Dick Tracy: Chester Gould's Blueprint Expressionism at Billy Ireland Library & Museum

Start Date:

May 2, 2011

Through:

August 19, 2011

Location:

Reading Room Gallery
27 West 17th Avenue Mall

This year marks the 80th anniversary of Chester Gould’s celebrated comic strip, Dick Tracy. From 1931 to 1977, Gould (1900-1985) wrote and drew the popular continuity strip about a tough, intelligent, and incorruptible police detective who battles a parade of increasingly strange and grotesque villains.
The items in the exhibition were chosen by artist and author Art Spiegelman, a Wexner Center Residency Award recipient, with Jenny Robb, curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. According to Spiegelman, Dick Tracy “brought the front-page violence of the prohibition-era tabloids to the back of the newspaper. In today’s blood-soaked entertainment culture it’s hard to realize just how extravagantly brutal the original Dick Tracy must have seemed to its tens of millions of daily readers in the 1930s and 40s. It was The Sopranos of its day, but without the moral ambiguity.”
Spiegelman’s selections highlight Gould’s unique graphic style. He explains that “Gould coupled the precision of blueprints to the emotional intensity of the German Expressionist art taking place on the other side of the Atlantic... and he created a kind of Blueprint Expressionism.”
Dick Tracy: Chester Gould’s Blueprint Expressionism is on display from May 2 – August 19, 2011 and includes original comic strip art from the International Museum of Cartoon Art Collection and vintage newspaper pages and clippings from the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection. Examples of knock-offs, spoofs, and homages to Dick Tracy will also be featured including Al Capp’s character Fearless Fosdick, who appeared in L’il Abner.

_

Art Spiegelman Residency Events at OSU Wexner Center

Art Spiegelman Residency Events


One of the world’s most influential and acclaimed cartoon artists, Art Spiegelman is also a 2010–11 Wexner Center Residency Award artist in film/video. Spiegelman, along with figures such as Robert Crumb and Bill Griffith, was one of the key artists of the American underground comics movement in the 1960s and 1970s. As part of his residency, Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, his wife and another renowned authority on cartoon art, are presenting a series of lectures on a variety of topics related to Spiegelman’s work and the history of the genre.

Art Spiegelman
Dick Tracy, Chester Gould, and More

Thu, May 19, 2011
4:00PM

OSU Wexner Center Film/Video Theater

Art Spiegelman shares his appreciation for comics’ most famous police detective, Dick Tracy, as well as the art of the character’s creator, Chester Gould, who wrote and drew the strip for more than four decades in this lecture.
An expert on the history of his field, Spiegelman analyzes Gould’s work and places it within the greater context of comics’ history. His residency is a collaboration between the Wex and Ohio State’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, and he intends to develop a new project based on research in the Cartoon Library & Museum’s collection.
While you are here, check out the exhibition Dick Tracy: Chester Gould's Blueprint Expressionism, on view May 2‒August 19 in the cartoon library and museum.
Presented in conjunction with Ohio State’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

Francoise Mouly
TOON Books and Young Readers

Fri, May 20, 2011
4:00PM

OSU Wexner Center Film/Video Theater

Francoise Mouly, the art editor at the New Yorker magazine since 1993, discusses her efforts to promote literacy in children through such efforts as founding TOON Books, a series of hardcover comic books for children.
Mouly has been a key figure in comics since the early 1980s, when she cofounded the alternative comics' magazine RAW, which featured the work of Charles Burns, Gary Panter, and Chris Ware, to name just a few. In 2008, she launched TOON Books,with projects drawn by such acclaimed artists as Jeff Smith, Jay Lynch, Art Spiegelman, and Nadja Spiegelman (Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s daughter). The line of books has been a huge success with libraries, educators, and, most importantly, young readers.
Presented in conjunction with Ohio State’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.