Edmond Baudoin's Le portrait - Coda

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1. Edmond Baudoin's first page as published in Civilization, Glénat, 1981 [Le canard sauvage - the wild duck -, 1973];

2., 3. some recurring images haunt Edmond Baudoin... I'll show two in this coda: the man who runs and the "open head" motif: "This man who runs in "La vie" [life; Civilization, Glénat, 1981 (Circus, 1978)] is an image that I could never erase from my mind" (Edmond Baudoin in Baudoin by Philippe Sohet, Mosquito, 2001: 31; my translation):

2. Passe le temps, Futuropolis, 1991 [1982];

3. Le chemin de Saint-Jean (Saint John's way), L'Association, 2003 [2002]; it seems that Baudoin reads a parable of life in the man who runs: he runs and runs and then gets killed; I also read a desire to get away from something painful or a yearning for freedom;

4. Edmond Baudoin: "I don't like "sound effects" in comics much. The "boom," "bang," "vroom." With La peau du lézard [the lizard's skin], I tried to convey sounds with the drawing's technique only. Strong ink blots for violence, weightlessness for tenderness" (Derriére les fagots - untranslatable expression used in those special occasions in which a precious wine bottle gets out of the wine cellar where it is supposedly kept "behind a bundle of sticks;" Z'éditions, 1996: 20; my translation); La peau du lézard is: Futuropolis, 1983; we can also see how, changing from the constrained rapidograph to the free brush, Baudoin looked to the Far East (to painter Shitao, mainly) for guidance;

5., 6., 7., 8., the "open head" motif:

5. Le premier voyage, Futuropolis, 1987; the main character, Mathieu (as in Les chemins de la liberté - the roads to freedom - by Jean-Paul Sartre), leaves his house to go to work, but wanders around instead: "I drew my character with his head open to let him be open to the world" (Edmond Baudoin, Derriére les fagots, ditto: 49; my translation); notice the printed words at the bottom of the page; Edmond Baudoin was an accountant who viewed art as a liberation;

6. Baudoin did a remake of Le premier voyage for Kodansha in Japan (later published in France as: Le voyage (the travel; L'Association, 1996 [1995]);

7. a variation on the "open head" theme: Drozophile # 4, March, 1999 (detail);

8. self-portrait with open head: Derriére les fagots, ditto;

9. Edmond Baudoin is a master of the drybrush technique: another allegory of life: the old chestnut tree, struck by lightning; it still stands like a beautiful sculpture, pointing upwards (Le chemin de Saint-Jean, L'Association, 2002; this drawing wasn't included in the first version of the book because Le chemin de Saint-Jean is a work in progress).

PS An interview with Edmond Baudoin at the fine site Du 9 (in English; I don't know what's essential or not, but, from the top of my head, I can remember two short stories by Baudoin published in the U.S.A.: this one: http://www.mattmadden.com/comics/writing/readbaudoin.html; and one in here: http://www.indyworld.com/rosetta/rosetta2.html): http://www.du9.org/Baudoin,765?var_recherche=madden.)

Edmond Baudoin's Le portrait

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The big publishers always preferred their work-for-hire artists to remain anonymous as much as possible. They wanted the characters that they owned to be cultural icons, they didn't want the creators to be stars. The best example is undoubtedly the Walt Disney Company (it took a while until Malcolm Willits discovered who Carl "the good artist" Barks was; the year: 1957; Barks was "eating duck" - to paraphrase Hal Foster who "ate ape," i. e.: drew Tarzan during depression years -, since 1942). This attitude went against the grain of the 20th (and 21th) century, of course... Our age simply worships signatures. That's why, eventually, they had to give credit where credit is due...

A true pioneer in this respect was Etienne Robial, publisher of the often lauded Futuropolis publishing house. Many before him gave credit to the artists and writers, but it was Robial who first pushed the name of the artists (as "auteurs") to the forefront, to the cover of his collection 30/40, to be more precise (30 x 40, in centimeters, is the size of the books: 11.81 x 15.75 inches). Issue # 1 appeared in 1974 (Calvo).

Edmond Baudoin began his career in comics the year before with "Incident" (accident; Le canard sauvage - the wild duck -, # 3 - 1973, third quarter). A few years later, in 1981, he met Etienne Robial. In his own words (Baudoin by Philippe Sohet, Mosquito, 2001: 33; my translation): "It was a meeting of vital importance [for me]. It was one of those meetings that blows one up." Publishing at Futuropolis Edmond Baudoin was a trailblazer of autobio comics in France with Passe le Temps (time passes; 1982) and Couma Acò ("like this" in Provençal; about his grandfather; 1991). Other books were inspired by his own experiences: Le premier voyage (the first travel; 1987). After Futuropolis' demise he continued to create autobio comics at L'Association: Éloge de la poussière (in the praise of dust; about his mother; 1995), Terrains vagues (the waste lands; 1996); and Seuil: Piero (Baudoin's brother; 1998), to name a few... More than his own life and intimate thoughts, more than being just his family (with the exception of Piero), Baudoin focused on simple, low class people (living like dogs, as he put it in Couma Acò). In 1990 (April), it was Baudoin time at 30/40 (see above). As an intro, Etienne Robial wrote to Baudoin in the inside front cover of the book (again, my translation): "Edmond, I'm writing to tell you that I'm happy to publish your work in the 30/40 [collection]. You'll say that, after ten years of a common stubborn persistence and eight books, the least that we can say is that we love each other. And yet, our story together nearly had an early ending. Because, Edmond, I can't believe how you could be a pain in the ass with your lines. What was this line: clumsy, with no body[?] And that's not all, you always had a message to deliver, not forgetting the frame repetitions, almost tics, with your habit of always swinging clouds, birds, the wind in the hair. Unbelievable: you wanted to be romantico-poetical and everything turned sci-fi. Listening to you talking about your comics one could believe to be at the Salon des Indépendents. Sometimes I inclined myself a bit over my secretary to see if you wore flares. Almost. But, in spite of all that, I ended up believing in your famous line. As I see it, it's more than stubbornness. In 1985, as if love was evil’s sister [the miracle of the vowels], as a poet friend of yours would put it, everything changed. [And I mean] the first three pages of Un rubis sur les lèvres [a ruby on the lips]. Magnificent, you understood everything, at last: line economy, nothing was missing; the sun, the heat, the burning sand. Everything thanks to your... lines. I perspired... I breathed... But, take note, Edmond, it's not finished. I'm looking forward to read the stories that you'll tell me with your lines, but be careful with them, I will not accept to go back to the Salon des Indépendents again." The story published in 1990 in this sumptuous size was "Le portrait" (the portrait). Baudoin was at the time in a relationship with dancer Carol Vanni (the model for the model dancer, Carol; the model for the painter was Michel Houssin: Michel; years later we can witness, in Terrains vagues, how his relationship with Carol - Louise - gets eroded). The above quote seems cruel, but Robial doesn't exaggerate a thing (he was quite unfair to the anti-kitsch Salon des Indépendents, though; maybe he meant the Salon tout court?). Even if Edmond Baudoin is light years from his first inauspicious first efforts, a certain sentimentality can still be detected here and there in his work. Not in "Le portrait," methinks... It's a story about one of Edmond Baudoin's recurring themes: drawing itself and how inadequate it (art) is to capture life. Maybe that's exactly the paradox: we kill what we capture. It doesn't matter one bit if love is involved in the process: the miracle of the vowels (part of a song mentioned by Etienne Robial, above) says it all: "Je la nomme et dès lors, miracle des voyelles, il semble que la mort soit la soeur de l'amour." (My translation: I name it right now, the miracle of the vowels, it seems that "la mort" - death - is "amour"'s - love's - sister.)

Images:
1., 2. cover and back cover (Carol, detail) of 30/40 # 19, Baudoin (Futuropolis, April, 1990);
3. Un rubis sur les lèvres' third page (Futuropolis, 1985).

PS The Hal Foster quote above is in The Comics Journal # 102, September 1985: 72.

PPS The above cited song is Ne chantez pas la Mort! (don't sing death!; music by Leo Ferré, words by Jean-Roger Caussimon, 1972).

Edmond Baudoin's site (in French): http://w3.uqah.uquebec.ca/baudoin/.

Francisco d'Ollanda's De Aetatibus Mundi Imagines - Coda

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Images:

1. De Aetatibus Mundi Imagines' title page: "glory be to thee [o Lord]" (Holanda substituted the evocative expression "o Lord" for the visual representation of a cross using a visual / verbal blend), "Images from the world's past," "the whole history;" the praying mantis is quite original;

2. in the first part of his "Genesis" (1 - 10) Francisco de Holanda wrote excerpts from the Bible in Latin on the verso pages and drew full page illustrations on the recto ones (as seen here in 2. - 4.); each pair represents a day in the creation of the world (1,2: day one);

3. (7,8: day four);

4. (9,10: day five);

5. for a brief period of just four pages (11 - 14) Francisco de Holanda is a William Blake avant la lettre; leaving the two-page system (with drawing and writing separated) he integrates writing in the drawing; the nice touch here (14) is the visual layout of the writing, mimicking a serpent's movement; this is what Anne Magnussen called (in Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000: 202), following Peirce, "iconic-diagrammatic;"

6. from page fifteen until the "Apocalypsis" (the Apocalypse) on page one hundred and thirty five (with a few full page illustrations as exceptions), Francisco de Holanda approaches a modern comics look with a big illustration and small inserts with text on the bottom of the page; here's page 72 (the annunciation): the color is an exception because all this section's pages but two are in b & w;

7. "nona visio," the ninth vision of the Apocalypse (153): the ending (the Apocalypse) seems either rushed or unfinished (Holanda seems to go back to his initial idea of the text / drawing pair of pages, but no extended text appears; what seems to me is that he lost steam as the years passed); anyway, Francisco de Holanda's drawing style has no distinguished features; on the contrary, it looks rather average as far as Mannerism goes;

8., 9. the book's last two pages are among the most interesting; page one hundred and seventy two is a blunt vanitas representing Aphrodite and Eros as corpses; page one hundred and seventy four is a self-portrait of the artist presenting his book to the "malitia temporis," the malice of the ages.

PS Thanks are in order to that fine chap at BibliOdyssey (http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2008/12/de-aetatibus-mundi-imagines.html) who reminded me of an old passion of mine: Francisco d'Ollanda.

Francisco d'Ollanda's De Aetatibus Mundi Imagines

Since you liked it so much the first time we're back in 16th century Portugal: I hope that you'll be happy. In the Duarte d'Armas' post I told you that Italian Renaissance art's impact reached Portugal very late because of a strong Flemish influence. My somewhat exaggerated theory is that Portuguese art skipped that phase entirely, jumping from Gothic art to Mannerism (and I say "exaggerated" mainly because of two French sculptors working in the country at the time). One of the greatest Mannerist Portuguese artists and a strong advocate of Italian art, a great admirer of Michelangelo (or Micael Agnello, as he wrote in a letter addressed to the great genius; maybe Michelangelo was a lamb in Italian to become an angel in Latin?, he called him Michael Angelus in a famous portrait - see above), was Francisco d'Ollanda (Francisco de Holanda in today's orthography). Ironically, he was the son of a Flemish artist living in Portugal: Antonio d'Ollanda ("Holanda" means "Holland").

Francisco de Holanda leaved Portugal in 1537 and lived in Rome until 1547. It was there that he drew many ancient ruins. He collected his drawings as (among other info) Das Antigualhas (on old things; 1539, 1540). He also wrote a Neoplatonic book: Da Pintura Antiga (on old painting, 1548). The second part of the book (known as "Diálogos de Roma," the "Roman dialogues") records the opinion of a few important Italian celebs about aesthetics, Michelangelo among them...
De Aetatibus Mundi Imagines (images from the world's past) is basically the Bible as a graphic novel. One hundred and seventy six pages survived at the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid (Madrid's national library). It took the author nearly thirty years to draw (1545 - 1573) considering that, during those years, he also dedicated his attention to other projects, of course. Francisco de Holanda was not a great artist, so, again, I did this post mainly because De Aetatibus Mundi Imagines is an amazing curio. The first part of his "Genesis" is absolutely masterful though. If you think that there're similarities between some of Francisco de Holanda's drawings and William Blake's it's simply because they exist...

You can find the whole book, here (just search for "Francisco de Holanda"):
http://bibliotecadigitalhispanica.bne.es/

Image:
Michaelangelo by Francisco de Holanda, in Das Antigualhas, but drawn many years after Holanda came back from Italy (sorry for the poor resolution). Michelangelo is portrayed in profile (as if on an old Roman coin) between laurel and rose wreaths. Both were used to crown the Roman emperors, both symbolized victory and honor.

PS A few posts ago I compared one of my favorite comics artists, Jacques Tardi, to Eric Flint. This happened because I wanted to underline his commercial work (the Adèle Blanc-Sec series) which is a parody of action-adventure children’s comics in the same way as Flint’s books are fantasies with a laugh. It was an injustice, of course, because Jacques Tardi also did (and continues to do) great books about WWI. I’m sure that he would like to be compared to Louis-Ferdinand Céline instead. I’m not sure if he’s that good an artist though (i mean "artist" in the broad sense of the word, of course)… A minor Céline, perhaps?...

Roy de Forest's To The Far Canine Range And The Unexplored Territory Beyond Terrier Pass - Coda

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All Images are details from Roy de Forest's pages in To The Far Canine Range And The Unexplored Territory Beyond Terrier Pass (Bedford Arts, 1988) as can be read in #:

1. cover, in which we can see the old sage and his dog;

2. Bigfoot and dog;

3. Roy de Forest, himself, "faces" his own mortality;

4. rock spirits?;

5. the family rests under an old genius loci's protection;

6. the rabbit spirit of a mountain?; its sight breaks the fourth wall protecting the reader in these unknown regions;

7. the old sage does the same.

Roy de Forest's To The Far Canine Range And The Unexplored Territory Beyond Terrier Pass

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Funk art isn't exactly my most admired art style. Being Francis Bacon my favorite 20th century artist (as recently seen) it's a bit strange that I favor Roy de Forest's work (and Gary Panter's, and Mat Brinkman's, and Brian Chippendale's). That's all true, but all things considered I don't have much choice: Funk (not Pop, which is just Neodadaism) is the obvious place where low / high art meets the lowly mass comic art. Besides, Funk is lively and, believe it or not, can also be pretty serious and deep. The proof?: not being exactly Funk, New Image painter Nicholas Africano's "autobiographical figural psychodramas" (as Arden Reed described them in Art in America, December 1999: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_/ai_58361009) are close enough to Francis Bacon's own obsessions...

Repeating Modernism's fascination with non-Western forms of art (Pablo Picasso admired African art and Francis Poulenc was inspired by the Indonesian Gamelan) these artists (Funk and surroundings, I mean...) pioneered a reivindication of previously discriminated social groups: popular decorative art, traditionally created by women; stupid, urban, bad, popular art; the art of American Indians (and Roy de Forest is the right artist to cite here, even if his characters are cartoonish...); narrative art (scorned by the Modernists), and the inevitable, mass produced, non-arts of caricature (Red Grooms) and comics...
A Journey To The Far Canine Range And The Unexplored Territory Beyond Terrier Pass by Roy de Forest (Bedford Arts, 1988) is an accordion fold book spanning eleven double-page spreads and two single pages. It records the peripatetic adventures of a "renowned grey-haired sage [a figure that Roy de Forest calls "Leonardo da Vinci"] and his loyal companion, a spotted, red-faced sheep dog" (as the artist described his characters at the end of the book). In the same page Stephen Vincent "reads" the story (and informs us that these images were inspired by a de Forest "one-week spring vacation with his family in Yosemite."): "Gradually we are introduced to diverse figures from Western mythology. Big Foot, the Indian, human spirits (à la Dante) stuck inside trees, anthropomorphic mountain shapes, and a host of haunted wolves, dogs and natural emanations will each alert our nervous systems that larger forces do accompany us on this latter day comedic journey into unknown territory."
Roy de Forest's graphic resources are remarkably varied. His textures, dots and lines, make visible what's invisible, as Paul Klee wanted (The Thinking Eye, Wittenborn, 1961 [Das bildnerische Denken, Benno Schwabe & Co., 1956]: 76). I don't mean locus genii or such things I don't believe in though: I mean simple things like breathing, sending light rays (the sun), and seeing. On second thought, the genni aren't that bad an idea either: providing that we see them as figments of our imagination and, consequently, as byproducts of our feelings in a particular place (a religare). In that specific department, the spiritual one, I like how To The Far Canine Range And The Unexplored Territory Beyond Terrier Pass ends, a lot: the old sage becomes one with nature. As he does so, he sends eye rays in our direction breaking the fourth wall. I, for one, feel compelled to accept his invitation...

Images:

1., 2. Nicholas Africano, The Shadow [I beat this fucker up], 1979 (we can't beat ourselves, I suppose), and The scream, Struggling with him, He's afraid of loneliness, 1978 (sorry for the bad resolution);

3. a William T. Wiley comic, (Unmuzzled Ox, 1975; sorry also for the awful resolution);

4. Red Grooms, Gertrude [Stein], 1975;

5. Amos Bad Heart Buffalo's drawing as published in Hartley Burr Alexander's Sioux Indian Paintings, C. Szwedzicki, 1938 (image caught, here: http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/ul/libcoll/harrison/books.php);

6. a mola (Kuna for "blouse," Panama).

PS I'm glad to see that film critics have a lot more sense than comics critics: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081223/REVIEWS/812239987. (On the other hand, I have my doubts because Ebert wrote these incredibly obtuse couple of phrases: "Frank Miller, whose 300 and Sin City showed a similar elevation of the graphic novel into fantastical style shows. But they had characters, stories, a sense of fun.") I especially liked this bit: "To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material." He he... I'm still laughing out loud... And in case you're wondering: yes, I would apply the same phrase to Will Eisner's Spirit (another hugely overrated character of the heavy paper stock persuasion).

Francis Bacon's Triptych May - June 1973

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Simply put, Francis Bacon's Triptych May - June 1973 is the best comic ever made. Not surprisingly it is not comical at all. To go on unsurprised, it was created by one of the best artists that ever lived. (We can't be surprised by our own convictions, or so it seems...)

My remark between brackets above is a bit self-ironic: not being an essentialist I have suspicions when things are too clear cut. We know how these things go: first we rationalize reality... afterwards we find that reality matches our rationalizations perfectly: big surprise. Anyway, it isn't because of this vicious loop that I'll stop believing what I said above. Irony just helps me to put things in perspective, that's all...

My views on art are very close to those defended by Francis Bacon himself. In this video: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/francisbacon/bbcarchive.shtm he says: "Abstract painting is a form of escaping the issue, because Abstract painting can never... even at its very best, can be never more than lyrical, charming, and decorative. It never, finally, unlocks, like great art can do, unlocks the valves of feeling by the... by this attempt to record the fact. When I... You see?, what any artist needs today is a profound technical imagination. It's a technique by which he can reset the trap in which the image he wants to record can be trapped again..." (1965).

Antoni Tàpies, Manolo Millares (but are they always Abstract painters?), and, possibly, Mark Rothko or Alberto Burri (but certainly not Wassily Kandinsky) remind me that Francis Bacon is wrong in his opinions about Abstract painting (I love the Informalists, obviously; plus, unlike Bacon, I don't exclude the "lyrical" from the great art's realm), but I'll use his words (adding "zany") to dismiss most, if not all, comics art in the babymen's canon. (A word for Feminist decorative art: it's a conceptual stance: the work is less important than the idea; Francis Bacon wouldn't approve this kind of art, I suppose, but I'm apparently more tolerant.)

Giles Deleuze explained Francis Bacon's art perfectly when he wrote (Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation, Continuum, 2003 [la Différence, 1981]; translation by Daniel W. Smith: 27): "The head-meat is a becoming animal of man." That's the fact Francis Bacon caught in his trap created with a profoundly imaginative technique: we are animals made of meat, and perishable meat at that.

Giles Deleuze said that what a philosopher does is to create concepts. A couple of them in Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation are very interesting to any serious comics scholar. The first one that I'll cite in this post is "chronochromatism" (Deleuze builds this concept over "chronophotography"). It describes how Bacon paints the bodies to indicate micro variations in time (he was very interested by Edweard Muybridge's chronophotographs). Bacon began his career influenced by Pablo Picasso and we can conclude that his art is a Cubo-Futurism with Expressionist clothes. The other concepts that I want to talk about can't be summed up in a word, so, I'll have to quote Giles Deleuze again (on the triptych format; ditto, 84, 85): "This then is the principle of the triptychs: the maximum unity of light and color for the maximum division of Figures. [...] Time is no longer in the chromaticism of bodies; it has become a monochromatic eternity. An immense space-time unites all things, but only by introducing between them the distances of a Sahara, the centuries of an aeon: the triptych and its separated panels. [...]

[T]he three canvases remain separated, but they are no longer isolated; and the frame or borders of a painting no longer refer to the limitative unity of each, but to the distributive unity of the three."

Deleuze also studied complex rhythms created by the forms in Bacon's triptychs. These reading beats are seldom explored by formalist comics scholars (from the top of my head I can only think of Renaud Chavanne's Edgar P. Jacobs & le secret de l'explosion; Edgar P. Jacobs and the secret of the explosion - PLG, 2005; but his primary texts, even if interesting, were a lot poorer, of course).

Triptych May - June 1973 (1973; see above) denies at least one thing in Giles Deleuze's quote above. A few instants only pass between the panels not "the distances of a Sahara, the centuries of an aeon." It represents George Dyer's suicide in 1971. To describe this tragic "comic" strip (I put the misnomer between inverted commas for obvious reasons) I'll quote Hugh Marlais Davies (Francis Bacon, Abbeville Press, 1986: 74, 75; as found, here: http://francis-bacon.cx/triptychs/t73.html): "In Triptych, May-June, Bacon shows sequential views of a single figure, like stills from a film. He has reversed the conventional left-right progression and has, again as in a film, abandoned a fixed viewpoint. We look through one doorway in the left panel and through another in the center and right panels. Read from right to left, the images depict the facts of [George] Dyer's death, as the nude figure vomits into the bathroom sink, crosses the room, and then dies on the toilet. The sinuous, agonized curves of Dyer's arm and shoulder at right are continued by the curve of the sink's drainpipe. The pitiful, almost fetally positioned figure at left has a closed composure in opposition to the distended agony of the adjacent panels. The white arrows in the foreground of the side panels were added to counter the sensational character of the subject matter by inserting a mote of clinical objectivity."
Two comments about the above quote: since these are still images wouldn't it be more appropriate to mention comics instead of film?; not being a mind reader I bet that I'm not wrong if I claim that Hugh Davies would never mention the word "comics" in this context; the fetally positioned Dyer reminds me of one of my favorite (moving) paintings by Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin (see above); it's the Eros / Thanatos (vanitas) theme again... Great art isn't that varied, I suppose...

Images:

1. Francis Bacon, Triptych May - June 1973, 1973; the shadow / Erinys leaving George Dyer's body in the second panel is particularly haunting; this avenging monster in ancient Greek mythology is coming to get the painter: it symbolizes his guilty conscience;

2. Francis Bacon, Three Figures in a Room, 1964 (triptych, detail: left panel): a premonitory portrait of George Dyer?; as I did for Nadine Spengler below: I wonder how he felt, seven years later, when his image became true?;

3. Manolo Millares' Antropofauna (anthropofauna, detail), 1970; in the same way as Ana Hatherly's characters, Millares' late paintings show figures that are partially made of language (the anthropos part?); wanting to contradict Francis Bacon I may be agreeing with him though: these tortured figures are hardly Abstract;

4. Edweard Muybridge's chronophoto The Horse in Motion, 1878;

5. Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin's Un lapin, deux grives mortes et quelques brins de paille sur une table de pierre (a rabbit, two dead thrushes and a few wisps of straw on a stone table; c. 1750).