I was alerted to this eBay auction of an original Joe Shuster drawing recreating the cover to Action Comics #19. It was done in 1983, which is pretty impressive for a guy who had difficulty drawing by then.There's good provenance with it, too, considering the photos with it.
Nobody has bid yet, but it seems like a pretty good deal (especially with that free shipping). Please feel free to buy it and donate it to the Mr. SIlver Age Museum of Original Art:
-- MSA
Replies
Oh yeah, I'm there. Gonna drop $8,500 on a sketch. That's for sure!
But you're right, much better to spend your money on some fine art. This fine artist just opened a big exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, so I've been seeing the local paper oohing and ahhing over his wonderful sense of artistry.
I'd tell you the name of this particular piece, but that might skew your perspective of what the artist is trying to say and color your perception of its message.
The most ironic part is the exhibit has large warnings not to videotape or take still photos of any art in the exhibit, even though you can do that in any other room in the museum. We must protect our copyrights, you know.
In fact, Lichtenstein's website has a copyright page that you must agree to before you can enter the site. The background is a big, growling dog that was ripped of from Joe Kubert. http://www.lichtensteinfoundation.org/grrr.htm
As Hilary Barta said in an article in which the Tribune accompanied him to the exhibit, it would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
I may have digressed a bit here.
-- MSA
Well worth saying though. The irony!
That Schuster-drawn Superman will go for much more than 8K and will be worth much more than whatever it sells for in a few years.
Superman is a blockbusting icon of popular culture and there he is drawn by his original creator. The picture looks good too. Siegel and Schuster gave him some sort of personality that later creators couldn't quite recapture, even if they'd wanted to. Humourous and a little smug!
Oops. Sorry, my humor was lost and I appear to have struck a nerve. (I didn't realize the size and value of this piece.)
Interesting that Lichtenstein's estate is so concerned with copyright when he basically copied other people's work for these paintings. I wonder if there's any information somewhere on the original sources of the various paintings - wikipedia lists some but you have to look it up on GCD to get the full credit. I can't imagine any of the artists got anything for it. On the one hand, the idea of appropriating work to create new work is something I can understand and be sympathetic to. On the other hand, everyone has become so touchy about it now - the comic companies in particular - it would be gross hypocrisy, if nothing else, that those artists weren't somehow included in the spoils. Hah!
I suppose in a truly fair brand protected world, someone like Elmore James would be a gazillionaire for the riff from Dust My Broom. On the other hand as Art Spiegelman said, "Lichtenstein did no more or less for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup."
Andy
Here are a few of the original sources:
http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/02/02/deconstructing-lichtenstei...
You can read The Chicago Tribune article where they accompanied Hilary Barta to the exhibit to get his thoughts here:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-05-11/entertainment/ct-ae-0...
My three favorite parts of the article are:
1. They say they invited Geof Darrow to come, too, but he declined because the exhibit would probably tick him off too much.
2. Barta says he can identify most of the original artists, and Lichtenstein mostly managed to duplicate their work while removing the vitality of the panel in the process..
3. Reading the Art Institute's curator explain why they didn't feel it was necessary to credit the original sources of the artwork.
There's another Lichtenstein blog online that paraphrases J. Jonah Jameson's favorite Spidey headline, saying: "Lichtenstein: Plagiarist or Art Thief?"
On the one hand, the idea of appropriating work to create new work is something I can understand and be sympathetic to.
I agree, but I don't think Lichtenstein added anything to these works or changed them sufficiently to qualify as adding original thought. It doesn't make the same kind of statement as Warhol's soup can.
I wonder what would happen if someone held an exhibit blowing up the original panels?
it would be gross hypocrisy, if nothing else, that those artists weren't somehow included in the spoils. Hah!
Yeah, that's the true irony. If Lichtenstein were to pay for appropriating the work, he probably would have paid the company for infringing on their copyright, not the artist, because they'd already been exploited by someone else. But, of course, he didn't. But had anyone else appropriated Mickey and Donald's images as Lichtenstein did, you can bet Disney would've been all over them!
-- MSA
The article says he identified the sources but not the artists but in all fairness, in those days unless you were Roy and Jerry you wouldn't have had any idea who did what, short of contacting the company and asking which might have woken the sleeping dog.
I also agree with Hilary Barta's last word - it is very ironic to get so uptight about taking a picture of something that is itself an unsolicited copy.
It all makes me think of that great quote from Wally Wood which I saw hanging on the door of the art studio at a magazine I used to work for. It said: "what you can't draw, trace; what you can't trace, copy; and what you can't copy, steal".
Words to live by, I say. :)
Andy
It's gotten a little easier to identify artists today, so there'd be a better chance of Barta knowing them than people at the time Lichtenstein did them. But some of his choices were from lesser-known guys who were harder to identify.
The Deconstructing article identifies some of the panels but still doesn't know who drew them, which adds even more irony to it. Lichtenstein gets huge credit for being "influenced" by an anonymous guy we still can't identify.That's not the way it usually goes.
Wood quote is pretty much the way things work, as most creativity is a matter of working off influences. There are lots of artists for whom it's easy to trace back to their influences (and Wood was one of them for many later guys). I think the most amazing change was for Barry Windsor Smith, who started out as a Kirby clone and became something entirely different.
I'm not sure Wood meant "take a random panel from some guy's work and trace it and sell it for big bucks as fine art," though. The irony is that nobody can really use those Lichtenstein paintings as their inspiration. If I swipe the growling dog from Lichtenstein's copyright page, nobody is gonna think I was influenced by Lichtenstein. They're gonna think I swiped Pooch. And I did.
-- MSA
I rather think Wood meant to "take a random panel from some guy's work and trace it and sell it" for small bucks to his editor. :)
In point of fact, one could argue that no one was hurt by Lichtenstein doing what he did because the original artist never could have - or would have - done the same thing with his own work. I think there is something about the appropriation that made it significant. Joe Kubert blowing up a drawing of a dog would not have made much of a splash - except maybe to us.
Which of course makes L's copyright statement all the more ironic (never mind cynical).
Andy