Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves

Sisters are doin’ it for themselves.
Standin’ on their own two feet.
And ringin’ on their own bells.
Sisters are doin’ it for themselves.
Now this is a song to celebrate
The conscious liberation of the female state!
Mothers, daughters, and their daughters too.
Woman to woman
We’re singin’ with you.
The inferior sex got a new exterior
We got doctors, lawyers, politicians, too.
Everybody, take a look around.
Can you see, can you see, can you see,
There’s a woman right next to you.

—From “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves” by Aretha Franklin and the Eurythmics

Women artists have always struggled to find a place in the male-dominated world of art, just a tiny slice of the larger patriarchy of history. One of the first places and eras in which women artists could assert themselves was late eighteenth-century France. Adelaide Labille-Guiard was one of the first great women artists of that time. Born April 11, 1749, Labille-Guiard began as most women artists did—as a miniaturist and pastel artist, the two genres deemed “acceptable” for their gender. Labille-Guiard’s Self-Portrait of a Miniaturist (above, from 1775) shows her as she saw herself at the point in her career—as a miniaturist who thinks bigger. Studying pastels with Maurice Quentin de la Tour, Labille-Guiard soon excelled at reproducing textures and faces, the two skills that would lead to a profitable career in portraiture later on. She studied oil painting under François-Elie Vincent and eventually opened up her own school after leaving her husband in 1777, just two years after painting her self-portrait as a miniaturist. Labille-Guiard’s world was about to get a whole lot bigger.

In 1783, the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture of France admitted Labille-Guiard, Marie Louise Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, and two other women artists. Strictures were placed upon the number of women who could be admitted and their work was never compared with that of the male members, but it was still a big step toward acceptance for these women. Labille-Guiard and Vigee-Le Brun thus began an artistic “rivalry” that continues even today. As much as people love the idea of artists locked in some kind of combat, commercial or ideological, I’d like to think that there was at least some sense of sisterhood between these two great women artists as they simultaneously broke barriers. Vigee-Le Brun, however, does seem more of a loner than Labille-Guiard. While Vigee-Le Brun courted Marie Antoinette and other prominent members of society, Labille-Guiard fostered relationships with the next generation of women artists. Self-Portrait With Two Pupils (above, from 1785) shows Labille-Guiard with Marie-Gabrielle Capet and Carreaux de Rosemond, two of her star students. No longer the meek miniaturist, Labille-Guiard paints herself in grand style surrounded by her favorite students, the legacy she hoped to leave behind.


Ironically, the success of Self-Portrait With Two Pupils gained Labille-Guiard access to the court of Louis XVI via his aunt, the princess Marie Adélaïde. Labille-Guiard soon won a government pension, and commissions to paint the princess, her sister Victoire-Louise, and Élisabeth, Louis XIV's sister. Although she frequented this royal company, Labille-Guiard remained a revolutionary at heart, which helped her survive the violence of the French Revolution. She even found lasting love and married her old teacher Vincent. Labille-Guiard’s focus, however, always remained on the cause of women in the arts. The portrait of Marie-Gabrielle Capet (above), one of the two pupils in Labille-Guiard’s Self-Portrait With Two Pupils, shows the student dressed as a successful artist in her own right. It’s truly a shame that art history has treated Labille-Guiard as a lesser version of Vigee-Le Brun, as if only one great woman artist could be accepted at a time. Today, Labille-Guiard’s reputation has been resurrected by women artists looking for the ancestors who took those first difficult steps on the road to equality.

Getting in Shape

The greatest argument for going out and seeing paintings in person is the insufficiency of reproduction, especially when it comes to modern art. Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis seems small and paltry in a book or on a computer screen, but when you stand before it you are overcome with a world of red-hued emotion. Likewise, the works of Kenneth Noland suffer in reproduction. Born April 10, 1924, Noland sometimes finds himself linked with Abstract expressionism, perhaps in his kinship with Newman, but is more often grouped with Color field painters such as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler. Noland’s work can be broken down into fairly self-contained sections, beginning with the circle paintings he did from 1956 through 1963, such as Beginning (above, from 1958). Although they might remind one of Jasper Johns’ target series, Noland’s circles focus on the interplay of color rather than the repetition of familiar shapes. Many of Noland’s circles seem almost mechanical in reproduction, where the subtle touches of the human hand are lost, much like the feathery edges of Newman’s “zips.” Beginnings shows more clearly Noland’s gamesmanship with the boundaries of the circle. Noland uses circles and shapes to emphasize the way that shapes contain or set boundaries and then breaks out of that containment. The colors in Noland’s circles and other shapes interplay to create a mood while simultaneously push beyond the canvas into the viewer’s imagination.

In the mid-1960s, Noland shifted from circles to chevrons, such as those found in Blue Veil (above, from 1963). Another common motif structure for Noland during this period was stripes, which essentially just unbent the chevrons. Both series again explore the way that colors can be arranged to create a mood. Blue Veil stands out from many other Noland paintings in that the dark background evokes feelings in strong contrast to the white backgrounds and brighter colors of other works. Noland cites Paul Klee as a great influence on his approach to color, but you could make a similar argument for the influence of Matisse. Noland could then be seen as a Fauve minus the beastliness but with the same aggressively innovative approach to experimenting with color’s capacity to bypass the mind and touch the heart. By eliminating the recognizable imagery of Matisse and others and going straight into abstract color, Noland defies rational explanation while inviting irrational responses.

By the 1970s, Noland went beyond putting shapes on canvas and began to shape the canvas itself into irregular delivery systems for his ideas. In Moon Ray (above, from 1976), Noland paints a series of stripes radiating from a point and physically stretching the usually square or rectangular canvas into something unique to the composition. Again, form follows function for Noland. Where circles and chevrons once supplied containers for him to overfill with color, the dimensions of the canvas itself now bend to his will. Ellsworth Kelly, Noland’s almost exact contemporary, similarly uses irregularly shaped canvases to express an idea, but more often using a single color, such as his Lake II, which “steals” a lake right out of a Cezanne. Noland experimented with many other shapes, some of which resembled surfboards. Still active, Noland continues to work the edges and surf conceptually through the very idea of painting, testing the boundaries and yet, unfortunately, rarely recognized for how he helped shape modern art.

Express Train

Unlike the rest of his fellow Italian Futurists, Gino Severini spent the First World War living just outside Paris rather than in Italy itself. Born April 7, 1883, Severini would watch the trains pass by carrying people, including soldiers, and supplies, including munitions. The increases speed of train travel epitomized the power of technology for Severini and the Futurists—a power on full, disastrous display in the war itself. J. M. W. Turner’s 1844 painting Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, one of the first examinations of rail power’s thrilling and chilling implications, seems almost quaint beside Severini’s disjointed, Cubist-influenced scene, Suburban Train Arriving in Paris (above, from 1915). We have no idea from the painting or the title what the train holds, but the year itself makes it likely that soldiers, perhaps wounded or dying, were aboard, returning from the front in search of medical care. In the background, the word “Kneipp” rises recognizably. “Kneipp” was a popular malted beverage of the time. It’s advertising lends an ironic note of normalcy to the abnormality of the times, as if a Coca Cola sign hung on a graveyard’s entrance.

Later that same year of 1915, Severini painted another train scene, titled Red Cross Train Passing a Village (above). Severini makes the context clearer by including the Red Cross in the title and adding the recognizable Red Cross symbol to the side of the train. We now know exactly who is riding through the countryside and the urgency behind the train’s speed. Whereas the train in Suburban Train Arriving in Paris is almost inconspicuous thanks to the Cubist styling integrating it with the background, the train in Red Cross Train Passing a Village appears clearly against a jumbled landscape. The Red Cross train actually seems to slice through the Futurist style of the rest of the picture, as if Severini were trying to hint that the reality aboard the train trumped any visual games Futurism and its credo could produce. Guillaume Apollinaire mocked the Futurists for their disconnect with the main currents of art and society. Severini eventually agreed with Apollinaire, but only after the war. Red Cross Train Passing a Village may enact in paint the conflict in Severini’s mind as he struggled to hold onto his Futurist faith despite the evidence mounting against it.

Severini’s greatest train painting of this year 1915 remains Armored Train (above). He based it on a photo showing French soldiers firing back at German soldiers in trenches from the safety of an armored train. In 1915, such attacks against trenches remained possible, but eventually the war turned into a slow grind of attrition with entrenched armies locked in a seemingly endless stalemate. Severini makes the most of the lines of the rifles and cannon pointing outward. Lines of energy mark the bullets and bombs sped perpendicularly to the movement of the train itself. The soldiers enjoy the false sense of security of the armored car, much as Severini enjoyed the false sense of satisfaction in technological triumphs throughout the early war years. At this point, Severini might have identified with the isolation of the soldiers on the armored car as they are entrapped by the womb of steel plating against certain death outside. Severini didn’t face death himself in France, but he was surrounded by it, with new doses of reality arriving daily on the trains that passed him by.

Graveyard Shift

Marlene Dumas, Measuring Your Own Grave, 2003, oil on canvas, 55 1/8 x 55 1/8 in., private collection, © 2008 Marlene Dumas, photo by Andy Keate

“It is the best definition I can find/ for what an artist does when making art/ and how a figure in a painting makes its mark,” writes Marlene Dumas in the poem that accompanies her painting Measuring Your Own Grave (above), which provides the title for the Menil Collection’s exhibition surveying Dumas’ unique figurative approach to art and the modern world of images. “An artist for more than thirty years, Dumas has only recently begun to articulate her practice as a visual accounting of our time through the representation of individuals or, rather, as bodies and souls as they move through the incidents of life, politics, and art,” writes Cornelia Butler, the organizer of the exhibition and the catalogue, in her essay “Painter as Witness.” Dumas bears witness to the modern world by taking photographs from the mainstream and creating a parallel flow of art that accentuates aspects of the images all around us that may be too subtle or too buried by familiarity for us to realize. “Dumas seeks to recuperate in her viewer, in the public,” Butler continues, “a sense of the raw violence and physicality of bodily existence, the nakedness of life, sex, birth, and death.” In a world that seems as emotionally flat and two-dimensional as a snapshot, Dumas introduces a third dimension of feeling and weight that reawakens us to reality.

Marlene Dumas, The Blindfolded Man, 2007, oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 35 7/16 in., The Rachofsky Collection, Promised gift to the Dallas Museum of Art

Like Fernando Botero and others, Dumas finds the visual imagery of the Iraq War and the Abu Ghraib torture controversy endlessly fascinating. Dumas series titled Man Kind running from approximately 2002 through 2006 explores the meaning of these photographs. “Since 9/11,” Butler writes, “very few aesthetic statements have gone so far in penetrating the scope and dramatic impact of monumental violence, loss, and fear.” Dumas’ The Blindfolded Man (above) forces us to look closely at the humanity of the prisoner and, thus, at our own humanity (or inhumanity). “The ‘other’ is also a mirror image of ourselves!” Dumas says. “Look in the mirror and talk to Al Qaeda.” Such games with knowledge and self-knowledge unsettle and unnerve unprepared viewers. In an essay titled “Less Dead,” Richard Shiff speaks of how Dumas “knows that the viewer of an image brings his or her cultural indoctrination and personal history to bear on the perception of meaning, that differing cultures and histories generate a conflict of interpretations, that competing ideological structures lead individuals deep into moral confusion.” Dumas’ focus on the human body, the one “given” across all cultures, strips away all the viewer’s personal baggage and tries to resolve the “moral confusion” of the war on terror and other conflicts. For Dumas, “A” is never A. “A” is always A with complications added. Dumas honestly admits her manipulation of source photographs while trying to make us see the manipulations behind the original image.

Marlene Dumas, The Kiss, 2003, oil on canvas, 15 3/4 x 19 11/16 in., courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London, © 2008 Marlene Dumas

Dumas works exclusively from photographs and film stills. The catalogue includes many sources for her work, allowing us a glimpse at the creative process from origin to finished concept. Like Francis Bacon, Dumas enlivens photographic images of the dead and suffering and gives the subjects new life in art—a posthumous immortality. Also like Bacon, Dumas sees the erotic aspects of death and dying, but with the significant difference of a heterosexual woman’s viewpoint rather than that of a homosexual man. The Kiss (above) originated from a film still from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in which the just-murdered Janet Leigh’s dead, yet open-eyed character “kisses” the bathroom tile. Closing the eyes and turning the head slightly, Dumas accentuates the “kiss” of death found in the original. Such manipulation reveals how Dumas imaginatively reaches into a source image and physically moves things around to suit her needs. “There is a crisis with regard to representation,” Dumas believes. “They are looking for meaning as if it was a thing. As if it was a girl, required to take her panty off.” Dumas paints whole series of near-pornographic images of women in highly revealing poses that play off of these concept of the striptease of meaning. Shiff emphasizes the power of empathy in Dumas’ work. When we look at these people, we feel for them as much as the artist did. “When we attend to a Dumas painting,” Shiff writes, “it is as if human will were acknowledging a certain necessity: it must yield to human sensation as well as to the sentience of other bodies, including other material things.” Dumas makes us engage with the other. If bodies in Bacon’s paintings are means towards the end of aesthetic and/or sexual pleasure, bodies in Dumas are never a means to anything but are instead the end itself.

Marlene Dumas, The Woman of Algiers, 2001, oil on canvas, 78 3/4 x 39 3/8 in., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, partial and promised gift of Blake Byrne, © 2008 Marlene Dumas

In “The Binding Factor: The Maternal Gaze of Marlene Dumas,” Lisa Gabrielle Mark analyzes how Dumas takes this empathetic approach and applies it to the conflicted reality of motherhood. For Mark, Dumas dares “to evoke the erotic flush and existential terror of motherhood, a trajectory that begins with the warmth and intimacy of sexual desire and eventually meets the cold indifference of the outside world.” Dumas, a mother herself, knows “the profound ‘otherness’ that lies at the heart of maternity: for the mother, the child is of her but not her,” Mark continues. The Woman of Algiers (above) belongs to the images of torture and pain in Dumas’ oeuvre, but it also shows that world from the perspective of a woman who may know the pain of childbirth and the separation anxiety of sending that child into the world. Dumas’ portraits of her daughter Helena and other children reminded me in their alien-ness of the descriptions of the Creature in the novel Frankenstein, in which Mary Shelley worked out her own personal childbirth demons. Whether it is race, gender, violence, sexuality, or the nature of reality itself, Dumas paints how these forces embed themselves into the photographic world surrounding us and confronts us with the things that we neglect or, more likely, refuse to see.

Marlene Dumas, Dead Marilyn, 2008, oil on canvas, 15 3/4 x 19 11/16 in., Private Collection, New York, © 2008 Marlene Dumas

“Painting is more about one’s own death than about other people’s death,” Dumas once remarked. Dead Marilyn (above) shows Dumas’ take on the infamous autopsy photographs of film star Marilyn Monroe. Without make-up and marred by bruises, the sex goddess’ “true” face comments not only on the falseness of the Hollywood persona but also on the underlying vulnerability that is infinitely more interesting and attractive. Dumas truly, as Butler puts it, “mines the images that have informed a collective understanding of our era” with “a restless, generous, and heartily discursive spirit.” The graphic sexuality and violence of much of her work will likely turn away some viewers, but it is that honest appraisal of the images of modern life that make such “offensive” material vitally essential. Dumas refuses to sanitize or filter out any aspect of life. She sifts out the convenient explanations and denials that make modern imagery palatable and hands us nuggets of truth. Whether we can swallow those nuggets or continue to choke on them is up to us. Measuring Your Own Grave takes the measure of man and womankind and holds up a disconcerting, disturbing, yet always fascinating and ultimately empathetic mirror to our lives, asking us only to look and consider, perhaps for the first time, what we see.

[Many thanks to the Menil Collection for providing me with a review copy of Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave and for the images above from the exhibition.]

Getting Schooled

One of the highlights of my tour of the Vatican years ago was the opportunity to see in person Raphael’s The School of Athens (above, from 1511) in the Stanza della Segnatura. Born April 6, 1483, Raphael snuck portraits of himself and many of his fellow artists into his group snapshot of the glory days of Greek philosophy. I especially sought out Raphael’s portrait of Heraclitus, a portrait of Michelangelo inspired by Raphael’s sneak peak at the almost completed Sistine Chapel Ceiling. Raphael even painted Michelangelo in a Michelangelo-esque style, which makes Heraclitus stand out even more from the crowd. With Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael comprises the grand triumvirate of the High Renaissance. Even into the early twentieth century critics as renowned as Bernard Berenson ranked Raphael above his two esteemed contemporaries. Thanks to the papal desire for high-quality decoration, Raphael and Michelangelo rubbed shoulders quite frequently in a school of shared respect and healthy competition. The spirited arguments recounted in The School of Athens could easily stand in for the aesthetic battles waged between these geniuses.

Just a few years after The School of Athens, Raphael opened up his own school of sorts, with the Loggia (above) of the triple portico of the Vatican Palace as his schoolroom. As related in Nicole Dacos’ The Loggia of Raphael: A Vatican Art Treasure (my review here), just before Donato Bramante, designer of the triple portico of the Vatican Palace, died in 1514, he suggested to Pope Leo X that Raphael could best finish the job. Raphael assembled his team of assistants and added artists from other countries over time to complete the multimedia work of creating sculptures and paintings to fill the Loggia. Nothing in the Loggia is actually by Raphael, but everything found there comes from his vision of a kindler, gentler idea of the Bible. Raphael wanted to create the perfect atmosphere of tolerance and peace for the pope to show to visitors while discussing diplomatic matters. Raphael’s Loggia essentially became a laboratory in which young artists were steeped in a new way of looking at the role of Christianity in the world.

According to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Raphael died at the age of 37 after a night of wild sexual passion in the arms of his mistress Margherita Luti, the subject of Raphael’s portrait La Fornarina (aka, The Bakeress; above, from 1519-1520). Vasari’s Lives focuses throughout on the elevation of Michelangelo as the greatest of all artists as well as a paragon of virtue, so scripting a licentious end for Raphael, one of his chief rivals, made Michelangelo look all the better. Raphael’s reputation suffered another blow in the late nineteenth century thanks to John Ruskin and the artists known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Raphael may be the only artist to have a school explicitly NOT named after him, by name. Providing the theory for the Pre-Raphaelites' artwork, Ruskin condemned Raphael’s art, claiming that “execution was looked for rather than thought, and beauty rather than veracity.” Ruskin made Raphael the turning point in art history where everything went wrong. “in medieval art, truth is first, beauty second; in modern art, beauty is first, truth second,” Ruskin wrote. “The medieval principles led up to Raphael, and the modern principles lead down from him.” The Pre-Raphaelites wanted to turn back the clock and erase Raphael’s bad influence. Fortunately, their success in art didn’t translate into a success in art history. Raphael remains a powerful presence in the history of the Renaissance—another great teacher in that grandest of schools.

Stop Making Sense

If Salvador Dali is the king of Surrealism, Max Ernst is the court jester. Born April 2, 1891, Ernst took the absurdity of Surrealism and Dada and emphasized the humor of the joke of reality over the existential angst accompanying the loss of rationality. In Aquis Submersus (above, from 1919), a doll-like figure with a handlebar mustache stands at the edge of a swimming pool surrounded by buildings. The buildings, however, seem more like two-dimensional stage backdrops. Their shadows appear behind as if projected onto a wall. The moon reflected in the water turns out to be a clock hung high above the scene. It is as if one of Giorgio de Chirico’s ominously unpopulated towns had been recreated by a grade school class for the school play. Ernst certainly knew of de Chirico’s art and is playing off of him here. de Chirico actually resisted the label of Surrealist, so Ernst may be trying to help him out here by showing how a little absurdity could be injected into de Chirico’s surreal seriousness.

For Ernst and other Surrealists and Dadaists, every scrap of the world around them was fodder for foolishness. In The Hat Makes the Man (above, from 1920), Ernst cut out pictures of hats from catalogues, pasted them to a page, and linked them with lines of color to “make” living creatures roaming across the page. Always the clown, Ernst puns visually on the idea of “the hat makes the man” and literally constructs a “man” out of hats. Ernst claimed that the pictures of the hats and other bourgeois items for sale “provoked” him to action. Freud, in many ways the Surrealist’s best friend, saw hats as symbolizing repressed desire, literally keeping a lid on the id. Ernst runs with that idea and creates phallic columns of writhing hats struggling to keep things tidy. Just as Rene Magritte would later use bowler hats to stand in for the erasure of the modern man’s sense of self, Ernst uses hats to signify the fruitless struggle to cover up human urges.

Ernst’s Ubu Imperator (above, from 1923) pays homage to the father of Dadaism, Alfred Jarry. Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi inspired generations of European artists to “stop making sense” and thus deny the conditions of society presented by authority. Jarry founded the fake science of 'Pataphysics, or "the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments," as Jarry unhelpfully described it. Like The Hat Makes the Man, Ubu Imperator is an individual made up entirely of accoutrements. Whatever animates the clothing might be human, but we’re not sure. All we know is that the clothing, which represents the commercialism and standards of a society, however vain and cruel, is coming our way. The great paradox of Ernst’s work is that while it almost never depicts a recognizable human, it contains a great deal of humanism. I look at some of Dali’s paintings and feel only sadness and horror at how they tear open the inhumanity of the world. When I look at Ernst and his covered-up characters, I laugh and feel hopeful that there’s something still worthwhile deep inside.

Mad Prophet

Any red-blooded American boy who ever picked up an issue of Mad Magazine might not know the name but certainly knows by sight the style of Basil Wolverton. Monte Wolverton, Basil’s son, continues to work in a similar style as his father, bringing the bizarre, grotesque Wolverton look to new generations. Although Basil is best known for his Mad work, he himself wanted to be remembered for his little-known work for Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God that appeared in the magazine The Plain Truth. The Wolverton Bible: The Old Testament and Book of Revelation Through the Pen of Basil Wolverton, compiled by Monte Wolverton, brings together the religious work of his devoutly religious father and sheds new light on Basil as a serious illustrator. Basil worked on these 700 images illustrating the Bible from 1953 through 1974 while simultaneously working for Mad and other publications. “In all this, Wolverton saw no conflict,” Monte explains of his father. “One realm was religious and the other secular. He believed religious people need to lighten up and not take themselves seriously.” Part of that lightening up process involved Basil’s dramatic, almost cinematic approach, which could reinvigorate old tales such as Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (above) with a fresh, contemporary look.

Wolverton began corresponding with Armstrong in the 1940s, after listening to Armstrong’s radio show The World Tomorrow. By 1943, Wolverton was an elder in the Worldwide Church of God and soon on the church’s board. Armstrong soon enlisted Wolverton to use his art to reach younger audiences. “From the beginning,” Monte writes, “both Wolverton and Armstrong sought to create a story that followed the Bible account more accurately than children’s Bible story books on the market in the 1950s” that “laundered” the story’s darker aspects. “Wolverton’s comic horror work and his grotesquely humorous drawings were consistent with his theological understanding of the human condition,” Monte continues, explaining how Wolverton’s artistic style and religious beliefs meshed in his Biblical illustrations. Whereas other depictions of Noah’s Ark emphasized cute animals, Wolverton emphasized the plight of those left behind (above) who faced God’s watery wrath. Unfortunately, Wolverton’s recovery of the violence of the original text challenged the sensibilities of the intended youthful audience as well as the patience of their parents. The Woverton Bible almost bursts open with pictures of masses of humanity facing one catastrophe after another—all drawn directly from the Bible itself, but still capable of traumatizing children unaccustomed to that side of the story.

Wolverton’s illustrations of the Old Testament bring many of the stale tales to life in ways no other twentieth-century artist has. Yet, Wolverton didn’t see himself as a “fine artist.” “Unlike many comic-book artists,” Grant Giessman writes in his Foreword, “Wolverton considered himself to be primarily a comic artist, with no secret longing to break into the fine arts, do portrait painting, or escape the ‘comic-book ghetto’ by going into advertising work. He loved the genre, with all of its perceived limitations.” In Wolverton’s hands, the “limitations” of the comic genre become strengths, especially when tackling the visually challenging text of the Book of Revelations. Wolverton takes the passage discussing “Death on a Pale Horse” and converts the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse into bombers raining death upon the landscape (above). Such images, which played into the already present 1950s fears of nuclear annihilation from above, drew the most complaints—a testament to the power these works had to take ancient words and make them feel immediately present.

Wolverton reveled in unleashing the full extent of his macabre imagination on the material found in Revelations. He called Mutants (above), one of his favorite images, even though Armstrong blanched at using it in The Plain Truth out of fear of how it would affect young minds. Despite such concerns, Giessman writes, “Armstrong clearly had the right man for the job, because it’s difficult to gaze for very long upon Wolverton’s horrific end-of-the-world visions and not wonder if you really shouldn’t get right with Jesus.” Armstrong’s belief in the Second Commandment’s prohibition of images of God kept Wolverton from moving on to the New Testament and the story of Jesus. A stroke in 1974 left Wolverton unable to continue working entirely until his death in 1978. Looking at Wolverton’s body of religious work, you truly get the sense that he drew directly from his body of beliefs. Monte compares his father’s work to that of Hieronymus Bosch, and I agree. Wolverton’s mind set was distinctly that of the middle ages, yet he lived in modern times. In the 1500s, Woverton would have been right at home, whereas in the twentieth century he made the most of thinking and working outside of the mainstream.

As much as the horrific and Bosch-esque in Wolverton’s art strikes you immediately, it’s also important to recognize the beauty of many of his visions, such as his imagining of Jacob’s dreaming of the “stairway to heaven” (above), also known as “Jacob’s Ladder.” In these beautiful images, Wolverton reminds me of another artistic outsider of profound faith—William Blake. Blake painted his unique vision of the Christian faith and emphasized the sublime over the terrible, whereas Wolverton emphasized the reverse, but at some point the two artists intersect in a span that is much too brief, yet touchingly beautiful to behold. When Wolverton draws the creation of Adam using over a thousand dots, we feel as if he’s is building up the first man atom by atom just as God himself did. The Wolverton Bible still has the ability to revolt and repulse viewers, but that is just one aspect of its overall ability to make these well-known stories seem new and, more importantly, inescapably human.

[Many thanks to Fantagraphics Books for providing me with a review copy of Basil Wolverton’s The Wolverton Bible: The Old Testament and Book of Revelation Through the Pen of Basil Wolverton and for the images from the book.]