People Who Died

Harvey Pekar

Harvey Pekar was one of the first to see comics explicitly as art. His worldview was primarily literary, and he saw his comics as a kind of literature. I fell in love with his work in the early 1980s, and have treasured it since.


Sigmar Polke

Polke had been doing groundbreaking work in Germany for well over a decade when he had his first American show in 1982. It was, by all accounts, an eyeopener. Polke imitators sprang up. It's hard to blame them--he was such a font of creativity, any number of artists could make careers feeding off his table scraps. He's an artist I've always dug.


Al Williamson art (top) and Frank Frazetta (bottom)

Al Williamson and Frank Frazetta are two of the few remaining artists associated with the seminal E.C. Comics line of the 1950s. Both were extraordinarily skilled artists. Frazetta had a unique style that made him a favorite of metalheads for generations. I always thought Williamson was the more boring of the two. With a few exceptions--some of the work they did for E.C. Comics, Frazetta's work on L'il Abner, and some other adds and ends, these two artists dedicated their lives to illustrating fantasy kitsch. That was the thing about comics artist of their generation--they came along too early to see the field cracked open by the underground cartoonists of the 60s.


Louise Bourgeois

Louis Bourgeois was the coolest old lady of her time. I want to be that productive and creative when I'm in my 80s and 90s. I'll leave the tributizing to Hennesy Youngman.


Captain Beefheart

Captain Beefheart... I love you, you big dummy.

Note on Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting

Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting by Dietmar Elger

This book has been faulted for not delving too deep into Richter. But I don't see that as a big fault. It's part of the life-cycle of biography. First we have an official biography--and that is what this is. Elger is the director of the Gerhard Richter Archive and was Richter's secretary for a time. He had Richter's participation. Given this, the book could have been a complete whitewash, but it doesn't seem that way. What it does focus on, not surprisingly, is the work. Richter's personal life is outlined but not delved into. Now the next stage of biography for Richter will be an unofficial biography, probably after Richter's death, and it will be much more personal. That's the way it goes.

So should you wait for this next biography? Richter is 78 years old, so it might be many years before a "definitive" biography is written. But more important is that Elger's book is really good. It is substantial and beautifully illustrated. He does a good job of explaining Richter's various approaches to painting (and changes in style) over his career. He is good at describing the artistic scene in Germany, especially in the 1960s. And while he doesn't delve too deeply into Richter's personal life, he does deal with the way that Richter has a series of artistic interlocutors who important influences him--Sigmar Polke (who he met at Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the early '60s), Blinky Palermo, and his second wife Isa Genzken.

I've always liked Richter's paintings, and I feel I have a better understanding of them after reading this book. The book is beautiful and full of information about one of Germany's greatest artists.