The newest exhibit is a one-of-a-kind experience

By Max Hill

Photo courtesy of Vancouver Art Gallery

Art Spiegelman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and essayist behind Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, In the Shadow of No Towers and a wide variety of comics publications, essays, and collections. Despite his impressive resume, Spiegelman seems like the last person whose work you’d expect to find in a gallery retrospective: he’s renowned for his acerbic and selfcritical sense of humour and his discomfort with the vast praise he’s received during his career.

However, after winning the Grand Prix at the Angouleme International Comics Festival in Paris, Spiegelman helped put together an exhibition of his work, which has been featured at four museums worldwide, including the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany and the Jewish Museum in New York. Until June 9, an impressive collection of Spiegelman’s sketches, scraps, and published pieces will be on display at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

The CO-MIX exhibit gives viewers a linear narrative of Spiegelman’s distinguished career: beginning with his experiences in the underground “comix” scene of San Francisco, the show includes many strips and stories from this period. Heavily influenced by the history of the comics medium, from Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo series to Harvey Kurtzman’s work for Mad Magazine, Spiegelman’s early work experiments with a variety of styles and genres.

Included in the exhibit are such works as Prisoner on Hell Planet, a shockingly personal account of Spiegelman’s reaction to his mother’s 1968 suicide told in German expressionist style, and the original artwork for Spiegelman’s three-page 1972 strip Maus, which would go on to inspire his graphic novel of the same name 10 years later. This documentation of Spiegelman’s early work displays his struggles to find both his artistic voice and an effective medium for the artist’s unique brand of inflammatory social commentary.

After moving back to New York in 1976 and marrying Francoise Mouly — who would become a key artistic collaborator — Spiegelman began teaching at the New York School of Visual Arts. Having spent four years involved in the burgeoning New York underground comix movement, Spiegelman began Raw, a comix anthology co-edited with his new wife. The publication helped bring many lesserknown cartoonists into the public eye, including Chris Ware, Charles Burns, and Alan Moore. It was also in the pages of Raw that Maus was originally published. The exhibit includes several original copies of Raw, as well as preliminary sketches for many of the magazine’s covers and an impressive collection of memorabilia, including graphic tees and buttons.

Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prizewinning opus Maus is of course given particular attention: the exhibit includes a wealth of sketches and drafts from Maus’ second volume and a variety of other fascinating documents, including Spiegelman’s parents’ passports and documentation of his father’s entry into the Auschwitz concentration camp. Many visitors to the exhibit will linger in this section; the pieces are beautifully arranged and breathtaking in their simplicity.

The graphic novel, which tells the story of Spiegelman’s father Vladek Spiegelman’s experience during his time in Auschwitz, was one of the first works of its kind to receive scholarly and critical attention.

“I think what Art did was to take a medium — the comics medium — and to see what the possibilities were,” says Bruce Grenville, senior curator of the exhibit and personal friend of Mr. Spiegelman. “He developed a narrative that is so rich and compelling that people kind of gravitated toward it that never would have looked at a comic book in their life.”

This is the first time that Maus has been featured in a gallery setting since being exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1992.

The exhibit’s second half focuses on Spiegelman’s work since the release of Maus. One room is dedicated to an impressive collection of controversial and intransigent New Yorker covers which the artist contributed during his 10-year stint at the magazine. Included is Spiegelman’s Sept. 24, 2001 cover depicting the Twin Towers in New York City as black silhouettes against a black background. Inspired by the abstract paintings of Ad Reinhardt, the cover has achieved recognition for its striking minimalism and evocation of the loss felt by citizens of New York, and Art himself, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“I felt that images were suddenly powerless to help us understand what had happened,” said Francoise Mouly in a Sept 5, 2011 New Yorker article. “The only appropriate solution seemed to be to publish no cover image at all — an allblack cover. Then Art suggested adding the outlines of the two towers, black on black. So from no cover came a perfect image, which conveyed something about the unbearable loss of life, the sudden absence in our skyline, the abrupt tear in the fabric of reality.”

Another room focuses on In the Shadow of No Towers, an idiosyncratic and self-referential comic series published by the German newspaper Die Ziet from 2002–2004. The work doubles as a form of social commentary of an anxious post-9/11 America and a deeply personal expression of Spiegelman’s own anxiety and post-traumatic stress following the attacks.

At the exhibit’s end is a collection of the artist’s publications for children, which contrast with the profoundly mature themes of his better known pieces. Works such as Open Me… I’m a Dog and comix anthology Little Lit (co-edited with Mouly) illustrate Spiegelman’s versatility, inventiveness, and unlikely lightheartedness.

Unlike the exhibit’s first half, Spiegelman’s work from 1991 on is not presented in any linear fashion: instead, museumgoers are free to explore the artist’s contemporary works in whatever order they choose. The show also offers the opportunity for visitors to read Maus and other works at their own pace: copies of Spiegelman’s works are littered across two cozy reading sections throughout the gallery.
The museum has not featured any comics artists in their galleries since 2008’s popular Krazy exhibit, which was cocurated by Grenville and Spiegelman. Despite growing acceptance of comics as a valid art form, exhibits that focus on cartoonists are still few and far between — and seem to attract a different crowd than the usual museum fare.
“It’s a surprisingly broad and diverse audience,” explains Grenville. “When I go in there, I’m always surprised at the kind
of range . . . there are people who are more hardcore artists in a dedicated sort of way, and then at the same time people who probably haven’t set foot in the museum before.”

Tuesday nights are especially popular, when the gallery opens its doors late and charges by donation. “It’ll be jammed tonight,” exults Grenville.

The gallery has rarely seen such an interesting and unusual array of attendees as you’ll find at the CO-MIX exhibit: suit-andtie intellectuals and skateboardcarrying punks share breathing space and speak volumes towards the wide appeal of Spiegelman’s work and its ability to convey something different to each and every reader.

But perhaps the best reason to recommend the exhibit is that Spiegelman’s work is unlikely to be featured in a gallery setting again. “I think what’s great about the show is that you will never get another chance to see a retrospective of Art. You won’t get it in your lifetime,” says Grenville with a hint of wistfulness.

It doesn’t seem far-fetched to say that it’s the last opportunity fans and art lovers alike will likely have to take a closer look at the work of one of the medium’s most well-known and influential figures.
Given the deeply personal nature of Spiegelman’s creations, be they the brusquely satirical strips of his San Francisco years or the grandiose statements of his more recent output, many of his devotees feel an intimate connection to his work.

When asked about what aspect of Spiegelman’s work spoke to him, Grenville replied, “I think with Art’s work, it’s his ability to make every page — every frame — so dense with possibility and meaning. And it’s what you see in every great artwork is this sort of sense of the complexity of composition, of the content, an understanding of the history — that’s brought to every page of what he does.”

By blending the best aspects of high and low art with his own unique sense of humour and insightful socio-political critique, Spiegelman has solidified himself not only as one of the greatest artists in the history of the medium, but also as one of the defining artists of his time.

To see these pieces in such vibrant detail, from conception to finished product, is worth the trip. Inviting yet uncompromising, the show is a perfect metaphor for Spiegelman’s work, and for the man himself.