Artistic license

Salvador Dalí, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol are arguably three of the most important artists of the 20th century.

Now, with art historian Katherine Ingram’s This Is… book series, they get their own Marvel Comics treatment.

Well, not exactly. The artists are presented not as Batman, Iron-Man and Spider-Man, but in scholarly texts that emphasize their major artistic story arcs — matched with cool, hip illustrations by Andrew Rae.

Art and comic books. They may seem like polar opposites, but nowadays comic books are art, and art draws from the energy of comics. Pop artists Warhol (and Roy Lichtenstein) probably did the most to bring the two worlds together. Nowadays, we can’t look at comics without thinking about art.

Ingram’s art books for the comics lover are a godsend in these book-challenged times. Available at National Book Store, the series is a rarity: educational, full of insight, good for kids starting to learn about art and perfect for hipsters who can groove on Rae’s witty drawings. Like those “Classic Comics” that so many young Filipinos used to read — instead of their Beowulf and Ivanhoe — these comic books are art history texts in disguise.

The book on Warhol (This is Warhol) goes beyond the usual take on the artist — his now-commonplace quip about “15 minutes” of fame, which has somehow overshadowed the challenging nature of his work.

Ingram’s text covers Warhol’s relationship with his Russian/Slavic mom, who also was a makeshift artist. For the modest Warholas (Andy dropped the final “a”), art wasn’t fashion; it was something to make a little money on the side. No wonder Warhol preferred commercial art to “serious” art at first; he made an immediate impression in New York painting shoes and cats for fashion magazines. (His technique even then involved blotting wet ink and “printing” duplicates of cats and shoes.)

Richly illustrated with cartoon images that convey Warhol’s life in pictorial tableaux (the two-page spread on his Lexington Avenue townhouse maps out all of Warhol’s obsessions, showing what a pack rat he was), Ingram’s story picks up on key themes — the fascination with death that had as much to do with Andy’s fear of poverty as it did the death of his father and one of his siblings at an early age; not to mention his own bed-ridden battle with St. Vitus’ Dance as a kid. Death haunts his early silkscreen canvases on electric chairs, car crashes, Marilyn Monroe and a mourning Jackie Kennedy. Long before Damien Hirst plugged himself as death’s slickest salesman, Warhol was there with haunting, evocative images, laid out as flat and uninflected as a postage stamp.

The flip side of all that death was his fascination with the shiny, cheap and available products of modern life. From Campbell’s Soup to Coca-Cola, Warhol presented it all without layers of irony. That would come later, from his postmodern critics and disciples. The brilliant thing was that most art critics missed the layers in his work the first time around. And Warhol was not one to play them up himself. He said he dealt in surfaces, and he meant it. He was, by default, the deepest purveyor of shallow surfaces modern art had to offer.

The thing that Warhol and his Pop cohorts were warring against was Abstract Expressionism, and its fanciful, personal-angst symbology. Too much effort, Warhol would say. Trying hard. But the volume on Jackson Pollock probes deep into the artist’s struggle to master his inner expression. As Ingram notes, the postwar artists of New York were largely male, macho, obsessed with violence and Jungian imagery. Pollock’s early work was like a Rorschach of his psyche: all divided selves, third eyes and contorted Picasso faces. But to equate Pollock with all this violent energy would be simplistic, one-dimensional — cartoon-like. Ingram looks instead to a 1941 MoMA show on Native American art that Pollock visited: its bold abstract figures, sand paintings drawn on the floor and huge scale had a major influence on his later “action” and drip paintings, she argues.

Still, Ingram and Rae can’t resist going a little Marvel Comics with their Pollock. Like the Hulk, he emerges as a difficult force of nature — drinking heavily, smashing windows in a New York neighborhood in the wee hours, throwing surly looks at partner Lee Krasner, pissing into Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace. You wouldn’t like Pollock when he was angry. (Though you might buy his paintings.)

The book on Salvador Dalí includes this typical self-deifying quote on the back cover: “Every morning, upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí?”

Who needs a PR agent when you’re Dalí?

This is Dalí shows us the Spanish artist as Child King, enfant terrible — forgetting his native language as a kid, learning French instead, swept up in visions and egomaniacal urges. The rocks of Cadaqués off the Spanish coast were a key visual inspiration for his surrealism (he’s said to have reproduced their eroded surfaces, full of imagined figures, in his later paintings by memory).

Whether it was the Freud he pored over as an art student, or a restlessness with Cubism and other then-current styles, Dalí went his own way: he developed an “obsessive realism” that focused on details in his landscapes, until they took on the lucidity of dreamscapes. Trucking with Surrealists like Tanguy and Chirico, Dalí also found a perfect metaphor in the camera’s eye, which couldn’t help but reflect reality, but imbued with endless layers of meaning and texture. Like some superhero, perhaps gifted with bionic, insect-like vision, he focused on the world and made it unusually vivid and haunting in his paintings.
Sometimes the Freudian symbolism could be too literal — the “drawers” containing hidden fears and meanings imbedded in countless Dalí paintings and sculptures — but you can’t argue with his almost ruthless technique.

You also can’t argue with a feverish mind that could come up with surreal “inventions” nonstop — like mirrored fingernail polish so you could check your reflection before going out, or a see-through mannequin filled with water and goldfish. He was always more Mad Man than madman.

And like the other artists in Ingram’s series, Dalí was obsessed with fame and his own image as an artist. The later Dalí would do anything for a buck, it seems — hanging out with Alice Cooper, endorsing lollipops, chocolates, beverages, signing blank slips of paper for money that would later, he said, be filled out with art. The books are as much a primer on art history as they are a meditation on the 20th century as a cauldron of the ego.

Ingram shouldn’t stop with these three figures, though. Picasso surely deserves his own comic book treatment, and perhaps that crop of post-Warhol artists whose images have ended up adorning Uniqlo shirts and prints — Haring, Basquiat and the like — need to be given the comic book treatment as well.