reviewed by Martha Kennedy
Chris Ware. Julien June Misserey and Benoît Peeters. Paris: Bibliothèque publique d’information, June 8-October 10, 2022. www.bpi.fr/exposition-chris-ware-bpi/
An outstanding exhibition
that featured the work of Chris Ware ran June 8 – October 10, 2022, at the Bibliothèque publique d’information (Bpi) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It was developed in
partnership with the Angoulême
International Comics Festival, which honored him with the Grand Lifetime
Achievement Award in June of 2021. The exhibition, developed in close
collaboration with Ware, celebrated his prodigious talent and inventiveness in
comics, an area in which he has pushed expressive and formal boundaries. Prior
to this major international honor during his nearly 40-year career, Ware had
already received many other prestigious awards including: several Ignatz,
Harvey, and Eisner awards, the Guardian First Book Award, an American Book
Award, the Prize for the best album at the Angoulême Festival and Critic’s Prize, and Grand Prize of the
city of Angoulême.
I had the pleasure of
viewing this impressive retrospective in person this past summer. The show gave
a window into Ware’s prolific, multi-faceted work for which he has won great
international acclaim. The exhibition was for anyone interested in his work
including those highly versed in it as well as those beginning to discover it.
The overarching arrangement was
chronological with the following sections: issues of the Acme Novelty Library;
three groups that largely feature selected drawings and color enlargements for
each of Ware’s graphic novels; and Comics & Co., an area that presents examples
of the artist’s work for magazines, posters, and short animated films. Exhibit
texts were in French but included some portions in English in smaller type.
French editions of Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid on Earth, Building
Stories, and Rusty Brown, attached to stands, were easily browsed
and helped anchor each group of items related to each graphic novel.
On entering the Bpi, it was
easy to find the exhibition. Just inside the entry were large cases containing numerous
issues of The Acme Novelty Library, the ongoing series that Ware began
in the 1990s. The differing sizes, formats, and stylistically-changing cover
designs hinted at the contents within and several examples were opened to
display some of the highly varied comics stories (unsigned and purporting to be
by multiple creators), cutouts with instructions for assembly, and articles
addressed to readers. Some issues presented versions or portions of comics that
eventually became parts of Ware’s graphic novels including Jimmy Corrigan
the Smartest Kid on Earth.
The section devoted to Jimmy
Corrigan (2001) included drawings and enlargements that primarily highlight
the feelings and musings of Corrigan, the middle-aged, highly introverted
protagonist and his eventual meeting with the father long absent from his life.
The work is semi-autobiographical in that Ware draws upon his own experience of
meeting his own absent father while he was working on his novel. In one drawing
Ware shares Jimmy imagining what his father looks like by depicting multiple
images of older men’s bald heads shown sequentially in a grid. In an online
tour, curators Misserey and Peeters commented that making such use of the page
at this time was highly innovative formally. They also mentioned Ware’s
interest in evoking nostalgia tinged with sadness and detailed rendering of such
architectural settings as the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, for example. Such interest
continued into his work that followed.
The section on Building
Stories underscored the unconventional nature of this graphic novel that
consists of fourteen separate printed works cased in a box that tell stories
about people living in one building. An
exhibit case containing multiple notebooks relating to the graphic novel gave a
glimpse into Ware’s creative process. As noted in the exhibit brochure, the stories
of people in the building gradually build a portrait of one resident, a woman florist
and aspiring artist with one leg. One of the most striking original drawings in
this section featured a life-size rendering of the artist’s daughter based on
her actual size at the time he drew it. This presented formal challenges in
balancing the large form with smaller visual units, a challenge that he handled
with impressive skill in composing the double page spread. Misserey and Peeters
observed that the drawings and color enlargements in this section demonstrate that
Ware had moved beyond a semi-autobiographical milieu to create a world that
reflects increasing engagement with others.
Some of the most compelling
pieces in the section on Rusty Brown portray the character Joanne Cole,
a Black teacher at the school attended by Rusty. To this reader, she is also
one of the most interesting and sympathetic characters in the novel. The
drawings on view included key scenes in her professional and personal history:
we see her seeking to connect with her students, her strong engagement with
playing the banjo (an interest shared with Ware), her careful interactions with
white colleagues (much of which require repression and self-containment),
qualities so well captured in Ware’s depictions. His imagery conveys a
broadening of his relationships with others in the world. I agree with Misserey
and Peeters who pointed to a growing sense of empathy and compassion toward
others that is seen in this work.
Midway through the show, a
video of Ware being interviewed in his home and studio provided an engaging interlude.
A clip that showed him at work using his straight edges and fine tipped pens conveys
some of the intense focus required to achieve the precision, care, and thoughtful
deliberation so evident in his work.
The section Comics & Co.
presented examples of such additional work as a beautifully drawn cover for The
Ragtime Ephemeralist, covers for The New Yorker, architectural
drawings, and short video animations. Ware’s designs for The New Yorker,
in particular, stand out not only as visually arresting but also as full of
nuanced, thoughtful perspectives on the state of American society that reference
the impacts of heightened socio-political divisions, the pandemic, threats of
mass shootings at schools, and more. His architectural drawings also reminded
me of how he uses this well-honed skill in rendering Midwestern architecture in
Omaha and Chicago, in particular, to evoke a sense of place that contributes to
narrative atmosphere and immediacy in his graphic novels.
Further evidence of Ware’s
multi-faceted interests and talent could be seen in several cases that
displayed small wooden objects--figures and toys that he fashioned by hand. While
some of these playful objects portrayed characters in his comics, others in a
case near the end of the show were made for family events such as birthdays. Including
such objects underscored the importance of family as well as work in his life.
When interviewed in
conjunction with this exhibition, Ware agreed that he identifies as a “full
‘book artist.’” As he draws, writes, and designs his books, he tries to keep in
mind the ways in which a human being is like a book in that it has a spine, is
“bigger on the inside that the outside,” and can convey the truth about itself
(or not.) He also said that a book is “also the only art which pretty much
anyone can afford and own.” While the original drawings in the exhibition are
one-of-a-kind, Ware also says that they represent “simply one step” in his
creative process: “the finished, printed object is the art itself.” This emphasis
on the book made the Bpi seem the perfect venue for this artist’s superb retrospective.
No matter what aspect of Ware’s work you find most compelling or admirable or challenging,
this exhibition shed light on your understanding of his art, him as an artist,
and a human being.
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