nao consegue ler em english. Art Review The van Gogh of the Gross-Out
- Sign in to Recommend <javascript:void(0);> - Sign In to E-Mail<http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/design/23basil.html> - Print<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/design/23basil.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print> - Share<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/design/23basil.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all#> Close<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/design/23basil.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all#> - Linkedin<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/design/23basil.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all#> - Digg<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/design/23basil.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all#> - Facebook<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/design/23basil.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all#> - Mixx<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/design/23basil.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all#> - MySpace<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/design/23basil.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all#> - Yahoo! Buzz<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/design/23basil.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all#> - Permalink<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/design/23basil.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all#> - [image: Article Tools Sponsored By]<http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&opzn&page=www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/arts/design&pos=Frame4A&sn2=44759cca/973fb6a7&sn1=37540ed8/d0e10591&camp=foxsearch2009_emailtools_1011075c_nyt5&ad=Adam_120x60&goto=http://www.foxsearchlight.com/adam> By HOLLAND COTTER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/holland_cotter/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Published: July 22, 2009 If you were a preteenager in the 1950s and had precocious friends or a with-it dad, it’s a good bet you knew the cartoons of Basil Wolverton, the Michelangelo of Mad magazine<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/mad_magazine/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, even if you didn’t know his name. Skip to next paragraph<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/design/23basil.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all#secondParagraph> Enlarge This Image<javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/07/22/arts/23basil_Ca1ready.html',%20'23basil_Ca1ready',%20'width=388,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')> <javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/07/22/arts/23basil_Ca1ready.html',%20'23basil_Ca1ready',%20'width=388,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')> Glenn Bray and The Wolverton Estate, via Gladstone Gallery Basil Wolverton: A retrospective of the cartoonist-illustrator continues at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea through Aug. 14. Above, "Smacker" (around 1950). More Photos »<http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/07/22/arts/20090723_BASIL_SLIDESHOW_index.html> Multimedia [image: The Michelangelo of Mad Magazine]Slide Show <http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/07/22/arts/20090723_BASIL_SLIDESHOW_index.html> The Michelangelo of Mad Magazine<http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/07/22/arts/20090723_BASIL_SLIDESHOW_index.html> Blog [image: ArtsBeat] <http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/> ArtsBeat<http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/> The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.<http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/> - More Arts News <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/arts/index.html> Like rock ’n’ roll and beatniks, Mad was a freakish spawn of the A-bomb era. It was like an emanation from some dark, Dada side of Disney; a stink bomb planted in the suburban Eden; and a preview of the underground-comics era to come. Wolverton, who is the subject of a career survey at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea this summer, was Mad’s early signature artist, the one who embodied its sick-and-proud humor. His specialty was a beyond-grotesque species of fictional portraiture, typified by the dog-toothed, bushy-browed, linguine-haired “Beautiful Girl of the Month” seen on the cover of Mad’s 1954 takeoff on Life magazine. The images in pen and ink — Wolverton worked almost exclusively in this medium — were a virtuoso exercise in bad taste, made all the weirder for being so meticulously executed. By the 1950s Wolverton had already been working in a gross-out mode for years, though he was in many ways an unlikely extremist. He was born in a small town in Oregon in 1909 and, apart from short stints in Hollywood and New York City, he stayed in the Pacific Northwest until his death in 1978. In photographs he looks softly bulky and moon-faced, ready to be amused. A devout churchgoer, he hoped to be remembered for his Bible illustrations, not his cartoons. Self-taught as an artist, he sold his first cartoon in 1926, when he was still in high school, and rarely stopped drawing thereafter, though he would have preferred a career in vaudeville. In the 1930s he enjoyed a lucky, though brief, break with a sci-fi newspaper strip called “Marco of Mars.” He later pitched other similar strips with names like “Hercules Hardy,” “Guy Spy Private Eye” and “Saucer Sid the Supersonic Kid,” but without success. His early work picked up on popular cartoon styles of the day but still had an uncouth look and tone of its own. His outer-space monsters are more charismatically monstrous than they really need to be for the pat narratives they’re part of. And Wolverton clearly chafes under the constraint of conventional genres. Some of his narrative series, like “Powerhouse Pepper,” have the explosive parodic élan of a Rossini opera; others, like the unpublished “Ethan Downing” strip, are oddly grave and measured. They’re like intergalactic productions of “Parsifal.” What was constant from project to project was a style of labor-intensive draftsmanship based on bold forms filled in with dense patterns of stippling and hatchwork. Almost as consistent was Wolverton’s appetite, which could verge on the pathological, for deformations and mutilations of human flesh. The general effect produced by such obsessiveness, a kind of sadistic hilarity, made him a star in 1946. That year the cartoonist Al Capp introduced a character named Lena the Hyena, “the ugliest girl in Lower Slobbovia” to his “Li’l Abner” strip. Her face, however, was not seen, the idea being that she was so unsightly as to send readers away screaming. Naturally, the public clamored to see her. In response Capp issued an open invitation for people to send versions of what they imagined her to look like, with the best entry to be chosen by a double-take triumvirate of celebrity judges: Frank Sinatra<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/frank_sinatra/index.html?inline=nyt-per>, Boris Karloff<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/36942/Boris-Karloff?inline=nyt-per>and Salvador Dalí <http://movies.nytimes.com/person/714997/Salvador-Dali?inline=nyt-per>. Out of the thousands of entries, Wolverton’s won. His Lena, a kind of dry run for “Beautiful Girl of the Month,” was printed not only in the Capp strip, but also in Life magazine. Lena isn’t in the Gladstone show, though several competitively outlandish faces are. Even when Wolverton was concentrating on narrative cartoons, “spaghetti and meatballs”-textured portraits flowed, usually in the form of single-panel drawings conceived as a series: “Foolish Faces: Photos of a Few Famous Fatheads and Freaks” is one such group; “Private Peeps at Preposterous Punks Who Prowl This Planet” is another. Then came the 1950s and Mad, with which Wolverton’s name continues to be primarily associated. The magazine’s appearance was, in its cultish way, a transformational event in American pop culture. Suddenly humor no longer meant comfy titters on an “Ozzie and Harriet” laugh track. It was an assaultive form of anarchy, rising, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, out of who-knew-what murky social and psychological depths. For many people the shift in taste was discomfitting. Wolverton’s art — I’ll use the word, though he shied away from it — could be incredibly cruel. The heads he drew look dreadfully diseased, or like genetic catastrophes, or like beings melted and scarred in an atomic blast. He reserved some of his most repellent effects for images of women. Like so much of American culture in the ’50s, when a new feminist consciousness was just beginning to coalesce, his work comes across as spectacularly misogynistic. That he turns men into freaks too doesn’t really alter the impression that Wolverton’s art is a for-boys-only art. It may or may not be pertinent to a larger picture of the period’s visual culture that Willem de Kooning<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/willem_de_kooning/index.html?inline=nyt-per>’s controversial paintings of women as fragmented lumps of matter with bared teeth and googly eyes were being produced and exhibited at roughly the same time that Wolverton’s female grotesques were in wide circulation. And it is worth adding that most of the late-20th- and early-21st-century artists obviously influenced by Wolverton are men. On that long list I would count Peter Saul, Gary Panter, Kenny Scharf, Jim Nutt, Robert Williams, Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, Jeffrey Valance, R. Crumb<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/robert_crumb/index.html?inline=nyt-per>and Cameron Jamie, who organized the Gladstone show from the collection of the Wolverton patron and fan Glenn Bray. The Wolverton material best suited to a general audience, though, may be his Bible illustrations, which he was doing in the 1950s and ’60s, concurrently with his early Mad work. In 1941 he had become a member of a Protestant sect called the Radio Church of God, later the Worldwide Church of God. He was ordained as an elder in 1943, and as his contribution to the sect he illustrated some of its apocalyptically minded publications, as well as the biblical account of the earth’s final days. Several of his end-of-the-world pictures are in the show, and they’re wild. Plagues descend on the sin-ridden human race. Bodies break out in disfiguring boils. Faces burn, shrivel and stretch into masks of fear. In this context even the ultra-bonkers cartoons Wolverton did in the 1960s and ’70s for the post-underground Gjdrkzlxcbwq Comics and DC Comics make sense. In those profoundly and ingeniously disintegrative images, everything inside the body — viscera, muscles, mucus, bones, brains — moves to the outside. Heads multiply; tongues turn into noses; hands become feet. Figures become dripping, leaking containers of crude matter, like the figures of sinners and saints in Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment,” who scowl and weep and pout as they float above the pit. “Basil Wolverton” is on view through Aug. 14 at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, Chelsea; (212) 206-9300. Sign in to Recommend <javascript:void(0);> Next Article in Arts (1 of 18) »<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/23funding.html> A version of this article appeared in print on July 23, 2009, on page C1 of the New York edition.
