TO LAUGH THAT WE MAY NOT WEEP a Nearly Forgotten Cartoonist We Need to Look At—Right Now! by Art Spiegelman

PORTFOLIO

TO LAUGH THAT WE MAY NOT WEEP A nearly forgotten cartoonist we need to look at—right now! By Art Spiegelman

capitalism and the reformer

rt Young would have turned cartoonist in our history, a one-of-a- ger really exists: A Radical! Political!! 150 years old this month, and kind American original. His ability to Cartoonist!!! It’s the oblivion trifecta. Athe finest gift we could have boil complex social issues down to 1. Radical: We Americans, poor fish, given him is Bernie Sanders’s campaign memorable symbols, drawn with justifi- have a perpetually recurring case of to welcome socialism back into Amer- able anger but permeated with genial amnesia, trying to wriggle off the hook ica’s parlor after decades of keeping it warmth, would be an immeasurable when it comes to facing our history as a chained in the basement. Art Young? asset to Bernie in explaining the reali- Rapacious Capitalist Empire. We prefer He was the greatest radical political ties of today’s class war to its casualties. to think of ourselves as wide-eyed in- Unfortunately, political cartooning, nocents with perpetually renewing hy- Art Spiegelman’s “Drawing Blood” appeared like socialism, has fallen on hard times, mens. 2. Political: The word evokes in the June 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine. and Art Young’s job description no lon- C-SPAN–scale boredom and clouds of

capitalism The Last Supper proletariat toxic rhetoric. The only concept less celed subscription or lost advertiser can cracker-barrel manner was picked up inviting is “political radical,” which con- spell death for yet another paper. around the cracker barrel in his father’s jures up images of dangerous bomb- Of course Art Young’s profession is general store, where he also exhibited throwing anarchists—what could be not always and everywhere dismissed as his first cartoons. Gustave Doré’s wood- worse? Oh, I know: 3. Cartoonist! A trivial—just ask the murdered Charlie cut illustrations for Dante’s Inferno creator of trivial diversions, only worth Hebdo artists. And it’s not all about made a deep impression on him (he the time more fruitfully spent dozing if Mohammed: tin-pot despots in India, wrote and drew three versions of his the creator is (a) hilarious, (b) sala- Iran, Malaysia, Syria, and Venezuela, to own up-to-date Inferno over the years), cious, or, preferably, (c) both. In fact, name a few recent offenders, have ac- as did Thomas Nast’s Boss Tweed car- one of the few phrases more snooze- knowledged how potent cartoons can toons for Harper’s Weekly. A high- worthy than “political” may be “po- be by offering tribute to the cartoonists school dropout, Young sold his first litical cartoonist,” especially in its in the form of police harassment, huge cartoon to Judge at seventeen and then current, demeaned American form. As fines, long prison terms, and torture. moved to Chicago, where he studied art circulations dwindle and newspapers In Young’s day—he was born the and began to draw for newspapers. disappear, the political cartoonist has year after the Civil War ended and died He came to look back with remorse become an endangered species. In order while the Second World War was still at the antianarchist cartoons he drew to survive, these working stiffs have raging—the power of the political car- after the Chicago Haymarket riot of been reduced to making tepid gag cartoon to shape thought and mobilize 1886, as he slowly evolved from a tepid toons about current events, avoiding opinion was a given. He grew up in a Republican at twenty (which roughly any whiff of controversy, since one can- small town in Wisconsin, and his translates into mainstream Democrat in Clockwise from left: Capitalism, courtesy private collection; The In and the Out of Our Penal System, from Puck, October 20, 1909, courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; Holy Trinity, from Puck, January 6, 1909, courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; The Uprising of the Proletariat, from The Best of Art Young © 1936 64 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2016 The Vanguard Press, Inc., New York City; O, Blessed Sleep, from On My Way © 1928 Horace Liveright, New York City the out of our penal system

the uprising of the proletariat holy trinity

today’s parlance) into a flaming social- friends, and admirers that included Carl money wasn’t—refusing lucrative com- ist by forty-five. He was an editor and Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, Langston missions from mainstream magazines leading contributor to The Masses, the Hughes, Helen Keller, Charlie Chaplin, and newspapers to take the vow of fabled Greenwich Village radical mag- and even Walt Disney. poverty that comes with working for azine, where he worked alongside John the radical press.) Reed, Max Eastman, Jack London, John n 1909, a drawing Young made for He was never quite convicted for his Sloan, and Stuart Davis. He even ran Puck shamed New York’s Trinity convictions, though the Associated unsuccessfully for legislative office in IChurch, which had (and has) vast Press did sue him for libel after he (ac- New York several times, on the Socialist real-estate holdings, into tearing down curately) accused it of covering up the ticket. His career as a cartoonist un- and replacing the pestilent slum bloody details of a West Virginia coal- folded in newspapers ranging from buildings it profited from. He happily miners’ strike. During the First World Hearst’s New York Journal to the Daily accepted the term “propaganda” to War, he was tried for treason for his Worker and in magazines with sensibili- describe his work, which he saw simply pacifist cartoons in The Masses. He ties as different as The Saturday Evening as propagating his own ideas. His con- had to keep being nudged awake in Post and The New Yorker—as well as in tempt was reserved for the editorial the courtroom, and doodled an en- his own short-lived, cheerily titled Good prostitution involved in drawing for an dearing portrait of himself snoring in Morning, whose masthead declared, “To editor’s convictions rather than one’s his chair, captioned “Art Young on laugh that we may not weep.” When he own. (Young confessed that he didn’t trial for his life.” died, at age seventy-seven, he was have convictions until he was about He was as good at making powerful mourned by a spectrum of colleagues, forty, when he put his mouth where his enemies as George Grosz, who was

PORTFOLIO 65 manifested in masterful exaggeration—one can’t draw that creature’s body gesture without inhabiting the pose. The drawing is built on the artist’s recog- nition of his own—and everyman’s—capacity for gluttony, an understand- ing that we are all closer to animals than gods. It’s a theme he visits often in his work. (See, for example, Man and Beast, glori- ously captioned with a quotation from Hamlet: “What’s he been doin’?” “There’s a divinity that “Overthrowin’ the guvment.” shapes our ends.”) The cartoonist’s lightness of Fantagraphics Books releases The being allowed the audience to bear the Art and Life of Art Young later unbearable. It separates his work from this year), the artist wrote: the shrill, self-righteous sentimentality of many of his radical political-cartoon man and beast I did not spend many years of my life comrades. Even the prosecuting attor- “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends” cartooning the trivial turns in current ney in Young’s trial for treason was politics. Although a few of these are forced to agree with the defense attor- related to the topical issues of other variously tried for blasphemy, slander, days, it will be noted that practically ney’s statement that “everybody likes and obscenity in Germany before all of them are generalizations on the Art Young!” fleeing to America when the Nazis one important issue of this era the rose to power, but Young didn’t have world over: Plutocracy versus the f Young hasn’t been sufficiently re- Grosz’s talent for hatred. His indigna- principles of Socialism. membered, it is not because his pic- tion was visceral, but his generous Itures aren’t memorable. He’d studied soul and empathic heart put him in Young, like most progressives of his to be a painter, but said he preferred a the same Olympian league as Honoré time, might have been a bit disheart- large audience to being displayed on a Daumier. (Grosz and Daumier were ened to find out that the grand Soviet rich man’s walls. He was impatient with painters as well as cartoonists, which experiment kinda, um, fizzled badly, pictures that didn’t make a clear point. helped keep them from slipping into but because he kept his eye on the This need for content is personified the cultural memory hole that has fundamentals, his cartoons are rarely by Trees at Night, his series of land- swallowed Young.) musty artifacts from yesterday’s papers scape drawings that was gathered in Political cartoons usually have a but seem like urgent dispatches from book form in 1927. Here he reclaims short half-life—comments on the tomorrow’s news. His classic 1911 Life the landscape—usually a painter’s passing parade are just confetti to be cartoon, Capitalism (amusingly sub tossed out after the parade has gone titled The Last Supper), depicts terminal by, salvaged mostly by historians or gluttony. Whichever Republican ends other political cartoonists looking to up representing today’s one-percenters recycle them. Even Young’s boyhood will have to slug it out with Hillary hero, Thomas Nast—who gave us Clinton to see who wins the right to use our contemporary image of Santa this icon as their avatar in future World Claus and its antonym, the Republi- of Warcraft games. can elephant—is remembered main- I love that drawing, one of the artist’s ly because his cartoons are useful for clearest and most straightforwardly an- spicing up the gray monotony of gry indictments, which damns the American-history textbooks. Young’s greedy beast to plummet directly into work might be in some high-school Art Young’s Inferno. But there is some- textbook I haven’t seen, but that’s how an elusive touch of compassion not what makes him important. Dis- even for this monster who heedlessly cussing his selection process for the guzzles swill from his bejeweled caul- work in his 1936 collection, The Best dron. Young’s ability to hate the sin but of Art Young (the only major retro- not the sinner arises from his deeply spective of his work, at least until ingrained sense of humor, which is the devil’s orchestra

Top left: Man and Beast, from On My Way © 1928 Horace Liveright, New York City Top right: Overthrowin’ the Guvment, from The Best of Art Young © 1936 The Vanguard 66 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2016 Press, Inc., New York City. Bottom: The Devil’s Orchestra, courtesy private collection domain—as ground for a cartoonist’s imposed meanings by anthropomor- phizing his silhouetted willows with painterly washes so they literally weep. Young told Max Eastman, his fellow conspirator at The Masses, that he was as devoted to the aesthetic elements of his work as any painter. “I worry over composition, drawing, light and shade, elimination—above all elimination— from breakfast time to dinner.” I’m pretty sure that he was referring not to his digestive tract but to the cartoonist’s craft of making a spare, efficient image. There’s a stylistic progression from his youthful drawings, which emulate Doré’s detailed wood engravings and Thomas Nast’s tight cross-hatchings, to his sig- nature mature style of streamlined ink lines that echo early-twentieth-century woodcuts. The forceful graphic rigor of these later drawings is reminiscent of Rockwell Kent, his younger contemporary and comrade—but without Kent’s sometimes strained seriousness. Though Young is comfortable with various black-and-white media, including crayon drawing and painted washes, it’s his boldly composed later line work that fully embodies the paradox of humble virtuosity. Young was searching for pictures that were coherent intellectually as well as formally. Saul Steinberg de- fined this difficult process as making an image that, once seen, can never be unseen—and Young was a world- class master at distilling his thoughts into unforgettable formulations. A cartoon’s power derives from its capacity to echo the ways our brains work. We think in small bursts of language and in stripped-down icons. (I once read that an infant can recognize a simple smiley face sooner than its mother’s smile.) Young’s images were understandable to all classes and em- braced by a wide swath of the always- bickering left. Nowadays, satire and ridicule have effectively moved to late- night TV comedy, but it’s the cartoon’s “Chee, Annie, look at de stars—thick as bed-bugs!” ability to essentialize that we so sorely need now. The Occupy movement might’ve had longer legs if it only had everything is political. They are most bugs!” is a poignant example of what it a great T-shirt designed by Art Young. often intentionally and genuinely amus- means to laugh that we may not weep. But I would be doing Young a great ing (though, astonishingly, never cruel While many of Young’s political car- disservice if I left you with the impres- or condescending). His drawing of two toons were direct lessons on America’s sion that he was “just” a political car- slum urchins holding hands and staring rigged economic con game, all of his toonist. Many of his cartoons have no at the night sky while one says, “Chee, work was also a lesson in empathy. We overt political agenda, except insofar as Annie, look at de stars—thick as bed- have never needed more of both. n