New York, NY/ Newark, NJ -- One of America’s great popular art forms is given its first major museum examination in the landmark, two-part exhibition, Masters of American Comics, on view simultaneously at The Jewish Museum in New York City and The Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey from September 15, 2006 through January 28, 2007.  By focusing on 14 of the most innovative and influential artists – whose work will be seen in comprehensive presentations including conceptual sketches, finished drawings, rare printers’ proofs, printed newspaper pages, comic books, and graphic novels – the exhibition will vividly convey how comics have developed into a quintessential component of American culture.  Artists to be represented are: Winsor McCay, Lyonel Feininger, George Herriman, E.C. Segar, Frank King, Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, Charles M. Schulz, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Gary Panter and Chris Ware.

Nearly 600 objects will be exhibited by both institutions in a bright, colorful, and dynamic exhibition design to match the wealth of visual artistry on display. Comic strips from the first half of the 20^th century will be shown at The Newark Museum, and comic books from the 1950s onward will be featured at The Jewish Museum.  Unprecedented in its scope, Masters of American Comics provides understanding and insight into the medium of comics as an art form.  The work will be organized chronologically to be on view at the same time in both museums.  Masters of American Comics was jointly organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA).

“These were artists who used a perhaps unexpectedly sophisticated visual language to address the social and political issues of their time,” said Mary Sue Sweeney Price, Director of The Newark Museum.  “Their achievements as American artists are deserving of the renewed interest and scholarship embodied in this exhibit.” 

Visitors will discover how comics have grappled with such critical issues as immigration, war, memory, social consciousness, and marginalization.  In fact, according to Ruth Beesch, Deputy Director for Program at The Jewish Museum, “The history of comics is ultimately a history of the American 20^th century, with the social and political development of this country reflected and examined in as intelligent and artistic a means as in any avenue of visual representation.”

At The Newark Museum, the exhibition will trace the origins of American newspaper comic strips through the influential work of such pioneers as Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland), and George Herriman (Krazy Kat), who set the stage by defining the formal attributes of the genre in the early 1900s.  Focusing on the great achievements of this new art form through the century’s first decades, The Newark Museum’s presentation also includes the groundbreaking later work of Lyonel Feininger (The Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World), E.C. Segar (Thimble Theatre), Frank King (Gasoline Alley), Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates), and Charles M. Schulz (Peanuts).

Winsor McCay (c. 1869 – 1934) is universally praised as the finest draftsman to have worked in the comics medium, and is recognized for raising a disposable popular medium to unexpected heights of artistic expression.  He developed page compositions that have defined artistic comics ever since.  His most important comic strips are Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (1904) and Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905). McCay was also a pioneer in the medium of film animation and produced 10 animated films between 1911 and 1921.

Lyonel Feininger (1871 – 1956)) brought sophisticated Modernist currents of European art to the newspaper comic pages.  A founding member of the Bauhaus, Feininger was a celebrated painter whose career as a comic artist lasted less than a year.  Between 1906 and 1907, Feininger produced 51 pages of his features The Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World for the Chicago Tribune, which are exemplary for their combination of fine art and comic art.

George Herriman (1880 – 1944) developed a unique blend of language, design, ideas, and drawing, and can be credited for perfecting the style that has become the foundation of most subsequent comics – simple gestural lines that convey great emotion in whimsical characters.  Much more than simple entertainment for children, his work had a weight equal to any American art of the time.  He was the creator of the sophisticated and innovative Krazy Kat, which starred a cat and mouse that were first introduced in his comic strip The Dingbat Family in 1913.  Herriman continued to produce Krazy Kat until his death in 1944.

E. C. Segar (1894 – 1938) had the ability to connect comic scenes into spellbinding narratives, telling complex stories through a cast of funny characters using everyday language.  He began his career with the strip Charlie Chaplin’s Comic Capers, and started his own feature Barry the Boob in 1917.

Segar launched Thimble Theatre in 1919 with King Features, featuring a cast of performers who spoofed popular films and plays.  On January 17, 1929, Popeye first appeared in Thimble Theatre and made Segar the most popular cartoonist of his day by attracting millions of readers.

Frank King (1883 – 1969) created the comic strip Gasoline Alley in 1918, establishing a family of characters that grew old in real time.  The strip’s colorful Sunday pages were filled with unexpected fantasy and visual inventiveness.  One of King’s most original devices was to treat the entire page as a single scene that was still divided into the traditional panel structure.  His other features included Bobby Make-Believe and The Rectangle, a single-panel, black-and-white cartoon about life in Chicago.

Chester Gould (1900 – 1985) created a new comic genre with his famed detective strip, Dick Tracy, which debuted in 1931 and ran for 46 years.  The strip was remarkable for Gould’s exploitation of the properties of the printed page.  His stark, black-and-white drawings emphasized contrast, surface patterns, and unexpected juxtapositions to create a powerful sense of atmosphere.  Gould began his career as a cartoonist in 1917 when he won a context sponsored by The American Boy.  He published Fillum Fables (1924), Radio Cats (1924), and The Girl Friends (1931), but none caught on until he sent the Chicago Tribune a sample of Plainclothes Tracy, a strip about a modern day Sherlock Holmes that was renamed Dick Tracy.

Milton Caniff (1907 – 1988) created two masterpieces of graphic adventure, Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon.  His richly woven plots, memorable characters and dialogue, and exotic settings earned him the reputation as one of the great storytellers to work in the comic medium.  Caniff’s legacy was the development of a vocabulary of realistic suspense.  Terry and the Pirates ran in the Chicago Tribune from 1934 through 1946 (and continued under the pen of George Wundar until 1973).  It was followed by Steve Canyon, which debuted in 1947 and ran until a few months after Caniff’s death in 1988.

Charles M. Schulz (1922 – 2000) is the creator of Peanuts, one of America’s most iconographic and long-lasting comic strips.  The artist published his first drawing of his dog Spike – the inspiration for Snoopy – in the 1937 newspaper feature Believe it or Not! by Robert Ripley.  In 1950, Schulz sold his strip Li’l Folks to United Feature Syndicate.  Renamed Peanuts, it debuted in seven newspapers.  In 1952, the first book collection and the first Peanuts Sunday pages were published in 40 national newspapers.  Peanuts is still being distributed to over 2,000 international and national newspapers and boasts a daily readership of 90 million.

At The Jewish Museum, the second part of the exhibition will focus on comic book artists working from the 1950s to the present day, from the early Golden Age to the rise of the independent comics movement.  Particular attention is paid to such series as Will Eisner’s The Spirit and Jack Kirby’s Captain America and Fantastic Four, as well as to Harvey Kurtzman, whose MAD Magazine transformed the medium into one capable of great artistic expression and social commentary beginning in the early 1950s.  By the mid-1960s, R. Crumb’s work in Zap Comix added a new level of personal expression and extended the significant role of independent and underground comic books and graphic novels.  The medium continues to evolve today through the innovations of such artists as Gary Panter (Jimbo) and Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth).

Will Eisner (1917 – 2005) created an adult newspaper feature called The Spirit, and spun complicated stories balancing suspense, humor, and violence.  He used atmospheric backgrounds to convey the psychological state of his characters.  Complicated panel layouts and visual cues conveyed mood and content.  The Spirit, which debuted in 1940 and ended in 1952, was the most important bridge between newspaper comics and comic books.  Eisner was instrumental in developing the visual language of comic books in the way McCay earlier perfected the comic strip.  In 1978, he published what is often credited as the first modern graphic novel, A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories.

Jack Kirby (1917 – 1994), with Joe Simon, created the patriotic story of super soldier Captain America in 1941 and pioneered the romance comic genre with Young Romance in 1947.  Captain America was a superhero who devoted himself to fighting Hitler and echoed a character from Greek mythology and biblical narratives.  Later creations, like The Hulk, transformed comic books into great contemporary myths.  Characters operated in a world that was tangibly real and morally complex.  Kirby also experimented with abstract shape and color and other visual devices, perfected an explosive kinetic graphic style, and had his action sequences unfold frame to frame, reflecting the language of film. With Stan Lee, Kirby created some of the best-known Marvel superheroes, including The Fantastic Four in 1961 and The Incredible Hulk in 1962.  His many heroes were a cornerstone of American pop culture in the 1940s through the 1970s.

Harvey Kurtzman (1924 – 1993) achieved fame as a contributor and editor of the first 28 issues of MAD Magazine, initially published in 1952, a publication which brilliantly parodied some of society’s most cherished elements.  MAD Magazine greatly influenced the underground comics movement.  Visually, Kurtzman brought realism and a human perspective to complicated images and themes.  He also created Help!, which first published comics by R. Crumb.  Kurtzman’s work, including the ribald Little Annie Fannie, developed with Will Elder for Playboy, helped set the stage for the social, political, and sexual rebellions of the 1960s.

R. Crumb (b.1943) is widely acknowledged as the father of underground comics.  He first sold his counterculture Zap comics on the streets of San Francisco’s hippie neighborhood, Haight-Ashbury.  Radical in how he depicted sex, drugs, and fantasy, his work helped define 1960s youth counterculture, and its rejection of American mainstream values.  To give himself total freedom of expression, he brilliantly created an independent distribution system for his work.  His distinctive expressionistic style visually fit such psychologically revealing autobiographical works as Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, and Keep on Trucking.

Gary Panter (b.1950) created influential new work that looked unlike anything that preceded him, combining characters of seeming simplicity with distinctive line drawings.  While dealing with serious themes, he sought to convey that originality in the late 20^th century was more about sampling and combining existing information than in the expression of something new.  Panter began his work at Slash, a punk-rock magazine, and moved on to Raw.  He has also created a number of graphic novels, and was head set designer for the 1980s television show Pee Wee’s Playhouse.

Chris Ware (b. 1967) is a self-taught cartoonist known for his talent for blending painting, typography, music, theater, architecture, and skilled graphic design into the comic medium.  In the Acme Novelty Library, he used form and design to build upon comics’ tradition, and to find novel ways of narrating stories and revealing emotions.  His art reveals how an individual’s experience of the world is keyed by pre-existing images as much as reality.  Many of his plot lines are based on his own life.  Ware’s works include Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, The Acme Novelty Library, and Quimby the Mouse.

Comics serve as a mirror in which the central concerns of American life are portrayed by inventive artists who give us new ways of looking.  Of the 14 comic art masters featured in the show, co-curator Brian Walker has noted, “These artists are constantly reinventing things.  As soon as someone places them in a box, they’ll break out of it.”

Masters of American Comics was co-curated by independent scholars John Carlin and Brian Walker, and was coordinated by Hammer Museum Deputy Director of Collections and Director of the Gunwald Center Cynthia Burlingham and former Associate Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Michael Darling.  At The Jewish Museum, the exhibition is being coordinated by Alison Gass, Neubauer Family Foundation Curatorial Assistant, and at The Newark Museum, by Zette Emmons, Manager of Traveling Exhibitions.

A fully illustrated catalogue, published by the Hammer Museum and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, includes contributions on the individual artists by novelists, historians, critics, and artists, as well as a historical essay by co-curator John Carlin.

Visit The Jewish Museum at : http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/

Visit The Newark Museum at : www.NewarkMuseum.org