Artful Breakdowns

Artful Breakdowns
Author: Georgiana Banita
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2023-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496837525

Contributions by Georgiana Banita, Colin Beineke, Harriet Earle, Ariela Freedman, Liza Futerman, Shawn Gilmore, Sarah Hamblin, Cara Koehler, Lee Konstantinou, Patrick Lawrence, Philip Smith, and Kent Worcester A carefully curated, wide-ranging edited volume tracing Art Spiegelman’s exceptional trajectory from underground rebellion to mainstream success, Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman reveals his key role in the rise of comics as an art form and of the cartoonist as artist. The collection grapples with Spiegelman’s astonishing versatility, from his irreverent underground strips, influential avant-garde magazine RAW, the expressionist style of the comics classic Maus, the illustrations to the Jazz Age poem “The Wild Party,” and his response to the September 11 terrorist attacks to his iconic cover art for the New Yorker, his children’s books, and various cross-media collaborations. The twelve chapters cut across Spiegelman’s career to document continuities and ruptures that the intense focus on Maus has obscured, yielding an array of original readings. Spiegelman’s predilection for collage, improvisation, and the potent protest of silence shows his allegiance to modernist art. His cultural critique and anticapitalist, antimilitary positions shed light on his vocal public persona, while his deft intertextual strategies of mixing media archives, from comics to photography and film, amplify the poignance of his works. Developing new approaches to Spiegelman’s comics—such as the publication history of Maus, the history of immigration and xenophobia, and the cartoonist’s elevation of children’s comics—the collection leaves no doubt that despite the accolades his accessible comics have garnered, we have yet to grasp the full range of Spiegelman’s achievements in the realm of comics and beyond.

Breakdowns

Breakdowns
Author: Art Spiegelman
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 78
Release: 2008-10-07
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 0375423958

The creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus explores the comics form ... and how it formed him! This book opens with Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, creating vignettes of the people, events, and comics that shaped Art Spiegelman. It traces the artist's evolution from a MAD-comics obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories of Auschwitz on his own son. The second part presents a facsimile of Breakdowns, the long-sought after collection of the artist's comics of the 1970s, the book that triggers these memories. Breakdowns established the mode of formally sophisticated comics that transformed the medium, and includes the prototype of Maus, cubist experiments, an essay on humor, and the definitive genre-twisting pulp story "Ace Hole-Midget Detective." Pulling all this together is an illustrated essay that looks back at the sixties as the artist pushes sixty, and explains the obsessions that brought these works into being. Poignant, funny, complex, and innovative, Breakdowns alters the terms of what can be accomplished in a memoir.

Artful Breakdowns

Artful Breakdowns
Author: Georgiana Banita
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2023-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496837541

Contributions by Georgiana Banita, Colin Beineke, Harriet Earle, Ariela Freedman, Liza Futerman, Shawn Gilmore, Sarah Hamblin, Cara Koehler, Lee Konstantinou, Patrick Lawrence, Philip Smith, and Kent Worcester A carefully curated, wide-ranging edited volume tracing Art Spiegelman’s exceptional trajectory from underground rebellion to mainstream success, Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman reveals his key role in the rise of comics as an art form and of the cartoonist as artist. The collection grapples with Spiegelman’s astonishing versatility, from his irreverent underground strips, influential avant-garde magazine RAW, the expressionist style of the comics classic Maus, the illustrations to the Jazz Age poem “The Wild Party,” and his response to the September 11 terrorist attacks to his iconic cover art for the New Yorker, his children’s books, and various cross-media collaborations. The twelve chapters cut across Spiegelman’s career to document continuities and ruptures that the intense focus on Maus has obscured, yielding an array of original readings. Spiegelman’s predilection for collage, improvisation, and the potent protest of silence shows his allegiance to modernist art. His cultural critique and anticapitalist, antimilitary positions shed light on his vocal public persona, while his deft intertextual strategies of mixing media archives, from comics to photography and film, amplify the poignance of his works. Developing new approaches to Spiegelman’s comics—such as the publication history of Maus, the history of immigration and xenophobia, and the cartoonist’s elevation of children’s comics—the collection leaves no doubt that despite the accolades his accessible comics have garnered, we have yet to grasp the full range of Spiegelman’s achievements in the realm of comics and beyond.

The Art of the Funnies

The Art of the Funnies
Author: Robert C. Harvey
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1994
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780878056743

The comic strip was created by rival newspapers of the Hearst and the Pulitzer organizations as a device for increasing circulation. In the United States it quickly became an institution that soon spread worldwide as a favorite form of popular culture. What made the comic strip so enduring? This fascinating study by one of the few comics critics to develop sound critical principles by which to evaluate the comics as works of art and literature unfolds the history of the funnies and reveals the subtle art of how the comic strip blends words and pictures to make its impact. Together, these create meaning that neither conveys by itself. The Art of The Funnies offers a critical vocabulary for the appreciation of the newspaper comic strip as an art form and shows that full awareness of the artistry comes from considering both the verbal and the visual elements of the medium. The techniques of creating a comic strip - breaking down the narrative, composition of the panel, planning the layout - have remained constant since comic strips were originated. Since 1900 with Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland key cartoonists have relied on the union of words and pictures to give the funnies their continuing appeal. This art has persisted in such milestone achievements as Bud Fisher's Mutt and Jeff, George McManus's Bringing Up Father, Sidney Smith's The Gumps, Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie, Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, Zack Mosley's Smilin' Jack, Harold Foster's Tarzan, Alex Raymond's Secret Agent X-9, Jungle Jim, and Flash Gordon, Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, E. C. Segar's Popeye, George Herriman's Krazy Kat, and Walt Kelly's Pogo. In morerecent times with Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey, Charles Schulz's Peanuts. Johnny Hart's B.C., T.K. Ryan's Tumbleweeds, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury, and Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, the artform has evolved with new developments, yet the aesthetics of the funnies remain basic. The Art of The Funnies unearths new information and weighs the influence of syndication upon the medium. Though the funnies go in ever new directions, perceiving the interdependency of words and pictures, as this book shows, remains the key to understanding the art.

The Fine Art of Success

The Fine Art of Success
Author: Jamie Anderson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2011-05-09
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1119992532

You've read about Jack Welch, Lou Gerstner and Steve Jobs - but what can you learn about business from van Gogh and Picasso? The Fine Art of Success shows why you should look to pop-stars like Madonna or artists like Damian Hirst for guidance on innovation, competitive advantage, leadership, and a host of other business issues. Managers, marketing professionals, and students will see how these creative artists can help their organizations. Chapters include Madonna - Strategy at the dance floor; Damian Hirst - The shark is dead/How to build yourself a new market; Beuys – Understanding creativity, is every manager an artist; Picasso – Art lessons for global managers; Koons – Made in Heaven produced on eart; and Paik – Global Groove, innovation through juxtaposition. With controversial ideas, fascinating facts and memorable examples, The Fine Art of Success delivers business lessons that you'll be eager to apply.

The Art of Memoir

The Art of Memoir
Author: Mary Karr
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2015-09-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0062223089

Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well. For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse. (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.) In The Art of Memoir, she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and “black belt sinner,” providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre. Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers’ experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr’s own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told— and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.) As she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, she breaks open our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminates the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate. Joining such classics as Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, The Art of Memoir is an elegant and accessible exploration of one of today’s most popular literary forms—a tour de force from an accomplished master pulling back the curtain on her craft.

Who Says That's Art?

Who Says That's Art?
Author: Michelle Marder Kamhi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2014-11-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780990605706

The book argues that the "cutting-edge" work championed by today's art establishment worldwide differs so fundamentally from the "fine art" of the past that it does not qualify as "art" at all. Extensive evidence from art history, cross-cultural studies, neuroscience, philosophy, and cognitive psychology is presented in support of that argument. In addition, the author offers an in-depth appreciation of traditional art, including that created by contemporary painters and sculptors virtually ignored by today's critics, curators, and the mass media. The role played by art teachers, collectors, museums, and public officials in promoting today's "pseudo art" is also considered.