art spiegelman 1445

Never, until Art Spiegelman came along, had anyone won a Guggenheim Fellowship award in order to complete a work of cartoon art.. In 1986, Art Spiegelman, hailed by some as the "new Kafk

Until Art Spiegelman arrived on the scene, comics had not truly been acknowledged as art Never, until Art Spiegelman came along, had anyone won a Guggenheim Fellowship award in order to complete a work of cartoon art In 1986, Art Spiegelman, hailed by some as the "new Kafka," published Maus: A Survivors Tale, a graphic-novel depiction of his troubled relationship with his father, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Death Camps Then, in 1991, he published Maus II: And Here

My Troubles Began, which earned him a Pulitzer prize for both volumes

Biography

Art Spiegelman was born on February 15, 1948, in Stockholm, Sweden, to Vladek and Anja (Zylberberg) Spiegelman Three years after his birth, his family immigrated to the United States,

to the Rego Park area, in Queens, New York His father, Vladek, was a wealthy textile salesperson and manufacturer in Poland Before World War II, he worked in the garment trade and later in the diamond business

Both of his parents survived confinement to the Jewish ghettos and imprisonment in the famous Nazi Concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland His mother, Anja, suffered from periodic

depression, and his father, perhaps acting on instincts that had once been necessary for survival, was obsessively frugal His mother committed suicide in 1968 after barely surviving Auschwitz, and then coming to America Spiegelman was the youngest child to Vladek and Anja; he had a brother named Richieu Richieu had been poisoned by an aunt who also killed two of Art's cousins and herself just before the Nazi's came to take them away

Spiegelman began drawing as a child, spending time with a doodling game his mother had developed She scribbled a little on a paper, and he would turn it into something The game led to his drawing cartoons, and he began spending much of his time drawing "At that point, I stopped wanting to be a fireman, policeman, or a cowboy and opted for cartoonist." One day when he was about ten, he asked his mother to buy him a book on how to draw cartoons Because of her husband's frugality, she made a deal with him: she would buy the book for him, if he could prove that he had benefited from it If not, it would be deducted from his future allowance After that, Spiegelman began filling notebooks with his drawings and cartoons, copying styles from his favorite artists, like those who drew for MAD MAGAZINE, which he called a "terrific influence."

Cartooning History

Despite his parent's objection, Spiegelman intended to become a professional cartoonist He wanted to go to High School of Art and Design, whereas his parents "wanted me to become a dentist." "For them, dentist was halfway to doctor, I guess They'd point out how if I become a dentist, I could always do drawing on the side, whereas if I became a cartoonist, I couldn't very well pull people's teeth during my off hours Their logic was impeccable, just irrelevant I was hooked." In the early 1960's, he produced his own magazine, Blasé, an imitation of MAD By the age of fourteen, he was selling cartoons and illustrations to the Long Island Post

Today, Spiegelman and his wife Francoise Mouly make Raw ("The 'graphix' magazine that overestimates the taste of the American public") in which Spiegelman first introduced Maus, and

to which he and other artists contribute work It is basically a magazine devoted to new and unusual work in the graphic story medium For example, one of the most famous "practitioner of the underground," Robert Crumb, has provided cover art, and more Raw was preceded by a magazine, also published by Spiegelman, called Arcade, a magazine started in the mid 1970's for people involved in underground comics Then when Spiegelman met Mouly, they started Raw together

Comics as Art

For the past thirty years, the development of the typical American comic, a Superman and Batman type of comic, has been very different from that of its Japanese and European equivalent Whereas American educators for many years considered comics as children's entertainment of dubious literary value, European and Japanese comics soon developed a more adult and more serious content For that reason, people become offended when others refer to these more serious works

as "comics."

Spiegelman became one of the first major artists of "adult" comics since the first graphic

novel-comic called "Barefoot Gen" was written about Hiroshima and the atomic bomb

Spiegelman, who felt that Barefoot Gen was one of the most memorable works he had ever read, won America's premier award for literature for Maus I & II, the Pulitzer Prize, in 1992

Having learned in film class in college that in early animated cartoons, rodent characters often represented black people, he thought of using mice to tell a story of blacks in America As he explained in an interview, "That idea lasted for about forty-five minutes Because what did I know about blacks in America? And then suddenly the idea of Jews as mice just hit me full force, full-blown Almost as soon as it hit me, I began to recognize the obvious historical

antecedents how Nazi's had spoken of Jews as 'vermin,' for example, and plotted their

'extermination.'" Inspired by that, he began his work with a three-page cartoon which he gave to his father about the Holocaust that ends with mice being taken to a concentration camp called

"Mauschwitz."

Then, in about 1978, Spiegelman felt that he had come to a turning point in his cartooning work, and he decided to further develop his three-page comic strip, Maus He turned the three-page comic strip into a 295 page book which ultimately consumed 13 years work For his research, Spiegelman had moved back to New York City, where he talked at length with his father about his Holocaust experiences

Styles in Maus

Although the style of the finished book is deceptively simple, a delayed process was required to complete each page Starting with his father's taped memories, Spiegelman condensed remarkable scenes and scraps of dialogue, which in turn were refined to fit a comic-strip's relatively restricted framework The artist deliberately adopted an austere, pared-down style in order to make his mouse and cat metaphor as clear as possible and to create a seamless flow between word and image

Spiegelman uses a "comic-book" medium to convey a story of the Holocaust, and he succeeded in completely changing the way stories of the Holocaust were told It also changed the way comic books have traditionally been used It changed the way the comics had always been presented, and this change represents a historical milestone from the way that they had always been used as super-hero construction and morality plays

He reduces the people to cats, mice, and pigs (Nazis, Jews, and the Poles), in order to offer a conscious, intentional miniaturization and reduction, pointing up not merely the way the Jews were treated during the Holocaust, but it also represents the present day response to the Holocaust Throughout the book there are also dialogue boxes, images, commentary, as well as maps of Poland and the camps, diagrams of hideouts, real photographs from his family archive, detailed plans of the crematoria, and exchange table for goods at Auschwitz, and even a manual for shoe-repair

My Conclusions

Maus encompasses many small narratives, not merely the story of Vladek and Anja, but of Spiegelman himself, in his struggle to understand his family origins and himself He continuously discusses the traumatic and "unmastered" past on a number of levels: the death of his brother, the suicide of his mother, and the murder of the European Jews In Maus, the image is never left to stand alone, but is always caught up in the differential between narrative, image, dialogue, and reflection In this manner, an opening for critical thinking on the transmission of past trauma is created

Maus enacts the difficulty of working through a traumatic historical past that defies attempts at mastery, and is a presentation of the postmodern fragmented self, struggling to come to terms with this damaged and wounded history in a conscious manner

BIBLIOGRAPHY

· Current Biography Yearbook, 1994

· Art Spiegelman's Maus, "Art Spiegelman's Maus: Working-Through The Trauma of the

Holocaust" http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/holocaust/spiegleman.html

· Art Spiegelman Talks to the Fish Rap: 1992 "The Man Behind Maus"

http://arts.ucsc.edu/derek/Art.html

· Alt.Culture: Spiegelman, Art, "Spiegelman, Art"

http://www.altculture.com/site/entries/spiegelmanxa.html

· Art Spiegelman Interview, "Comix as Art: The Man Behind The 'Maus'

http://www.inlink.com/~sbolhaf/ispiegel.html

· Alt.Culture: Comics, "Comics" http://www.altculture.com/site/entries/comix.html

· Maus (Review), "Maus: Graphic Chronicle of a Holocaust Survivor"

http://www.inlink.com/~sbolhaf/maus.html

· Maus, "Art Spiegelman" http://libertynet.org/~iha/maus/maus3.html

· Maus: A Survivors Tale, Art Spiegelman, 1986

· Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began, Art Spiegelman, 1991