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Drawing (Cartoons) from Artistic Traditions

An eye-catching gem of cartoon art, the New Yorker cover design entitled Modern Art Museum by Anatol Kovarsky (fig. 1) demonstrates one of the many ways cartoonists reference artistic conventions or traditions in their work.1 Kovarsky’s witty perspective on visitors looking at colorful nonrepresentational paintings on four levels of an art museum brings to mind the visual delight of reading a large-format Sunday comic strip. While this image is devoid of word balloons or text, Kovarsky’s format and linear orchestration of large shapes and small details—paintings of varied size, style, and optical effect, along with figures differing in number, grouping, and attitude—deliberately invite viewers to see his museum visitors engaged in looking at works of art in a sequence. The viewer reads the composition from left to right, beginning with the first tier on the top and ending with the fourth tier on the bottom. Kovarsky’s arrangement of elements within each tier also produces a sensation of visual pacing and effect akin to those produced by comic strips. This clever image is one of thousands preserved in the collections of original cartoons and caricatures in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. The division’s holdings of comic art abound with drawings that play on formal elements, established prototypes, and tropes that characterize both comic art and fine art traditions.2 Whether comic strip or comic book, single or multipanel, editorial or gag/humor cartoon, comic art typically tells a story or expresses a point of view, often combining image and word. Such art, usually produced under deadline, requires the creator to be extraordinarily flexible and inventive. To achieve the arresting union of form and meaning that distinguishes this artistic mode from others, creators of comic art frequently borrow, adapt, or transform elements of artistic traditions or prototypes they deem useful for their projects. For years art historians and curators have recognized and investigated ways in which fine art incorporates, alters, or appropriates aspects of comic art and other forms of popular culture. It has taken longer for the same community, however, to give equally close attention to ways in which cartoonists draw on established artistic traditions or prototypes. Among Martha H. Kennedy