On Mother's Day, it's time to celebrate the amazing women in our lives: the superheroines. From the pencil of Ramona Fradon, these five talented women remind us how important it is to look and dress like fashion models in order to fight evildoers.
Ramona Fradon, Power Girl, Batgirl, Wonder Woman, Zatanna, and Supergirl
Superman goes to a fortuneteller in this original cartoon art by Ed Arno. It was first offered on eBay in 2013 for $50. When it received no bids, the seller lowered the price to $25 and it sold.
Ed Arno,"I'm in a hurry, so try speed reading." Original art
Ed Arno,"I'm in a hurry, so try speed reading." Original art
Ed Arno,"I'm in a hurry, so try speed reading." Original art
Here is my latest entry in the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest #408 for December 16, 2013. The super cartoon is supplied by J. C. Duffy while the mild-mannered caption is supplied by me.
"Not to worry, Clark. Your secret is safe with Dr. Lex Luthor."
I had yet another caption idea, one that I did not submit:
"You can't fool me, Jimmy Olsen!"
December 30, 2013 Update: The Finalists
January 13, 2014 Update: Winning Caption
Note: My previous entry in the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest was, I thought, one of my better efforts, not that that's saying much, and if the magazine should ever decide to compile a collection of my failed contest entries, I'd like them to give it the title The Creative Types and Brandon. Check out my latest thwarted attempt to distinguish myself from the other grains of sand in the caption contest sandbox here.
A few earlier blog posts about the New Yorker art of J. C. Duffy may be seen here.
J. C. Duffy's official website can be found here and Night Deposits, his daily blog, is located here. That's right, someone else writes a daily blog!
View Mr. Duffy's New Yorker work in the Condé Nast Storehere.
Cartoonist news about J. C. Duffy may be found on Ink Spillhere.
By the way, the Man of Steel has appeared on this blog herein an early post of mine about Action Comics No. 1 and here in a post about New York is Book Country poster art. He gets around.
Plenty of seasonal Christmas posts from the archives of Attempted Bloggery await you here. Fa la la la la, la la la la.
One of the reasons for all the excitement surrounding Christie's forthcoming sale of Roy Lichtenstein'sI Can See the Whole Room!...and There's Nobody in It! is that last year Christie's held a hugely successful sale of the artist's iconic Ohhh...Alright.... This Pop Art masterpiece achieved an astonishing sale price of over $42,000,000, seemingly justifying its atrocious spelling. It also justifies Christie's putting a whopping $35,000,000 to $45,000,000 estimate on the current painting coming on the auction block November 8, which has exemplary spelling but way too much punctuation, and which I discuss with several insightful updates here.
Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) Ohhh...Alright... signed and dated 'rf Lichtenstein '64' (on the reverse) oil and magna on canvas 36½ x 38 in. (90.2 x 96.5 cm.) Painted in 1964.
Special Notice
On occasion, Christie’s has a direct financial interest in lots consigned for sale, which may include guaranteeing a minimum price or making an advance to the consignor that is secured solely by consigned property. Christie’s may choose to assume this financial risk on its own or may contract with a third party for such third party to assume all or part of this financial risk. When a third party agrees to finance all or part of Christie’s interest in a lot, it takes on all or part of the risk of the lot not being sold, and will be remunerated in exchange for accepting this risk. The third party may also bid for the lot. Where it does so, and is the successful bidder, the remuneration may be netted against the final purchase price. If the lot is not sold, the third party may incur a loss. Christie’s guarantee of a minimum price for this lot has been fully financed through third parties.
Provenance
Leo Castelli Gallery, New York E.J. Power, London Ileana Sonnabend, Paris Private Collection, London Steve Martin, Los Angeles Acquavella Galleries, Inc., New York Acquired from the above by the present owner
Saleroom Notice
Please note that Christie's guarantee of lots 5, 27, 37, 39 and 76 have been financed by third parties who are bidding on those lots. The third parties will receive a financing fee from Christie's, whether or not they are the successful bidder.
Literature
A. Boatto and G. Falzoni, Lichtenstein, Rome, 1966, p. 57 (illustrated) A. Frankenstein, "American Art and American Moods," Art in America, vol. 54, no. 2, March-April 1966, p. 87 (illustrated). D. Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1971, pl. 80 (illustrated). L. Alloway, Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1983, p. 124, no. 116 (illustrated). R. Hughes, "The Image Duplicator," Time, 8 November 1993, pp. 143 and 214 (illustrated in color). T. Hendra, Brad '61: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, 1994, p. 31 (illustrated in color). M. Gibb, "Pop Art: Then & Now," Collections International Art and Culture, vol. 9, no. 1, London, 2004, pp. 5, 34-36 and 38 (illustrated in color). M. Kennedy, "Repeat Performance: Lichtenstein Returns to Britain after 35 Years," The Guardian, London, 26 February 2004, p. 9 (illustrated in color).
Exhibited
Las Vegas, Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, The Private Collection of Steve Martin, April-September 2001, pp. 48-49 (illustrated in color). London, Hayward Gallery; Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Roy Lichtenstein: All About Art, August 2003-February 2005, no. 20a (illustrated in color). New York, Gagosian Gallery, Lichtenstein: Girls, May-June 2008, p. 38, 39 and 41 (illustrated in color).
Lot Notes
Executed in 1964, this work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.
Painted in 1964, Roy Lichtenstein's Ohhh...Alright illustrates the brash comic styling of his most celebrated period of artistic production. As with all his greatest images, Ohhh...Alright...is at once striking and subtle, humorous and highly serious. Lichtenstein lifted the stunning blue-eyed, flame-haired beauty that fills the frame from the pages of a romance comic and rendered it larger-than-life. She forms part of the much admired cast of dreamgirls painted between 1961 and 1965 that saw Lichtenstein attain international prominence as one of America's most exciting and controversial artists. Created in conjunction with his explosive war paintings, these images of love-struck women reflect the artist's formal interest in a generic style of representation, while simultaneously addressing the cultural dichotomy between male and female stereotypes.
The visage of this 1960s sweetheart represents a single panel from a graphic love story that Lichtenstein dilated to the scale of a 36" x 38" easel painting. He presents this image without context, the narrative flow frustratingly incomplete. The solitary, emblematic figure leaves us guessing as to why she looks so crestfallen, as she mutters into the phone clutched at her ear. It captures the Pop master's innate gift for editing, capturing the telling gesture of an emotive moment. In his hands, the subject's corny theatricality has become an image of mystery, where the past and future events of the storyboard can only be surmised. It disrupts our desire to engage with the scenario and forces the viewer to analyse the image on its own terms. The work owes its vivid monumentality to the careful scrutiny and distillation of a pre-existing image selected from thousands of random possibilities. Lichtenstein then adapts his source, removing distracting details, lines, figures, or words to present his compositions with the ultimate clarity.
The seamless surface of Ohhh...Alright... may look as if it was rolled off a printing press in a matter of seconds, but it is actually the product of a long, painstaking procedure. Lichtenstein chose the original illustration from the DC comic book Secret Hearts, which Lichtenstein has made his own by subtly manipulating its content. He created the prototype for the painting in the form of a small pencil drawing, where he turned the blonde girl into a redhead, and eliminated extraneous background detail. A key part of his re-composition was the removal of the speech bubble emerging from the telephone receiver that announces, "I'm sorry, Nancy, but I'll have to break our date! I have an important business appointment." This significant adjustment not only allows the heroine to occupy more of the picture plane, but also opens up greater possibilities of interpretation, while cleverly zeroing in on the essence of the scene. Lichtenstein then enlarged the image with an opaque projector to trace the outlines onto canvas, before applying color in a way that mimics the feeling and texture of newsprint.
Lichtenstein's series of romance paintings drew on the slightly dated comic books published for the burgeoning Post-War teenage market. The plotline of these stories typically follows a young girl who falls in love with a young man; a serious problem arises to threaten the relationship, and the heroine is briefly devastated before an inevitable happy conclusion. The appeal of both the romance and the war comic genres for their readers probably lay largely in their predictability, which emphasized the normative view of masculinity and femininity in 1950s America. Men fought and won battles, while women fell in love and married. These subjects fulfilled Lichtenstein's fascination with strong visual and cultural clichés as well as his preoccupation with form and style. By selecting and amplifying the romance genre beyond all normal bounds of scale in works like Ohhh...Alright..., Lichtenstein sharpens its essential content - pointing out how adolescent notions of love are insistently reinforced through representation in popular culture. The romance comics are essentially illustrated soap operas aimed at readers presumably navigating the treacherous waters of love for the very first time. Yet Lichtenstein's paintings address an audience of sophisticated adults that will mostly have found love to be at odds with its idyllic promise. Nevertheless, few among us ever completely give up on the dream of perfect love, as the endless stream of Hollywood romantic comedies attest to every year.
For this series, Lichtenstein scrutinized his female subjects, editing and re-presenting the crux of their trials and tribulations. He usually chose to depict these heroines in a moment of vulnerability, suspense, or worry to evoke an irrepressible sense of empathy in the viewer. The young woman in this painting is no different. Her furrowed brow, pursed lips and faltering, deflated speech clearly show she is somehow unlucky in love. Whereas his war paintings remove the internal musing their protagonists in favor of decisive, action-oriented demands, the romance pictures often expose the heroine's romantic anxieties through words of empathy, hurt pride, frustration, and despair. The snippets of conversation tend to emphasize their lack of resolution, as can be seen in the ellipses in the present work, and the closely related portrait of a blonde on the phone intoning "Oh, Jeff...I love you, too...but..." (1964), or the stammering "M-Maybe he became ill and couldn't leave the studio!" (1965). Their unresolved emotional thoughts leave them in a state of suspension, a condition that is further highlighted in paintings with titles such asDrowning Girl (1964, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Hopeless (1963, Offentliche Kunstmuseum, Basel) and Blonde Waiting (1964, Private Collection). In this way, Lichtenstein deliberately exaggerates the difference between masculine action and female emotion, while foregrounding the role of representation in reinforcing these archetypes.
Tellingly, the dates of Lichtenstein's comic book paintings correspond with his own marital break-up and his choice of themes appear more than coincidental. The war and romance series both select tense, climactic moments when the conventional images of masculinity and femininity are at their most extreme. While the men in the war scenes are all action and anger, the women for the most part appear passive, anguished, and unable to control their destiny. The duality of these subjects may well have helped Lichtenstein to cope with the hopes and disappointments of this tumultuous time, while also indicating his pessimism in the stereotypical love story. These scenes enabled him to both mock and indulge that attraction. When asked by an interviewer later in life why so many of his female portraits are weeping, Lichtenstein replied, "Well, I was in the middle of a divorce. I don't know if that had an effect, but it might have" (quoted in E. Richardson, "Those Lichtenstein Women", Harper's Bazaar, October 1993, p. 236). Yet the reserved artist generally felt uncomfortable with this personal reading, as his friend and fellow artist Allan Kaprow confirmed, "everyone at the time thought the paintings were about his personal life, but you couldn't ask about sensitive issues like that. He'd roll his eyes and make a joke" (quoted in B. R. Collins "Modern Romance: Lichtenstein's Comic book Paintings", American Art, vol. 17 no. 2, Summer 2003, p. 75). By 1965, Lichtenstein had finalized his divorce and he gradually phased out the comic imagery, perhaps having fulfilled his psychological need.
The other view of the comic based works contends that he simply chose them to create a contradictory aesthetic encounter between cool formalism and culturally low, emotionally hot subject matter. "At that time," Lichtenstein recalled, "I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was emotionally strong - usually love, war, or something that was highly charged and emotional subject matter to be opposite to the removed and deliberate painting techniques. Cartooning itself usually consists of very highly charged subject matter carried out in standard, obvious, and removed techniques" (quoted in J. Coplands, ed., Roy Lichtenstein, New York, 1972, p.89). Lichtenstein certainly found in this material a rich potential for the dispassionate portrayal of exaggerated emotion. The paradox of his work has always remained that its outward embrace of quotidian imagery belies an inward concern for art as arrangements of colors and shapes. Having developed a concern for form through years of working within an Abstract Expressionist mode of painting, the relation of a mark, or an object to the picture plane and the assertion of this surface as a finite, static zone was of the utmost importance to him.
In Ohhh...Alright..., Lichtenstein demonstrates his sense of pictorial completeness. Using the Ben Day process to systematize his mark making into standardized units, he destroys any sense of depth while highlighting the artifice of the figurative image. Lichtenstein diffused the contour of the woman's face with small dots and surrounded it with solid black contours, thereby reconciling her image with the flat plane on which the artist placed her. He designed the pretty redhead to occupy the picture plane emblematically rather than spatially and he carefully cropped her to create an equalized composition, neither horizontal nor vertical. Lichtenstein would start with a strong image, but once he had decided what to paint, he would try to see beyond its content and look at it as just marks on a canvas. In order to distance himself further from the subject matter he designed an easel capable of rotating the canvas so he could work on it from all angles. He would turn his paintings on their side, or upside down, and studied them in reverse with a mirror to ensure he had achieved a tightly interlocking, all-over composition. In this way, Lichtenstein was able to treat the high drama of his images as an abstract problem in delineating space and form.
His new aesthetic, one that amplified printed images in a manner that denied any record of the artist, or his artistry, was highly provocative to contemporary audiences. From the moment of its first public appearance, Lichtenstein's audacious appropriation of commercial art was recognized as an affront to the work of painters from the previous generation. Not only was his work blatantly representational after decades of denying representation, but it also aligned itself with the kitschy lowbrow tastes of the public. His subject matter and his methodology seemed hostile to passionately held views on originality, invention, and expressivity, as Lichtenstein played down the idiosyncrasy of the artist's hand in favor of uninflected surfaces that replicate the look of the machine-made. The precise, "mechanical" style Ohhh...Alright... may appear to equate his imagery with Warhol's famously stated desire to become like a machine, but Lichtenstein preferred to create single rather than the multiple images. Here, the pre-processed origin of the image is made brutally self-evident in order to dismantle the suspension of disbelief with which we, as viewers, look at reproduced images.
The enlistment of parody complicates the reading of Lichtenstein's work, but by reproducing the reproduced, he aims to draw attention to the way people are compelled to apply meaning and value to the most basic signs. He has explained how graphic symbols triggered his emotions as a child, and how his perception shifted as an artist: "When I was a child and I looked at the comic books, these women were really convincing. I really thought these were very beautiful women. Now I see the drawing in it and they don't look that way to me. I mean, you could really have a love affair with these women as a child, and now these don't mean that to me in the originals, in the comic books" (quoted in D. Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2002, p. 228). There is a certain subterfuge at work here then, as Lichtenstein uses the pitfalls of romantic love to distract us from the essentially abstract colors, shapes and forms that goes into this picture's making. He has redeployed the shorthand techniques with which advertisers and illustrators conjure a sense of beauty, to signify the fiction of representation. Lichtenstein's calculated adaptation of cartoon imagery therefore reminds us that the simple surface of things does not necessarily correspond to complex reality.
David Barsalou's research into Roy Lichtenstein's sources is useful for visual comparisons such as these. The problem, of course, is that his sources aren't readily verifiable without a proper citation.
January 14, 2012 Update:
Here's Lichtenstein's Ohhh...Alright... along with its source from DC's "Secret Hearts"--without any watermarks.
It's telling that only the name of the inker Bernard Sachs is known to David Barsalou, and not that of the comic book artist. Artists who didn't take any credit for their work in the 1960's generally didn't challenge Roy Lichtenstein's appropriation of their imagery if they were even aware of it.
On May 5, this splash drawing of Batman and Robin from Batman: The Dark Knight #3 drawn by Frank Millersold for the phenomenal price of $448,125 at Heritage Auctions. The auction lot description uses words like iconic, definitive, and masterpiece to describe this image, where I basically see a Batman with awkwardly-rendered arms.
I confess to being out of my element here. I'm not in the least familiar with The Dark Knight Returns although I certainly would like one day to read what Time magazine calls one of the top ten graphic novels of all time. To make matters worse, I haven't even seen the movie, which means I'm more clueless than most about this whole Dark Knight franchise. I suspect the runaway popularity of the movie may have done something to enliven the bidding on this drawing, and perhaps even some Hollywood money was involved in its purchase. And perhaps not.
In general, I support the power of the market to set prices whether high or low, even in cases like this where I'm clearly not getting it. It's possible that if I read the graphic novel--is it really so much more than a comic book?--I might gain more of an appreciation of the artwork here, or at least of its context. It certainly has energy; I'll grant that.
Frank Miller and Klaus Janson Batman: The Dark Knight #3 Batman and Robin IconicSplash Page 10 Original Art (DC, 1986). Frank Miller'sThe Dark Knight Returns defined the best of 1980s comics, and has since been universally acknowledged as one of the most important and influential stories ever published. Miller is arguably the greatest superhero writer/artist to work during this period, and Dark Knight is his undisputed masterpiece: the four-issue series rejuvenated Batman as DC's most popular character and in the process helped revitalize the comics industry. This splash page is to our minds the single most memorable image from the entire book and the greatest image from the decade ever to come to market -- as well as one of the handful of most desirable pieces of original comic art from any era to come to market. A perfect stand-alone image of Batman and Robin (Carrie Kelley, the first female, full-time Robin) soaring high above Gotham City, an icon symbolizing the entire storyline -- this one has everything going for it. As demonstrated by the fact that we've only offered two Dark Knightpanel pages previously -- and the fact that no splash page, much less a such an undeniably classic image, has never been offered at auction -- artwork from the famed series is much scarcer than anything else from the period. This gem has been locked away in a single collection since being purchased upon the series' original publication and is the definition of "fresh to market." And unlike many pages from the series, where differences between the original art and the published version are evident (as a result of Miller making changes on pasteovers), no changes were made to this artwork for publication, and the original contains no paste-ups or stats -- it's pure art, just the way it appeared in print. Definitive is the only adequate description of thismasterpiece, and as such, it was chosen to represent the entire time period in DC's recent 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking book, serving as the chapter heading for "The Dark Age: 1984-1998," and reproduced as a glorious color full-page image, leading off the chapter on page 556. In 2005, Time magazine ranked The Dark Knight Returns as one of the top ten graphic novels ever created.As Alan Moore wrote about the series: "Beyond the imagery, themes, and essential romance of Dark Knight, Miller has also managed to shape the Batman into a true legend by introducing that element without which all true legends are incomplete and yet which for some reason hardly seems to exist in the world depicted in the average comic book, and that element is time... time has come to the Batman and the capstone that makes legends what they are has finally been fitted. In his engrossing story of a great man's final and greatest battle, Miller has managed to create something radiant which should hopefully illuminate things for the rest of the comic book field, casting a new light upon the problems which face all of us working within the industry and perhaps even guiding us towards some fresh solutions." In short, this is one of the most important pieces of original comic book art Heritage has ever had the pleasure to offer. This iconic masterpiece from "Hunt the Dark Knight" has an image area of 11.5" x 17.75", and aside from some very light paper aging in the image area and some passages of white-out, the art is in Excellent condition.
"I've always loved that drawing. Danced around my studio like a fool when I drew it. I hope it finds a good home."
--Frank Miller
Miller, Frank: Frank Miller (American, b. 1957): is a multi-talented cartoonist, writer, and film director, most celebrated for his work on the Marvel characters Daredevil, Elektra, and Wolverine, as well as on his own characters for the Dark Horse titles Hard Boiled, 300, and Sin City. In the late eighties, Miler became the first and foremost of a new breed of "noir" comic book storytellers, thanks to the tremendous popularity of his work on the industry-changing Batman: The Dark Knight Returns series. He also directed the film version of Will Eisner's The Spirit, and shared directing duties with Robert Rodriguez on Sin City, and produced the film 300.
