Art Spiegelman was born in 1948 and has been a cartoonist since he was a teenager.
In 1992 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his creation of the two-volume
classic comic book Maus published in 1986 and 1991. In November of 1992,
Spiegelman became a contributing editor and artist for the New Yorker magazine
and his work has appeared on many of the covers since then.
At Tandem Press
he created two lithographic prints. Lead Pipe Sunday #2 is a two-sided print
which illustrates the death of comics, which have been blasted out of the
newspapers in recent years. On the front page there is a comic strip where
the imaginary character Derby Dugan appears with his dog. The character comes
from the novel by Tom DeHaven where he writes about an imaginary comic strip
artist called Walter Geebus. In the center panel we see a depiction of the
demise of comics, and allusions to many of our favorite comic characters are
represented including Happy Hooligan, Little Orphan Annie, Popeye, Hans and
Fritz, Nancy, and Dick Tracy. We also see references to Philip Guston and
Magritte's hat. The back panel of the print depicts an abstracted image of
a catastrophic crash.
The second print, Crossroads, is based on imagery
from Spiegelman's Maus books. In this haunting image, where all the people
are depicted as mice, we see Spiegelman's parents standing in the center
of a crossroads or swastika. In the top left-hand corner, is a depiction
of Gustave Dore's Wandering Jew, and on the bottom panel of the print we
see a depiction of the artist hailing a New York taxicab with his two children.
See biography for a full listing of collections and exhibitions
Biography in PDF format (400KB)
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