It’s yet another sign of the growing “respectability” of the comics medium that Basil Wolverton, the Michelangelo of Mad Magazine, is the subject of a career-spanning exhibition at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, and that this exhibition was reviewed with a major article, “The Van Gogh of the Gross Out” by Holland Cotter in Thursday’s New York Times.

 

Cotter does a good job of sketching the contours of Wolverton’s career, noting the artist’s crucial 1946 triumph in a contest held by Lil' Abner cartoonist Al Capp to depict Lena the Hyena, the ugliest girl in Lower Slobbovia.  The recognition that Wolverton received from winning this contest (his drawing was published in Life Magazine no less) was the springboard for his success in the 1950s where he became the Keeper of the Grotesque for Mad Magazine, a publication that Cotter describes as “a freakish spawn of the A-bomb era, an emanation for some dark, dada side of Disney, a stink bomb planted in the suburban Eden."

 

Though Cotter praises Wolverton’s imagination and technique, he notes that the artist “could be incredibly cruel” with creations that “look dreadfully diseased, or like genetic catastrophes, or like beings melted or scarred in an atomic blast.”  Cotter also contends that Wolverton’s art comes across as “spectacularly misogynistic,” and notes parallels between his works and Willem de Kooning’s images of women as fragmented lumps of matter with bared teeth and googly eyes from the same era.

 

Cotter thinks that it is not a coincidence that the artists who were influenced by Wolverton, a stellar group that includes Gary Panter, Peter Saul, R. Crumb, Kenny Scharf, Robert Williams, Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, Jim Nutt, and Jeffrey Vance were all male, though it goes without saying they are an extremely talented and influential group.

 

Cotter singles out Wolverton's apocalyptic Biblical illustrations for special praise and Fantagraphics has recently published The Wolverton Bible (see “Preview of the Wolverton Bible”).  In addition to The Wolverton Bible, Glen Bray and Daniel Harvey’s The Original Art of Basil Wolverton, published by Last Gasp in 2007, is a must for anyone seriously interested in Wolverton’s art.