Smithsonian.com

Many budding artists labor under the dictum, “Draw what you see.” Yet many practicing artists have followed a complementary belief, “Draw what you don’t see,” as illustrated by Albrecht Durer, the Early Northern Renaissance master, and his print Rhinoceros. Durer depicts the African beast and its pleated armor with uncanny precision. He had only second-hand accounts as reference. Durer reconstructed a contemporary news item: a fabled, exotic exemplar was captured and destined for Papal Rome before its ship sank in a storm.

Rhinos aren’t native to Europe; tigers, meanwhile, aren’t native to Japan. The closest tigers prowl Russia’s Siberian woodlands, the northeastern part of China, and Korea. Yet curiously, tawny tigers have slinked through the silk scrolls of traditional Japanese art for centuries, as seen in a current exhibition, Patterned Feathers, Piercing Eyes at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery. A few tigers had visited Japan before its cultural isolation ended in the late nineteenth century, full-grown cats and mewling kittens given as gifts to warlords and shoguns. But most artists seem to have depicted tigers using imported pelts as reference. Many artists also liked to depict leopards in the mistaken belief they were female tigers, a family of spots and stripes.

On a closer look, it appears some artists used house cats as models. Take Maruyama Okyo’s Sitting Tiger, enchantingly painted in 1777 . His inked tiger glares with green almond eyes and slitted pupils—an ocular feature common to house cats on sunny days, but not to tigers.
Without tigers to draw upon from life, Japanese artists depicted the fearsome kitties for cosmic reasons unknown to artists such as Durer. They drew upon Taoism, a mystical Chinese philosophy that grew from studying nature. In free-flowing Taoism, Chinese philosophers saw the universe in terms of a symbiotic yin and yang: yang, active and masculine, takes the form of a mythological dragon; yin, passive and feminine, the tiger common to some Chinese forests.

Japanese Zen Buddhism shares some beliefs with Chinese Taoism. In Japan, artists depicted twinned dragons and tigers on the sliding doors of Zen Buddhist temples. And like the Christian story of Saint Jerome and his lion, Buddhists believed that tigers accompanied long-ago holy men. In the Zen Buddhist imagination, a tiger grooms itself with monkish discipline, its sunlit nap a lasting metaphor for enlightenment.

With great interest, I read the recent Smithsonian magazine article about Elizabeth Shapiro, a researcher of ancient DNA. Some speculate that Shapiro and her brood might bring extinct species back to life. In the article, Shapiro poses with a mummified bird—the dodo, a flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius off the west coast of Africa until its extinction in the 17th Century. Today, the dodo has become a metaphor for extinction that rivals only the extinct giant moa of New Zealand in aviary fame. I always found the dodo a curious creature. Despite its morose association with death, artists’ renderings of the dodo always reminded me of a rejected Sesame Street character, with its bulbous, frowning beak and waddling cotton-swaddle body. Its odd name remains poetically chained to the fun-to-say expression, “Dead as a dodo.”

Charles Darwin is dead as a dodo too. The silver-bearded author of The Origin of Species, Darwin espoused an atheistic theory of extinction and evolution that at once canonized and vilified him for the ages. Yet Darwin was more than a beacon of controversy: he was also a family man, as illumined by a precocious doodle on the back of one of only twenty-eight surviving original folios of The Origin of Species. His young son Francis drew a picture with the aplomb of Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are. “The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers” shows two soldiers facing each other. One dons a flamboyant turban and blooming pants and rides a plum; the other, dressed in British attire, rides a stately carrot. Despite his precocious talent, Francis didn’t grow up to become a professional artist. Instead, the fruit didn’t fall far from the tree. With his eminent father, Francis would co-author The Power of Movement in Plants. Maybe Francis kept in mind his childhood doodle, drawn on the back of a page filled with the inquisitive cursive of his father.
Photo courtesy of Denis Finnin/American Museum of Natural History.

Artists draw us in not only with their work, but also with their colorful charisma. Of all those in the art world who fulfill such creative archetypes, the most endearing character may well be Hokusai, the witty Japanese woodblock printmaker of “The Floating World” period, who once published under the pseudonym Gakyo Ronji Manji, “The Old Man Mad With Painting.”

Hokusai worked within a printing tradition that flourished around Tokyo between the 17th and 20th centuries. “The Floating World” refers to the cosmopolitan ambiance in which such woodblock prints grew, and contrasts with “The Sorrowful World” espoused by Japanese Buddhists at the time. In “The Floating World,” earthly pleasures come to life in landscapes and narratives that depict or elaborate upon historical scenes, folklore and traditional poetry. Japanese woodblock art was made for the masses, and it has a distinct look: pearly paper, sharp edges, and vivid, carefully composed planes of color. The art grew within a luminous, distinctly Japanese cultural bubble, which was pierced by the introduction of Western influences in the early 20th century.

For 89 years, Hokusai worked in good-humored tumult within this peaceful bubble. “The Old Man Mad With Painting” assumed 26 pen names throughout his life, depending on his particular station; even “Hokusai” is a pen name, meaning “North Star Studio,” a reference to the Buddhist sect to which he ascribed. He outlived his family and moved 93 times—many accounts of Hokusai became as floating and varied as soap bubbles.

Ever prodigious, Hokusai remains most well known for his “36 Views of Mount Fuji,” (1826-1833) which shows vignettes of his contemporaries at work in Tokyo; Mount Fuji, snow-capped and often pale blue, appears in each print, unifying the series. Hokusai invents freely here: his dynamic compositions all nest Mount Fuji, the icon of Japanese Buddhist spirituality. His most famous work, “The Great Wave at Kanagawa” shown above, was created for this series (note Mount Fuji in the background.) Other print series include “One-Hundred Poems.” Here, Hokusai illustrates famed traditional poems, but he does so with great irreverence, sometimes assuming the persona of a semi-literate nurse who misinterprets the poem with hilarious illustrative results.

Hokusai may have coined the term “manga.” Today manga is a wildly popular Japanese comic book form, but for Hokusai, the term meant whimsical picture. Hokusai filled his notebooks with thousands of drawings of daily life, just trying to get his rendering skills right. He introduced whimsy to ordinary scenes of daily life and also to creatures such as a rhinoceros, which he never saw in person—much like Albrecht Durer, the Early Northern Renaissance artist who also drew a famous rhinoceros, which he never actually saw. In this sketch book, one can believe in Hokusai’s legend: at nearly age 90 on his deathbed, he said, “If I had another five years, even, I could have become a real painter.”

Photo credit: Hokusai’s “The Great Wave at Kanagawa,” 1826-1833 (Wikipedia)

Though he was a visual artist, Joseph Cornell seemed more like a literary recluse, a soulmate of Emily Dickinson. Cornell was bird-like in stature, dreamy in temperament and monkish when it came to the artistic fame he found in later years. Between 1903-1972, he spent most of his days in a small home on the aptly named Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York. He lived with his mother and took care of his younger brother, Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy. By day, he was an unlikely door-to-door salesman and barely made ends meet; by night, he was an artist of unusual lyrical power.

He made collages from pulpy ephemera such as starlet photographs and astronomical maps. Cornell often juxtaposed such imagery with precious, discarded objects like clay soap-bubble pipes and jars of sparkling pigments. He liked to create his compositions in jewel cases or wood boxes, giving his collages a sculptural feel. For Cornell, these boxes held “eterniday,” meaning the past is ever unfolding into the present. Linear time disappears in favor of a poetic meditation upon the object, and within it, a curious juxtaposition of imagery.

I recently attended Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination, a chronological retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which originated at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The show covered his well-known work in collages and boxes (it closes January 6th). Amid teeming works, one piece exemplifies Cornell’s poetic nature—a jewel case holding fake ice cubes, dedicated to the 19th-century ballerina Marie Taglioni. Cornell was extremely well-read and fluent in all things French; he especially appreciated the ballet. Taglioni supposedly kept a fake ice cube in her jewel case, a memento of a time when she twirled in the snow to bemuse a Russian highwayman who had halted her carriage on a starlit night.

Like Rembrandt, Cornell coaxed a more subtle richness from his materials in later years. The original pieces glow with a spiritual light, which can’t be reproduced in photographs. “Medici Princess” (ca. 1952) comes from Cornell’s “Medici” series, dedicated to the ruling family of Renaissance Florence and its more poignant figures. The box features a reproduction of a portrait by the court painter Agnolo Bronzino. In it Bia de’Medici, an illegitimate child of Duke Cosimo I, gazes toward the viewer with eerie prescience and preciousness. Around her neck, she wears a tiny medallion bearing the picture of her powerful father. Cornell seems to evoke the transcendent power of art and memory here. Bia would live only to the age of five, but Cornell has nested her enamel-like image in a dark wood box, behind a glass pane, blurred and deep blue—Cornell’s favorite color. Her image is repeated in smaller vignettes at either side, also encased in glass. Below her, one can see a feather, bound book pages and a floor-plan of the Florentine palace, where once she played ever so briefly, so long ago.

When do comic books mature into graphic novels? Both mediums rely on cartoons to tell universal stories. Cartoons omit the incidental detail of photography, and instead become open vessels into which readers pour in their memories and experiences. Comics guru Scott McCloud calls this act closure: We can understand only what we can feel, and we can truly feel only what we’ve experienced. Cartoons present a simplified, universal world and help us mediate this process of reading, empathizing and understanding.

Graphic novels speak to us with a subtle, equivocating voice rarely found in traditional comic books. Superheroes have left the stage, deferring to cartoon truth-tellers who gaze inward even as they reflect upon their culture. In graphic novels, characters convey essential truths by narrating subjective experiences, and we subconsciously place ourselves in a cartoon world. That’s why this medium so effectively take us into politicized, forbidden places, like those still whirring spokes on the so-called axis of evil, Iran and North Korea.

Persepolis, by Iranian ex-pat Marjane Satrapi, is a lyrical, funny yet political memoir of growing up in Iran during the fall of the Shah and the Islamic Revolution; the protagonist, a young Satrapi, must adapt to the iron fist and the veil despite her family’s progressive inclinations. At the same time, her narrative covers the magic of childhood and the tumult of adolescence. The first volume of Persepolis shows Satrapi as a little girl, confusing God with an image of an impressive, white-bearded Karl Marx. The author of communism ironically communes with her during bedtime prayer. Later, she is sent away to Europe for high school, and we see the turmoil of adolescence through the lens of an exile—awkward parties, odd boyfriends and “enlightened” peers who seek to romanticize or caricature Satrapi’s mythic homeland.

In Pyongyang, French-Canadian Guy Delisle arrives in the capital of communist North Korea as a subcontractor for a French animation company. Delisle covers a bleak two months in the eerily austere capital. Though the narration understandably lacks the personal touch of Satrapi, the storyboards—presented in a series of comic, understated vignettes—poignantly capture a cultish culture washed clean of imperfection and dissent. In cool black and white, we place ourselves in the monotonous grandeur of communist monuments, tremor at the spooky absence of disabled people and raise our eyebrows, along with Delisle, at the omnipresence of the pompadour-sporting dictator Kim Jong-Il and his departed father. Their twinned portraits adorn nearly every room Delisle encounters, except, notably, bathrooms.

The graphic novel medium works well here. Photographs too often present a documentary reality, which can’t help but highlight how different the reader’s world seems from the picture world. Yet in Delisle’s simple, almost childlike drawings, the once distant capital city of Pyongyang becomes a metaphor for repression and isolation—a place we have all visited from time to time.