end.

A Mixed Nature

“This little book has a mixed nature,” Rodolphe Topffer wrote of one his early books that many consider the first comic books. “It is composed of a series of autographed pictures. Each picture is accompanied by one or two lines of text. The pictures, without this text, would have only an obscure meaning; the text, without the pictures, would mean nothing. Together they form a sort of novel, all the more original in that it does not resemble a novel more than any other thing. The author of this little oblong volume is not known. If he is an artist, he draws badly, but he has some skill in writing; if he is a writer, he writes only moderately well, but in recompense he has a good amateur's drawing skills.” Born January 31, 1799, Toppfer was being much too modest in writing of such works as Les Amours de M. Vieuxbois (drawn in 1827, published in 1839; a panel from which appears above),which married the worlds of words and art in a way few had done before. Topffer taught and painted and drew such pictures on the side, for the amusement of his students, family, and friends. In the panels above, Monsieur Vieuxbois hangs himself in despair over lost love, only to return to the living when his true love calls, pursuing her with the rope still around his neck and the end of the rope still attached to the ceiling beam. Such lighthearted slapstick remains a staple of comics and cartoons today.

Goethe saw Topffer’s comic books in 1830 and loved them, belying his reputation for high seriousness. Topffer later used Goethe’s kind words to acquire a publisher for his unique works. Topffer, however, in addition to his jabs at love and social status through Monsieur Vieuxbois, which Goethe loved, in Monsieur Pencil took aim on politics and warfare—two topics on which Topffer and Goethe saw less eye to eye on. Goethe never saw such panels as the one above in which a foolish scientist places Monsieur Pencil in a crate, thinking him to be some kind of alien. Despondent, Monsieur Pencil tries to hang himself by holding on to a tree branch while still trapped in the coffin-like crate, changing hands when one gets tired. Pencil’s misadventures multiply throughout the story, creating a domino effect that sets the whole country into turmoil. Through such absurdity, Topffer comments directly on the senselessness of the death and destruction surrounding the Revolution of 1830, aka The July Revolution, which replaced one king with another. By all accounts, Topffer himself was no liberal, but his conservatism allowed him to see the errors of France’s ways at that time and to gently point them out in his unique way.



Topffer’s stories gained an audience in his lifetime. Unfortunately, the absence of copyright laws in the nineteenth century allowed rampant pirating of his works, robbing him of much income. In 1842, an English-language version of Les Amours de M. Vieuxbois, titled Obadiah Oldbuck (one panel is shown above), is published as the first comic book in America. Topffer dies in 1846, having published only seven of his books during his lifetime, with many others to follow, including numerous translations. Illustrators such as Gustave Dore point to Topffer as an influence in their approach to putting images to text. It’s hard to believe that in such simple doodles, the playthings of a playful professor, the entire genre of comics, from Superman to Peanuts to Doonesbury, was born.

Talking Pictures

And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen;
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken—
The ice was all between.

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around;
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Rime by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coming from a literature background, I used to have a bias against illustrations of the great imaginative works. Seeing someone else’s interpretation of the words often seemed to limit my own mental picture. Once you’ve “seen” a page come alive, it’s hard to break that connection. The exception to that rule has always been the work of Gustave Dore. Born January 6, 1832, Dore meets the challenge of illustrating such grand imaginative works as Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and, rather than limit further dreaming, serves as a springboard into the author’s world. Dore captures beautifully the loneliness of the Mariner’s ship venturing through the barren icescape into an uncertain future. By dwarfing the huge ship within the walls of ice, Dore manages to replicate Coleridge’s poetic attempt to diminish the role of humanity within the grander scheme of nature. Dore’s ice even seems to crack and growl like the living presence of Coleridge’s epic.

John Milton's Paradise Lost provided another text upon which Dore could work his magic. In the scene above recounting the battle between the good and bad angels, Dore comes tantalizingly close to rendering the limitless scale of that battle. Milton in his blindness paints such beautiful pictures in words that it’s hard to imagine anyone even accepting the task of visually depicting that work. Dore’s Biblical illustrations (done in 1866) and engravings for Dante’s The Divine Comedy similarly render these spiritually charged scenes with a liveliness that never violates the reverence of the original. I’ve always seen Dore as the father of the sword and sorcerer school of fantasy art. Dore teaches us by example just how to remain true to the written word yet still infuse your own creativity.

As a native son of Philadelphia, however, Dore’s illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven (an example appears above) bring a smile to my face. Poe’s popularity in America always seemed to lag slightly behind that in France. Dore’s illustrations of Poe’s works broadened that French audience even further. Poe’s macabre sense of theater can easily stray into camp if not done sensitively. (Vincent Price’s Poe-inspired films always walked that line tenuously, sometimes falling into the cheesy range, but never failing to be scary fun.) Hogarth and Dore both elevate the illustration to new heights but never cross over into one another’s territory, Hogarth working the sociopolitical and Dore the purely imaginative. As much as I love Hogarth’s socially conscious wit, it’s always nice to escape into literature with Dore nearby.

Living Over Thinking

Anyone who came away from the Thomas Chimes exhibit at the PMA wanting to learn more about Alfred Jarry should read Jill Fell’s book, Alfred Jarry: An Imagination in Revolt. Fell gives a complete picture of Jarry’s influence as an author and artist, but also as an unconventional art critic.

The poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire judged Jarry’s woodcuts (his Veritable Portrait of M. Ubu is above and his Saint Gertrude is below) to be the finest examples of the full range of Jarry's artistic talent. Jarry credited Goya’s Disasters of War, Gustave Dore’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno, Odilon Redon’s monstrous imagery, and William Hogarth’s satires as influences on his work. In turn, the “psychological primitivism” (Fell, p. 84) of Jarry’s woodcuts would influence the German Expressionists, Der Blaue Rieter group, and Die Brucke group.

Such influences gave Jarry little anxiety in his use of them. “A really original brain works exactly like an ostrich’s stomach,” Jarry wrote. “Everything suits it, it pulverizes pebbles and mangles pieces of iron… A great personality does not assimilate anything at all, he de-forms it; better still, he transmutes it, in the upward direction of the hierarchy of metals. Finding himself in the presence of the unsurpassable—of the masterpiece—he does not produce an imitation, but a transposition.” (Quoted in Fell, p. 76) Jarry performed an act of alchemy in his work, taking all the elements of art, especially images of cruelty, such as those found in Goya and Dore, and creating something new and his own.

In both his artwork and his art criticism, Jarry placed a priority on living over thinking. In his art, Jarry strips away social, academic, and historical conditioning, bringing in high and low, beautiful and ugly, rudely (to most eyes) juxtaposing elements the same way that the Surrealists, who count Jarry as a predecessor, later would. I’ll never forget the scene with the razor and the eyeball in Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s short Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou. Jarry assaulted the eye and the imagination in the same unforgettable way. “Beauty, for Jarry, lay in the shock of the unexpected,” Fell writes. “Beauty had to be allowed to escape moral categorization and to encompass the cruel, the evil, and the monstrous.” (Fell, p. 137)

In his art criticism, Jarry always stressed actually seeing art for yourself over just reading or thinking about it. Jarry championed obscure, solitary, outsider artists over mainstream, established artists in his criticism, forever striving for new innovations. Paul Gauguin, Henri Rousseau, Ferdinand Hodler, Emile Bernard, and the members of Les Nabis group are only some of the artists Jarry knew and promoted in his work. An anti-theoretical critic, Jarry used a “paranoic-critical method” (according to Andre Breton) to guide the viewer past the superficial lines of an image and through to the underlying shapes within. Jarry’s criticism also took the form of poems (specifically about Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings) and a novel (in which Gauguin, Bernard, and Aubrey Beardsley each preside over a country reflecting the principles behind their art) in an attempt to escape conventional criticism and achieve something closer to art itself.

Jarry’s ideas serve today as a reminder that, although both are important, living should always take priority over thinking. Experiencing life, in all its beauty and ugliness, should always be more important than thinking about it (or reading blogs about it).

Funny Pages

In the Spring 2007 issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (also linked in my blogroll at right), Patricia Mainardi writes an article titled "The Invention of Comics." She credits Rodolphe Topffer with creating the first true comic strips in 1827 (but not publishing them until 1837). The first comic strip "The Loves of Mr. Vieux Bois" is shown above. She also discusses the early comic strips of Gustave Dore, better known for his illustrations of the Bible and Dante's Divine Comedy.

It's funny how America has always tried to take too much credit for the comic medium (as Mainardi points out). I don't think there can be an argument that the superhero genre was started in America by Shuster and Siegel when they created Superman, but the general framework of the comics, if not most of the language of the medium, was already in place.

It's interesting to see how far the comic medium has come from these first efforts to the more stylized, artistic graphic novels of today. One of my comic favorite artists is Neal Adams, whose Batman illustrations in the 1970s always made me wish I could draw like him. The idea of comics as "serious" art may draw some laughs, but I for one can honestly say that it was the first true introduction for me to any concept of artistic style and composition. And the good guys always won, too.