Thoughts on Basil Wolverton

MAD #11. "The first time I ever saw the work of Basil Wolverton was on the cover of MAD number 11, in 1954. I was eleven years old and it changed forever the way that I looked at the world", says the pull quote of R. Crumb on the back of THE ORIGINAL ART OF THE BASIL WOLVERTON. When I initially saw this image, I thought it was Robert Crumb as it pretty well looked like the sort of thing he would draw. Obviously my entire frame of reference was wrong by 10 years, not realizing how long and prolific MAD was.

It wasn't until researching a Canadian Art History paper on General Idea that I began to realize how relevant LIFE magazine was before I was born, and now when I'm looking at this image one sees that extra added layer of satire (beyond just the simply "Beautiful Girl of the Month"). Harvey Kurtzman, editor of MAD at this point, made it a habit of satirizing all walks of life, in this case LIFE, and later on with his Little Annie Fanny strip in PLAYBOY with Will Elder made fun of the values of the very publication it appeared. What I didn't realize until very recently though was the featured 'model' on the cover actually was pre-existing.

From the bastion of truth, Wikipedia:

In 1946 Wolverton won a contest to depict "Lena Hyena", the world's ugliest woman, a running gag in Al Capp's Li'l Abner newspaper strip where Lena remained unseen beneath an editorial note stating her face had been covered to protect readers. Capp, responding to popular demand, announced a contest for artists to submit their interpretations to be judged by Boris Karloff, Frank Sinatra and Salvador Dali. Out of 500,000 entries, Wolverton's was the winner; it appeared in a Li'l Abner daily and Life magazine. Wolverton's fame briefly lead to Life and Pageant printing his caricatures. The Lena portrait typified the unique "spaghetti and meatballs" style he employed regularly thereafter.

So not only were Wolverton's caricatures suddenly appearing in LIFE magazine, but there is now a kind of connection of the fine arts with Salvador Dali among the members of the jury involved with the proceedings. I can't help but think back to Dali's own Soft Construction With Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) looking at Lena.

In THE ORIGINAL ART OF BASIL WOLVERTON, Giuseppe Arcimboldo's 'vegetable portraits' (ex. Vertumnus) are used as a historical grounding in discussing Wolverton's work.* The first time I encountered Arcimboldo's work, I thought I came across a really talented painter working in the last thirty years (see a modern example using the Arcimboldo approach). The artwork that immediately sprang to my mind though thinking about the artistic merit and explaining of the power of the MAD #11 cover was Quentin Matsys' "A Grotesque Old Woman" aka "The Ugly Dutchess"

When I first saw this image, I swear I was looking at yet another extremely talented postmodern painter tackling Tolkien or World of Warcraft characters. Again, these works are 500 years old, and are (to me) more relevant and interesting than most paintings of that same era. Anyway, what we are seeing in Wolverton, Arcimboldo, and Matsys are caricature and the grotesque. Here's the some background and history on the concepts of caricature and the grotesque, going back as far as when Matsys and Arcimboldo were painting their works in the 1500s, from THE ORIGINAL ART OF BASIL WOLVERTON:

Caricature generally consists of exaggerating a subject's physical characteristics-usually facial features-to comic effect. Caricature is usually associated with satire, exposing a political figure (or other celebrity) to ridicule through the association of their appearance with that of a pig, or vampire, or other creature-in the case of Erhard Schon's famous sixteenth-century woodcut supposedly depicting Martin Luther, Luther is shown as a set of bagpipes being played by the Devil. Though it didn't really catch on until the seventeenth century, caricature is as old as art making: comically exaggerated portraits have been found in the ruins of Pompeii. In fact, caricatures may have deeper biological significance than their social and political uses suggest, reflecting the human ability to abstract complex fields of information into a few simple iconographic reductions, thus linking caricature to the roots of applied semiotics and graphic communication.
-Doug Harvey, Pg. 18.

*DEEEEEP BREATH* And now, the grotesque!

The subject of the grotesque is more complicated, dating to the late 15th century discovery of The Golden Palace of Nero in Rome. Initially mistaken for a grotto, the palace's millennium-and-a-half-old decorations caused a sensation among the young artists of the emerging Renaissance (including Michelangelo and Raphael), who devised a new style-le grottesche-to incorporate the category-smashing hybrids of human, animal, and plant imagery they found there. As this fantastic, humanist response to the strictly ordered sensibilities of the Church dominated Middle Ages quickly spread, its characteristics became more extreme, spawning such extravagant visionaries as Hieronymous Bosch and Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Over time, the term "grotesque" came to take on connotations of nightmarish monstrosity, the upheaval of hierarchy, shameless carnality, and unblinking observation of the darker aspects of human nature.
-Doug Harvey, pg. 19

Even following out of Bosch you have Pieter Bruegel (also Flemish, right along with Matsys) who Robert Hughes compared favourably to Robert Crumb in CRUMB....boy it all starts getting a tad like that Robert Crumb JOE BLOW comic, doesn't it? Oh yes, one can even say that someone like Drew Friedman was probably influenced by Basil Wolverton, considering his grotesque caricatures of celebrities. And who is a big Friedman fan? Daniel Clowes, who has an entire graphic novel called CARICATURE. In Todd Hignite's IN THE STUDIO, Clowes also talks about the influence of THE MAD READER on him. Anyway, I bet like me you had no idea where the idea of the grotesque came from, right? Who says you don't learn anything from reading my blog!

Shudder. I'll also add that what actually got me to pick up the ORIGINAL ART book was John Kricfalusi's blog and his love and admiration of Wolverton's work (list of blog posts about Wolverton).

-Jarrett

*There's a certain irony with placing Arcimboldo's 'vegetable works' with Wolverton's 'spaghetti and meatball style', I suppose.