New Horsemen, New Whores: Michael Caines “Revelations and Dog”

I always chuckle at the old joke about the dyslexic atheist holding up a sign saying, “There is no Dog!” Whenever talk turns to revelations and apocalypses, we all seem to be reading things backwards and upside down in hopes of making sense of the unknown, usually with comic results. Michael Caines’ Revelations and Dog riffs on the familiar song of the Book of Revelation to come up with a new tune for today’s topsy turvy world on the brink. It’s an almost perverse presentation to publish with Easter coming up, but Revelations and Dog’s joking may be the perfect antidote to the humorless, febrile dreams of religious radicalism. Caines comes up with the perfect new Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Whore of Babylon for today’s faithful, and unfaithful. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "New Horsemen, New Whores."

[Image: Michael Caines, Revelation chapter 6, ink and gouache on paper, 9.5 x 14 inches, 2009.]

[Many thanks to Mark Batty Publisher for providing me with a review copy of and the image from Revelations and Dog illustrated by Michael Caines.]

Scare Tactics: Banned Horror Comics of the 1950s

As American tumbled to the lowest point of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt rallied the country with the words, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” A little over two decades later, the United States government got into the fear business in a big way by shutting down one form of horror and replacing it with a form of their own. The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You to Read! brings the horror comics of the 1950s back to life. Selected, edited, and with commentary by Jim Trombetta, these pre-Comics Code comics tell an even scarier tale than that of vampires, werewolves, and zombies—a tale of censorship and control that should scare anyone who cares about art and cares about how governments shape it using tactics that are downright scary. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Scare Tactics."

[Many thanks to Abrams ComicArts for providing me with a review copy of The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You to Read! Selected, edited, and with commentary by Jim Trombetta.]

Mad Prophet

Any red-blooded American boy who ever picked up an issue of Mad Magazine might not know the name but certainly knows by sight the style of Basil Wolverton. Monte Wolverton, Basil’s son, continues to work in a similar style as his father, bringing the bizarre, grotesque Wolverton look to new generations. Although Basil is best known for his Mad work, he himself wanted to be remembered for his little-known work for Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God that appeared in the magazine The Plain Truth. The Wolverton Bible: The Old Testament and Book of Revelation Through the Pen of Basil Wolverton, compiled by Monte Wolverton, brings together the religious work of his devoutly religious father and sheds new light on Basil as a serious illustrator. Basil worked on these 700 images illustrating the Bible from 1953 through 1974 while simultaneously working for Mad and other publications. “In all this, Wolverton saw no conflict,” Monte explains of his father. “One realm was religious and the other secular. He believed religious people need to lighten up and not take themselves seriously.” Part of that lightening up process involved Basil’s dramatic, almost cinematic approach, which could reinvigorate old tales such as Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (above) with a fresh, contemporary look.

Wolverton began corresponding with Armstrong in the 1940s, after listening to Armstrong’s radio show The World Tomorrow. By 1943, Wolverton was an elder in the Worldwide Church of God and soon on the church’s board. Armstrong soon enlisted Wolverton to use his art to reach younger audiences. “From the beginning,” Monte writes, “both Wolverton and Armstrong sought to create a story that followed the Bible account more accurately than children’s Bible story books on the market in the 1950s” that “laundered” the story’s darker aspects. “Wolverton’s comic horror work and his grotesquely humorous drawings were consistent with his theological understanding of the human condition,” Monte continues, explaining how Wolverton’s artistic style and religious beliefs meshed in his Biblical illustrations. Whereas other depictions of Noah’s Ark emphasized cute animals, Wolverton emphasized the plight of those left behind (above) who faced God’s watery wrath. Unfortunately, Wolverton’s recovery of the violence of the original text challenged the sensibilities of the intended youthful audience as well as the patience of their parents. The Woverton Bible almost bursts open with pictures of masses of humanity facing one catastrophe after another—all drawn directly from the Bible itself, but still capable of traumatizing children unaccustomed to that side of the story.

Wolverton’s illustrations of the Old Testament bring many of the stale tales to life in ways no other twentieth-century artist has. Yet, Wolverton didn’t see himself as a “fine artist.” “Unlike many comic-book artists,” Grant Giessman writes in his Foreword, “Wolverton considered himself to be primarily a comic artist, with no secret longing to break into the fine arts, do portrait painting, or escape the ‘comic-book ghetto’ by going into advertising work. He loved the genre, with all of its perceived limitations.” In Wolverton’s hands, the “limitations” of the comic genre become strengths, especially when tackling the visually challenging text of the Book of Revelations. Wolverton takes the passage discussing “Death on a Pale Horse” and converts the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse into bombers raining death upon the landscape (above). Such images, which played into the already present 1950s fears of nuclear annihilation from above, drew the most complaints—a testament to the power these works had to take ancient words and make them feel immediately present.

Wolverton reveled in unleashing the full extent of his macabre imagination on the material found in Revelations. He called Mutants (above), one of his favorite images, even though Armstrong blanched at using it in The Plain Truth out of fear of how it would affect young minds. Despite such concerns, Giessman writes, “Armstrong clearly had the right man for the job, because it’s difficult to gaze for very long upon Wolverton’s horrific end-of-the-world visions and not wonder if you really shouldn’t get right with Jesus.” Armstrong’s belief in the Second Commandment’s prohibition of images of God kept Wolverton from moving on to the New Testament and the story of Jesus. A stroke in 1974 left Wolverton unable to continue working entirely until his death in 1978. Looking at Wolverton’s body of religious work, you truly get the sense that he drew directly from his body of beliefs. Monte compares his father’s work to that of Hieronymus Bosch, and I agree. Wolverton’s mind set was distinctly that of the middle ages, yet he lived in modern times. In the 1500s, Woverton would have been right at home, whereas in the twentieth century he made the most of thinking and working outside of the mainstream.

As much as the horrific and Bosch-esque in Wolverton’s art strikes you immediately, it’s also important to recognize the beauty of many of his visions, such as his imagining of Jacob’s dreaming of the “stairway to heaven” (above), also known as “Jacob’s Ladder.” In these beautiful images, Wolverton reminds me of another artistic outsider of profound faith—William Blake. Blake painted his unique vision of the Christian faith and emphasized the sublime over the terrible, whereas Wolverton emphasized the reverse, but at some point the two artists intersect in a span that is much too brief, yet touchingly beautiful to behold. When Wolverton draws the creation of Adam using over a thousand dots, we feel as if he’s is building up the first man atom by atom just as God himself did. The Wolverton Bible still has the ability to revolt and repulse viewers, but that is just one aspect of its overall ability to make these well-known stories seem new and, more importantly, inescapably human.

[Many thanks to Fantagraphics Books for providing me with a review copy of Basil Wolverton’s The Wolverton Bible: The Old Testament and Book of Revelation Through the Pen of Basil Wolverton and for the images from the book.]

The Original Maverick

Peter Saul, Self, 1987; Acrylic and oil on canvas, 72 x 100 inches (182.9 x 254 cm); Private collection, New York; courtesy George Adams Gallery, New York.

In the 1953 film The Wild One, someone asks Marlon Brando’s character, a rough motorcycle gang leader, “What are you rebelling against?” Brando snarls back, “Whattya got?” Similarly, Peter Saul never met a idea he couldn’t rebel against in his art. In a retrospective exhibition currently at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the motivations of this original maverick are examined. “Considering how much American art over the past two decades has been devoted to dissecting the dark underbelly of the beached American dream,” writes Dan Cameron in his essay “Front Row Seats in Hell” in the exhibition catalogue, “one might even be excused for thinking that Saul is one of the quintessential U.S. painters of the past 50 years, as egregiously underrated as he is pathologically incorrigible.” Saul’s incorrigibility blankets over his ability as both an artist and a social commentator. In a work such as Self (above, from 1987), Saul cracks open his own cranium to reveal the conflicting forces within. “Expression (a firecracker) and Abuse (a lit cigarette) seem to be in a perpetual standoff with Knowledge (a soup spoon) and Esteem (a condom nailed to a cross),” Cameron writes of Self. Fearful of falling into what Saul calls “that giant pit of so-called truth, good intentions, and responsible attitude,” the artist maintains a uneasy alliance with his own head while picking through modern systems of belief and refusing to buy into any of them.


Peter Saul, Icebox Number 7, 1963; Oil on canvas, 74 1/2 x 63 inches (188 x 160 cm); Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Bill Lenox, Dallas.

The first modern system of belief Saul strikes out at is consumerism in works such as Icebox Number 7 (above). The Icebox series offers “compendiums of aggressive consumer madness,” writes Michael Duncan in “The Spectacular Wrath of Saul: Peter Saul’s History Paintings.” Duncan places Saul within the larger tradition of history painting kicking and screaming, just the way Saul would prefer. Saul paints the Icebox series just after returning to America after living in Holland and Paris. As Cameron points out, Saul not only leaves Europe itself behind but also European style itself. Upon Saul’s return, he adopts “a more slickly hard-edged, hyper-American technique” that “successfully fused the distorted angst of Francis Bacon with the aerodynamic sleekness of H.C. Westermann.” Once Saul set his sights on America as his main subject, the possibilities seemed endless, especially since he attacks every side of every issue. Although Saul is personally more liberal than conservative, Cameron believes, “what appears to motivate Saul more than rage is indignation over the hypocrisy of American liberals.” For Saul, liberals can never be liberal enough as they always cling to some ideology. Saul seeks and ideology-free zone, which may be impossible but remains the only climate his conscience can survive in.

Peter Saul, Columbus Discovers America, 1992-95; Acrylic and oil on canvas 96 x 120 inches (243.8 x 304.8 cm); Levy Family Collection, Dallas.

When it came to history painting, Saul first thought locally, then globally. Living in California in the 1960s, during the draconian governorship of Ronald Reagan, Saul depicted Reagan and his policies with “scatological vehemence” in works such as Government of California, according to Cameron. Saul also protested the Vietnam War, while simultaneously depicting the war crimes of American soldiers. “There are no heroes in his paintings, no victories, no coronations, no causes for inspiration or spiritual uplift,” Duncan writes of Saul’s unique brand of history painting. Some of Saul’s take on modern society’s accepted level of madness comes from the sensibility and visual style of Mad Magazine, especially the art of Basil Wolverton. The relentless irreverence of Mad Magazine, aimed at an “immature” audience, informs Saul’s work in that he refuses to grow up if that means growing comfortable with injustice in any form, especially passive acceptance. “I feel completely relaxed in rebellion,” Saul tells Robert Storr in the extended interview in the catalogue. In works such as Columbus Discovers America (above), Saul “has developed a style dedicated to the dystopian reversal of all ideals—a comic-book grand manner,” Duncan believes. For those growing up on the rebellion of comic books and their “ugly” style, Saul’s work reveals a whole new way of seeing the world as an adult through the eyes of a perpetually angry young man.

Peter Saul, Cold Sweat, 1999; Acrylic on canvas, 55 ¼ x 66 3/4 inches (140.3 x 169.5 cm); Private collection, New York; courtesy David Nolan Gallery, New York.

Saul, of course, is no longer a young man. Cold Sweat (above) shows an aging figure coming to terms with the limits of his physicality. As Cameron points out, Cold Sweat presents “the eruption of the body’s interior fluids as a problem in social etiquette for those who are viewing from the outside, while discounting the genuine agony of the poor aging slob who cannot control the workings of his own body.” Similarly, Saul’s work remains uncomfortable for everyone, including himself in terms of a failure to achieve much recognition in the art world. “The professional art world seemed to me like working in an office building,” Saul says of his early days and his choice to buck the system. Works such as Double de Kooning Ducks and Donald Duck on Toilet Descending a Soft Watch spoof, respectively, Willem de Kooning, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, and Salvador Dali, just a few of the art history targets Saul set his sights on. Saul never asks for acceptance by the art world, knowing that none would be coming and not really wanting it if it did. By adopting a brightly colored, cartoonish style, Saul circumvents all art world apparatus and speaks directly to the viewer, which, as Cameron writes, “is another way of saying to the critical establishment that while [Saul] may care about its judgments, he will always behave as if he has risen above them.” Saul prefers to sweat out the judgment of history, bathing in the knowledge that he remained true to himself throughout.

Peter Saul, Bush at Abu Ghraib, 2006; Acrylic on canvas 78 x 90 inches (198.1 x 228.6 cm); Hall Collection.

“There’s a tremendous need to be not seen as a racist, not seen as a sexist,” Saul tells Storr. “So I want to make sure I am seen as those things.” Even in his seventies, Saul still steps on toes. Bush at Abu Ghraib (above), reminds us “that nothing that can be summoned from the dregs of the individual creative imagination is anywhere near as terrible as the actual horrors taking place right now, in our name, somewhere on the opposite side of the planet.” Saul paints “ugly,” but in the “ugly” tradition of Goya, William Hogarth, William Blake, and others who step outside of the parameters of acceptance to reject a world. Dan Cameron, Michael Duncan, and Robert Storr’s Peter Saul and the accompanying exhibition introduce us to an artist who has been under our noses all along, saying all the things we should have been saying, and quietly waiting for a moment of understanding if not acceptance on his own terms and not those of the art world or society at large. This catalogue and exhibition are as much a blessing and a gift upon us as they are upon Saul, the real original maverick.

[Many thanks to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for providing me with a review copy of Dan Cameron, Michael Duncan, and Robert Storr’s Peter Saul and for the images above from the exhibition.]