Even as an adult, Guston still loved the way Bud Fisher, the creator of Mutt and Jeff, drew those big goofy shoes on his characters. He thought Cliff Sterrett, who drew the Gumps and Polly and Her Pals, "did the best furniture," and he also loved Gasoline Alley for "the backyards, porches, screen doors, litter on the steps, dogs, old cars being fixed, dismantled..."
But his all-time favorite comic strip was George Herriman's Krazy Kat. He was not alone in this: de Kooning was a big Krazy Kat fan, and others among his New York School cronies loved the atmospheric drawing style and poetic invented vernacular. Franz Kline, who shunned the New York Times because it didn't have comics, was also among those who faithfully followed Herriman's existential ink opera about a feline fool hopelessly smitten with a feisty little mouse who routinely repels his romantic overtures by braining him with flying bricks that he takes for tokens of love. The most perceptive painters knew that if comic strips were not dismissed, in Robert Crumb's words, as "cheap amusement for the masses, like vaudeville, early movies, pulp magazines, and so on," Herriman's genius would be seen as at least equal to their own.
But what they probably didn't know and what I didn't know until Michael Auping dropped this bomb in passing in the introduction to the new Guston book was that George Herriman was a light-skinned black man. It isn't mentioned in any of the histories of the comic strip that I've read over the years, not even The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, a hefty illustrated tome that is supposed to be definitive. I had to go on the Internet to get more information, and what I learned was that Herriman "was a black man passing himself as white for his entire life" and "years after his death, a marriage certificate of his parents was found, listening their race as 'mulatto.' " Finding out that Herriman was born in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, also sent flares up and started bells ringing in my brain, since jazz and the comic strip are often cited in the same breath by cultural historians as the only two art forms native to America. Suddenly the phrase "Krazy Kat" takes on new meaning, making Herriman seem a hipster ikon as heavy as Louis Armstrong. However, even without knowing his background, which it is doubtful any of them did, it still makes sense that Herriman's strip, with its Joycean dialogue and Nighttown setting, would have such vast appeal to members of America's first important fine art movement, most of whom also dug jazz.
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- bill 3-11-2015 1:14 pm