News Art Blog

Sometimes the toughest shadow to escape is one you cast over yourself. When artist Art Spiegelman began publishing Maus in 1980 in chapter form in the indie comics magazine Raw, which he co-founded with his wife Françoise Mouly, he couldn’t have guessed that his artistic journey into his family’s past and the Holocaust would lead to a PulitzerPrize in 1992. Spiegelman’s career stretched back to the 1960s (and Maus itself began in 1972 with a 3-page comic), but he never experienced the recognition that Maus could bring. In The Jewish Museum, New York’s new exhibition Art Spiegelman’s Co-Mix: A Retrospective, which runs through March 23, 2014, we see not only what led up to Maus, but also what’s led from it. Co-Mix is as much the story of the man who made Maus as the story of how a comic innovator and visionary escaped the snares of fame and made it out more creatively alive than ever. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Art Spiegelman Is More Than Just Maus."

The gun debate in America may have “jumped the shark” with yesterday’s Mother’s Day Parade shooting in New Orleans that left 19 wounded, including two children. When something as universally accepted as the idea of motherhood becomes a shooting gallery, any idea of a debate seems as absurd as Fonzie in leather jacket and bathing trunks riding those water skis over 35 years ago. Reuters ran with the story as their international headline the next morning, as the latest “look at the crazy Americans and their guns” story. But I’ll leave the real jokes to the real comics, who have already made their voice on the issue heard clearly in the short film "Cartoonists Demand Action to End Gun Violence," in which a bevy of big cartooning names try to make a serious point through the funny pages. While interests groups, the media, and even the government have failed to change anything, perhaps cartoonists can make the best case for gun control. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Why Cartoonists Make the Best Case for GunControl."

[Image: Dan Perkins, aka Tom Tomorrow. This Modern World.]

The cover of the May 16, 2011 issue of The New Yorker features a cartoon by Gürbüz Doğan Ekşioğlu in which the image of recently killed terrorist Osama Bin Laden is erased. Titled “Rubbed Out,” the painting depicts the freshly erased face of Bin Laden with the well-used pink rubber eraser laid carelessly on top (detail shown above). Now that it is almost definite that the photos of the dead Bin Laden will not be shown to the public any time soon, this may be the closest, and most poignant, thing. Ekşioğlu’s cartoon made me think back to Robert Rauschenberg’s famous 1953 work, Erased de Kooning Drawing, which lived up to its title in every way. Looking back on Rauschenberg’s thinking may hold some answers for what this new image may hold for the legacy of Bin Laden and the War on Terror. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Erasing the Image of Osama Bin Laden."