Did Peter Schjeldahl Really Talk Shit About Will Eisner?

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKK YOOOOOOUUUUUU!!!!

(I'm embarrassed that I ever stood up for the guy.)

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/051017crbo_books1

...“Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” (2000, Pantheon) is, besides being viciously depressing, the first formal masterpiece of a medium that he has proved to be unexpectedly complex and fertile.

...Robert Crumb, for whom there is the added problem of a historical significance: he is the father of art comics.

I'm glad all the comic fans had the endurance to wait until 2000 before they got their "first formal masterpiece". And Robert Crumb probably is the father of something (father of undergroung, maybe?), but not "art comics".

the hilarious cranky-old-man dismissal of manga (you can almost feel him cringe typing the words "kinky romance manga for girls")

charlie brown is "clark kent without the colorful underwear" - i bet that's exactly how schulz pitched it!

american splendour is "based on comics that pekar wrote and others drew." the idea!

Dave Sim and Osamu Tezuka do not exist!!!

RIP (Schjeldahl, that is). I enjoyed his art writing for the Voice back in the day.

Me too. RIP.

Opinions seem to be mixed around here.

recently found nice copies of eisner's "signal from space" and "the outer space spirit" in a comic shop clearance bin for $5 each. enjoyed them immensely

I loved Schjeldahl's summation of Philip Guston's paintings as “scenarios of childish fear shading into middle-aged abjection”

"To judge a work of art involves self-surrender. You are something other than your own person when in art’s spell”

“the relation of Agnes Martin’s mental illness to her art seems twofold, combining a need for concealment and for control — the grid as screen and as shield — with an urge to distill positive content from the oceanic states of mind that she couldn’t help experiencing”

"The Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum — the last show in the Madison Avenue building, before the museum relocates downtown — calls to account the most original, controversial, and expensive American artist of the past three and a half decades. At the age of fifty-nine, Koons has behind him a parade of scandalously sensational works that include a stainless-steel cast of an inflatable bunny; a porcelain statue of Michael Jackson and his pet chimpanzee; pictures and sculptures of the artist in flagrante with his short-term first wife, the Hungarian-Italian porn star Ilona Staller (Cicciolina); a four-story-high West Highland terrier covered with growing flowers; and an orange-tinted stainless-steel balloon dog that sold at auction, last year, for more than fifty-eight million dollars, the record for a living artist. We might justly term the present Mammon-driven era in contemporary art the Koons Age. No other artist so lends himself to a caricature of the indecently rich ravening after the vulgarly bright and shiny. But mockery comes harder when, approaching the work with eyes and mind open, you encounter Koons’s formidable aesthetic intelligence"

It took me a while to realize why this thread had been bumped.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/23/the-art-of-dying

Lung cancer, rampant. No surprise. I’ve smoked since I was sixteen, behind the high-school football bleachers in Northfield, Minnesota. I used to fear the embarrassment of dying youngish, letting people natter sagely, “He smoked, you know.” But at seventy-seven I’m into the actuarial zone.

I know about ending a dependency. I’m an alcoholic twenty-seven years sober. Drink was destroying my life. Tobacco only shortens it, with the best parts over anyway.

I got the preliminary word from my doctor by phone while driving alone upstate from the city to join my wife, Brooke, at our country place. After the call, I found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of the passing late-August land. At mile eighty-one of the New York State Thruway, the gray silhouettes of the Catskills come into view, perfectly framed and proportioned. How many times had I seen and loved the sight? How many more times would I? I thought of Thomas Cole’s paintings, from another angle, of those very old, worn mountains, brooding on something until the extinction of matter.

recently found nice copies of eisner's "signal from space" and "the outer space spirit" in a comic shop clearance bin for $5 each. enjoyed them immensely

Eisner had very little to do with The Outer Space Spirit, incidentally

in the front of the book there is a foreword by peter hamill, a ten page history by cat yronwode, and a reminiscence by eisner himself, each of which detail the working relationship between eisner, wally wood, jules feiffer and others. there are also editorial notes for each strip that do the same. it was fascinating reading.

oh wow that sounds ace

yeah it was very cool! i learned a lot, especially about wally wood

RIP. loved his writing

He wrote a review in early '21 of a collection of essays on the Frick. Here's a bit on Chardin's “Still Life with Plums”:

I have urged friends to contemplate it for several minutes. It’s less about how a jug, a glass of water, and some fruit appear—the description is perfunctory and the palette drab—than how they are what they are: instances of matter as densely actual as matter can be. The longer you gaze, the more sensitized you’ll be to quiddities of painting in relation to the real—and in relation to yourself as a viewer. Jones calls the painting “a peculiar mirror through which to ‘watch oneself watching.’ ” Ordinary things in the world interested Chardin.

RIP. I was another avid reader of his Voice reviews as they happened. Loved his clarity.

What?!?