Open Letter To Artists (From An Art Critic) - Part 18
by Joan Altabe - 11/27/2006

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For Better or For Worse

Artists should be required to read the comic strip "For Better or For Worse."

While Fine Art regurgitates styles, cartoonist Lynn Johnston moves people the way Rembrandt did with his "Girl With Broom" — a portrait of a youngster who has seen too much — with good drawing and a down-to-earth storyline.

Remember when Johnston stirred a nation to weeping over a dead sheepdog. When was the last time you were whipped by an artwork? When was the last time an image inspired the outpouring of feeling that Johnston's comic strip did when a dog saved a child's life at the cost of its own?

Like the Old Master, Johnston’s models are her family and herself. Readers see their own families in hers.

Each day after the storyline about the dog began, people called her, starting at 7 in the morning, she told me. She thought it was because everyone was in tears over the Oklahoma bombing.

Particularly memorable was her drawing of the little girl April saying, "Daddy... He isn't breathing!" April's facial expression conjures up Picasso's 1937 painting "Weeping Woman." Like the modern master, Johnston didn't just show how it looks to feel badly, she showed how it feels.

Even newspaper editors, known for the thickness of their skin, called Johnston to talk about pets they'd lost.

That's what "For Better or For Worse" is about: life and death. The characters grow and age and develop in real time. And like real time, you can’t see how a story will end in one sitting, as you can in a film or a book. You have to wait 24 hours for the next installment that leads a little closer to the resolution.

Contemporary art could take lessons from this comic strip. While Johnston concentrates on rites of passage, on the human experience, Futurists are focusing on machines, Conceptualists on ideas, Performance artists on shock.

Remember when the hospital called with the news that the grandmother died and Ellie walked across the kitchen to her shaken father, her face screwed tight? It was the wistful look of the barmaid in "The Bar at the Folies-Bergere," which Edouard Manet painted when he was sick and about to die.

Remember how the father's body appeared to collapse from its frame? It was the dispirited figure in Camille Corot's "The Letter," suggesting bad news.

Johnston doesn't play her audience for cheap thrills. In the same week Farley the dog died, she depicted April's father telling her that life is temporary and people should appreciate those they love every day.

It was Johnston's way of consoling her readers. As she told me at the time, "I always have to be aware that I could misuse the chunk of space I get in the paper."

Don't you wish the fine art world would be as sensitive?

If art isn't dredging up used-up styles, it's dwelling on technique. So what you get are slick pictures with little to say. Like photos, everything looks once removed from visceral experience - smooth and skin-deep.

And even if the art goes beyond a photograph made into a painting, even if it imparts real life in a spontaneous way, too often it doesn’t go beyond atmosphere. What you get is a depiction of a physical experience. There's nothing of one's inwardness, of an emotional life.

In a show of such "art" — the smooth and skin-deep variety — I overheard onlookers talking: "This is wonderful," said one who was praising a picture of a chair with a shirt draped over it. And another, admiring a different work, exclaimed, "This looks just like Wyeth's 'Christina's World.'"

I came away wondering why an art lover would find happiness in a copy.

— Joan Altabe | November 27, 2006

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