pic writing research

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Pictorial writing and illustration Matthew Broersma

Master’s Degree in Visual Communication

Birmingham Institute of Art & Design

University of Central England

July 2005



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M a s t e r ’ s D e g r e e

Research



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P i c t o r i a l W r i t i n g a n d I l l u s t r a t i o n



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Research

In a recent interview[2], the illustrator and designer Gary Baseman (fg

2) brought up a term he invented to describe his way of working across

different media, including editorial illustration, advertising, games and

toy design, television, lm and paintings intended for gallery exhibition.

I have actually created a term for this - Pervasive Art. The notion is that

as long as you stay true to your aesthetic, and have a strong sense of

meaning, then the work can be appropriate in almost any medium - from

print to TV to lm to paintings to commerce. I think a lot of artists are

doing this, and it’s my goal.

But he acknowledged that this way of working is unusual and can be

difcult: ‘Even though I’ve been around for a while, I always have tointroduce myself to a new audience. This can be very frustrating, but

the thing I’ve learned is that everyone has their blinders on and are

involved in their own areas.’

We take it for granted that there are different media and art forms,

each sectioned off from the others, and we don’t expect, for example,

conceptual artists to write television screenplays. On the other hand,

there are the occasional reminders that maybe these boundaries a little

arbitrary, that they only reinforce conventional ways of thinking and

act as a barrier to originality. There’s this nagging question when you

look at a political cartoon in the newspaper or watch a particularly

inventive sitcom: ‘But is it art?’ And why, after all, should a painter be

lionised for enlarging images from comic books, when comic books

themselves are considered, at best, ‘paraliterature’?

As an artist working in the eld of illustration, it’s worth looking at

these questions. Illustration is part of a popular visual tradition that

is built into the fabric of Western culture and continues to ourish,

but is usually ignored by critics because it doesn’t t into conventional

arguments about ne art. For illustration to have vitality and meaning,

it needs to be open to the inuence of the history of popular and neart. Likewise, ne artists who limit themselves to the stale connes of

conceptual art, shutting themselves off from the entire Western visual

tradition, are likely to become even more tedious than they already are.

The theory that I’ve found useful as a way of approaching this problem

is what I call pictorial writing, which is a loose translation of the term

ut pictura poesis, ‘as is poetry, so is the picture’, with ‘poetry’ standing

in for literature generally. A quote from Horace, it was resurrected

in the Renaissance and ultimately used to justify an laundry-list of

tiresome rules - such as that pictures, like poetry, should representidealised gures in historical settings - in what became known as

academic painting. However, dogma aside, the theory represented an

underlying assumption in Europe about all kinds of visual art, up until

the end of the second world war, which was as a kind of literature

2 A Gary Baseman

creation, from the

gallery show in

New York City.

(Strangeco.com.)

Preceding pagesThe Mesmerist (de-

tail from p. 13).

Image from personal

diary (showing a trip

to Norwich Cathe-

dral).



that communicated something. Even the most experimental artists

before that, such as Picasso, never strayed into purely abstract art[3].

We might think of modernism as the invention of an intellectual elite

which inevitably separated itself more and more from the realities

of the day, but it has been shown that just the opposite is true - early

20th century avant-garde movements such as Expressionism, Dada

and Surrealism drew on ideas that were sweeping through all levels of

society[4]. One current progressive group combines protests against the

invasion of Iraq with the collective authorship of popular thrillers[5].

All this is just to make the point that the idea of pictures as something

essentially different from other kinds of ‘literature’ is relatively new.

Instead, it was long taken for granted that all kinds of visual and

literary art inuenced each other, owed across borders, and was part

of an international culture that was common to different classes of

society across Europe[6]. Though society and culture are increasingly

atomised, art still functions in this way; ideas bubble up from the

population into television, novels, lms and comic books, and return

to the popular culture transformed. Comic strips and animated lmsserve the same function in society now that woodcuts and copperplate

engravings did in the centuries between the invention of printing and

the advent of electronic media.

The Middle Ages

The middle ages is the starting point for European pictorial writing,

and is the source of much of the iconography, folklore, customs, sayings

and conventional wisdom that still informs Western visual art. For later

artists, the period came to represent everything that was opposed tothe cold, calculating, soulless modern world; movements like the pre-

Raphaelites, the Symbolists, Die Brücke and the later Expressionists

drew on the spirit of medieval art in order to inject new life and

relevance into art. When we look at the medieval world, the intellectual

barriers we take for granted today disappear: it is suddenly impossible

to draw clear distinctions between art, science, mythology, folklore,

magic and religion.

What makes this period such an inspiration to artists, even now, is the

richness and vitality of its art and the fact that it seems to spring from

a culture shared by the illiterate peasant and the lord in his castle alike.

One example is the carvings found in medieval cathedral corbels, roof

bosses, misericords and the like. To a modern eye it is astonishing to

see bawdy jokes carved into the ceiling of a holy sanctuary alongside

grotesque images of saints being boiled alive (fg. 3). The contrast with,

say, the tepid religious art in the Vatican Museum’s modern section

couldn’t be greater.

Joseph Campbell argues that the thirteenth century, following the age

of the great crusades and the decline of the aristocratic taste of verse

romance, saw ‘the rst major ourishing in Europe of a literature of the people’[7], a literature that wasn’t conned to parchment.

3Figure of a saint being

boiled alive, roof carving

from Norwich Cathedral

(photo by the author).

4The Unjust Alewife, roof

carving from NorwichCathedral. See note 9.



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Prose compendiums of traditional lore began appearing, lled with

every kind of gathered anecdote and history of wonder.... A tumbling,

broad, inexhaustible ood of popular merry tales, hero, saint and

devil legends, animal fables, mock heroics, slap-stick jokes, riddles,

pious allegories and popular ballads burst abruptly into manuscript....

Compounded with themes from the Cloister and the Castle, mixed with

elements from the Bible and from the heathenness of the Orient, as well

as the deep pre-Christian past, the wonderful hurly-burly broke into the

stonework of the cathedrals, grinned from the stained glass, twisted andcurled in humourous grotesque in and out of the letters of illuminated

manuscripts, appeared in tapestries, on saddles and weapons, on trinket-

caskets, mirrors and combs.[8]

Such material made up a common culture in the Middle Ages that was

widely recognised wherever it appeared. Misericords, with their often

bizarre imagery, were just an extension of the sorts of things people

might mention in conversation, whether it is a scene of two women

plucking a fowl, Alexander’s ight into heaven in his basket, the owl inhis ignorance, the unjust alewife (fg. 4) or the monkey holding a ask

of urine[9]. References like these ll works we would today treat as

objective and scientic, like descriptions of animals or the workings of

the human body; a bestiary page of a lion gives it characteristics from

5One of the lion’s

characteristics is a fear

of cockerels. (Sekules,

Medieval Art.)

6 Anatomical illustra-

tion, English, c. 1292.

(Sekules, Medieval Art.)



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a fable, and a diagram of the human body becomes an opportunity for

artistic expression (fgs 5 and 6).

This literature was - like the rest of European culture - produced

through a long process of cultural ‘digestion’. Many of the tales and

legends of the Middle Ages originated from quite foreign sources, like

the Hindu Panchatantra, which in the thirteenth century made its

way into German and Italian from the original Sanskrit via Persian,

Arabic and Hebrew. ‘Anonymous’ tales as collected in compilations

made their way into the literary works of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Hans

Sachs and others, and certain tales from these authors became popular

and entered back into the body of oral literature. Dante’s fourteenth-

century Divine Comedy is full of references to medieval beliefs and

legends[10]. In the late eighteenth century the fashion of literary fairy

tales - inspired in part by Antoine Galland’s French translation of the

Thousand and One Nights - produced new tales which were again

assimilated into popular culture. All this material had acquired sucha genuine local avour by the time of the Brothers Grimm that it was

thought to have emerged from an aboriginal German soul[13].



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The same process applied to the way medieval visual art was created.

Artists didn’t see themselves as isolated individuals challenging

tradition, but rather as bringing tradition up to date. ‘It was more

common than not for an artist to look rst to a prototype or series

of exemplars, to enter into a dialogue with his or her sources, and

to innovate in terms of style or iconography by careful degrees of

departure from tradition and authority. In art the achievements of the

past were continually being consulted, absorbed, reinterpreted and

brought to new relevance in the works of the present.’[14] Seen in thislight, one can think of Picasso with his minotaurs (fg 8) as taking part

in the same process as the artists of the Middle Ages.

Popular prints

Alongside the revolutions of the Renaissance, Mannerism,

Romanticism, etc., popular prints continued to proliferate across

Europe, purveying tales, gags and and imagery that sometimes seems

to have been taken directly from medieval sources. Just as tales moved

back and forth between the oral and literary worlds, a particular legendmight be drawn from popular lore to be represented in a Bruegel

painting, which could later become the source of a cheap print[15].

There were a vast range of intermediate levels within the world of

prints between the two poles of academic and popular art, according

to time, place, social level and technical aspects of manufacture, and all

borrowed from one another, but ‘contrary to what is often suggested,

when one print is based on another it is usually not a slavish or clumsy

imitation but a new creation’[16].

Popular prints drew on all sorts of folklore[17] and were addressed

not to ‘the masses’ but to all levels of society; the word ‘popular’

has been dened in this sense as ‘read or seen by almost everybody

(and therefore) part of the consciousness of the educated as well as

the uneducated’[18]. Like medieval art, popular prints came to be

7

Bruegel’s Triumph of Death.

8One of Picasso’s mino-

taurs.



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seen by some as a way of revitalising ofcial art. In France, where

popular prints are known as imagerie populaire, realistic novelists like

Champeur and painters like Courbet opposed the naïve vigour of

the popular print to the blandness of academic art[19]. These prints

lled a place in the culture later taken over by newspaper cartoons,

chapbooks, penny dreadfuls, cheap illustrated novels (feuilleton)[19.5],

movie serials, comic books and television.

Bruegel

With the advent of the Renaissance and humanism, the history

of Western art began to pivot around individual art ‘geniuses’ and

intellectual progress, but these artists often took an active part in

producing prints for popular consumption, if they were not plagiarised

by printmakers. Dürer, who was obsessed with depicting the ideal

human form, produced copperplate engravings of a ner workmanship

than had ever been seen. The theoretical concerns that motivated

Dürer were lost on Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a near-contemporary,

whose vision of the world belonged essentially to the Middle Ages.

Bruegel’s vision - the suggestion of a world in miniature; the passion

for endless detail; the abrupt contrasts between the literal and the

fantastic; the mixture of brutality, licentiousness and guilt - his whole

way of seeing things belonged to the dying Middle Ages. Even the

seemingly straightforward seasonal landscapes belong to a systematised,

descriptive tradition that had its direct roots in medieval illuminated

manuscripts.[20]

Bruegel was, Roberts notes, indifferent to the illusionistic degree of

nish and the idealised gures that characterised his contemporaries.

His medieval approach can be clearly seen in paintings such as ‘TheTriumph of Death’ (fg 7) and in ‘The Harvesters’, which belongs to

the same tradition as the depiction of the month of September in the

fourteenth-century ‘Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry’. In such

paintings - as well as in his famous depictions of peasant festivals and



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9From Masereel’s Passion-

ate Journey.

10From Gary Baseman’s

gallery show ‘The Happy

Idiot’ - the gure of The

Happy Idiot and his

sinister alter ego.

11 A mermaid, from a

medieval misericord.



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sayings - Bruegel depicted themes familiar to the general populace,

drawing upon a long tradition of imagery.

Hogarth and other artists

Bruegel, Hieronymous Bosch and other Netherlandish painters came

to be seen as a distinct, ‘grotesque’ school, and William Hogarth was

initially seen as a sort of English exponent of this art. Hogarth was

one of the rst English artists to compete in his own country with the

more fashionable imports, and he was able to raise the tone of English

printmaking with engravings from his own paintings. But Hogarth, too,

drew on and was imitated by sources from popular culture, in paintings

and prints from the theatre for example. His print series, beginning

with A Harlot’s Progress (fg 14), are richly allusive to contemporary

iconography, including prints such as The Cully Flaug’d and The

London Curtezan[21]. The prints themselves became the subject of

references, as in a contemporary adaptation of Samuel Richardson’s

novel, Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded (fg 15), which set itself up as

a genteel answer to Hogarth’s supposed vulgarity. The print’s near-parody of Hogarth’s image, down to the heroine’s state of partial

undress, is pointed.

The late-nineteenth century Symbolists and the early twentieth century

Expressionists were among the other groups of artists drawing on the

medieval visual tradition as an antidote to the modern world. James

Ensor, a Belgian Symbolist who lived most of his life above his parents’

gift shop in Ostende, adapted medieval motifs such as the Dance of

Death and the second coming of Christ to an ironic modern context.

Death Pursuing the Human Herd and The Entry of Christ intoBrussels use a characteristic motif of the reclusive artist, the ambivalent

depiction of the mass of humanity. Frans Masereel, an Expressionist,

worked in woodcuts that have some of the simplicity and expressive

power of medieval prints. His Passionate Journey (fg 9) is a story of

social injustice and spiritual renewal told in 165 sequential images.

12Below left, the ‘Wheel of

Fortune’ from a medieval

Tarot deck.

13Below right, Baseman’s

gure ‘Dumb Luck’.

14Right, from Hogarth’s A

Harlot’s Progress.

15Below right, from an

illustrated version of

Richardson’s Pamela.



Conclusion

Artists continue to draw on striking symbolic imagery from the general

culture; in the modern world there may be more than ever a need

for visual symbolism that stimulates the imagination[22]. Nowadays

the imagery of mythology comes with a psychoanalytic veneer, as

with illustrator Baseman’s 2003 gallery show, ‘Happy Idiot and OtherPaintings of Unattainable Beauty’[23]. In a series of paintings using

dreamlike images such as mermaids, three-headed snowmen and

skeletons (fg 10), Baseman builds a highly personal allegory. ‘When

people see it they think it’s very child-like. But it’s really an adult

allegory about desire, longing, sex, the acceptance of man’s attraction

to unattainable beauty,’ he said in an interview with the Web site

Strangeco.com.

Baseman says he’s inspired by toys and advertising statues from the 20s

and 30s, early twentieth century painting, the Mexican art of Day of the Dead, Warner Bros. cartoons, Charles Addams and many other

inuences[24]. (Some of this iconography, like the Mexican tradition of

Day of the Dead (fg 16) or mermaids (fg 11), can be traced directly

back to medieval sources.) Unlike the work of Pop Artists, Baseman’s

work has a personal symbolism that is in contrast to its outwardly

commercial form; it communicates rather than commenting on itself. A

gure called Dumb Luck (fg 13), for example, is ‘a really happy rabbit

that is thrilled to have a lucky rabbit’s foot and yet has a peg leg.... This

character embodies my philosophy in life, of working as hard as you

can, and going after your dream and ultimately it’s all still up to dumb

luck and there’s always a price to pay.’ [25] It is worth noting that while

Baseman is inuenced by old toy design, he is also an active designer of

board games and toys, so that his designs are passing back into popular

culture.

16 A Mexican Day of the

Dead gure.

17The gure of the Em-

press (Hello Kitty herself)

from Joe Rosales’ card

deck, Hello Tarot.



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Notes

[2] Baseman, Gary. ‘Gary Baseman’s Happy Idiot’. Web: Strangeco.com, 2004. (Interview with

illustrator Gary Baseman.) See: http://www.strangeco.com/news/events_baseman.html

[3] During their more neoclassical moods Picasso and other modernists explicitly related their

art to the Western tradition, with images of nymphs, fauns, minotaurs and the like.

[4] In How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (see bibliography), Serge Guilbaut’s argument

that ‘art, even the art of the avant-garde, is part of the general culture, not autonomous or

above it’ is so outrageous that it apparently ‘forces us to think differently not only about art and

art history but about society itself ’, according to a review in the New York Times Book Review. So

what happened after the second world war? In his book, Guilbaut argues that a combination

of American nancial and military might, its safety from invaders and Nazis, and Europe

destroying itself in the second world war led to the US dominating ne art after 1945 - note

the absence of actual new ideas in this equation. It is now considered controversial to point

out that the greatest American artists, gures like Jackson Pollock and Edward Hopper, were

formed by an exposure to ideas developed in Europe - Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists

via the avant-garde who took refuge in New York City during the war. A book by another

French national, Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867-New York 1948 , by Annie

Cohen-Solal (translated by the author with Laurie Hurwitz-Attias, New York, Alfred A. Knopf,

2001), implicitly refutes Guilbaut’s thesis. But her history looks at modern art from the point

of view of patrons, dealers, collectors and museum directors, rather than artists, which sort of

speaks for itself.

[5] The Luther Blissett Project, now renamed Wu Ming, grew out of a progressive Italian

political movement and has authored a string of thrillers that promote an anarchistic world

view. The group, whose members prefer a collective name such as Wu Ming (Chinese for

‘nameless’), claim to have been inspired by ‘ancient legends regarding folk heroes, the language

adopted by the EZLN, genre cinema and Western pop culture in general, as well as the

manifold experiences of media pranksters and communication guerillas since the 1920s’ (Wu

Ming, Giap/digest #11, Oct 19, 2001, wumingfoundation.com), and equate their role to that

of oral historians in an African village. Most of their books have been bestsellers in translation

across Europe but so far only one, Q , has been published in the UK. Wu Ming give a radical

interpretation to the process of collective cultural production I will explore further on, arguing

that ‘writing is always a collective process, ideas are nobody’s property, “genius” does not exist,

there’s just a Great Recombination’ (Press release for Q , February 1999, lutherblissett.net).

[6] England isn’t the best example of this to look at, being a bit remote and aloof from

developments elsewhere in Europe, and indeed ultimately turning much of its medieval

gurative art into rubble. In Hogarth’s time the English well-to-do were still importing

continentals for their portraits and public art; Hogarth saw the founding of the rst British

Academy of Art in the early 18th century, a mere few centuries after those on the continent.

However the point is clear enough in countries like France, Germany, the Netherlands and

Italy, the same countries that were, coincidentally, conquered in succession by Caesar Augustus,Charlemagne and Napoleon. All this turmoil and bloodshed seems to have had a stimulating

effect on visual culture.

[7] Campbell, Joseph. The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales (folkloristic commentary). London:

Routledge, 1998. p. 849.

[8] ibid., p. 848-9

[9] Harding, Mike. A Little Book of Misericords. London: Aurum Press, 1998. p. 13. The

monkey image is ‘a satire on the quack doctors who were held to be as untrustworthy as a

monkey’. The unjust alewife is a gure often depicted as a denizen of Hell, naked and gleefully

brandishing a huge tankard; the idea is barmaids who give you less beer than they should will

end up paying for it. Evidently British people’s obsession with the amount of foam in beer is

not a new thing.

[10] For example the legend of Trajan and the poor widow. This legend, commemorating the

justice of the Trajan, tells how the emperor was once leaving Rome at the head of his army

and was stopped by a poor widow, who begged him for justice against the murderer of her

son. The emperor wanted to put her off, but when she reproached him for neglecting his duty



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he yielded. St Gregory is said to have seen this story represented as a bas-relief on Trajan’s

Column in the forum of Trajan, and been so impressed that he brought the dead emperor back

from Hell by his prayers and baptised him to salvation. Dante sees a sculpture representing this

legend in Purgatory - so vivid that he calls it ‘visible speech’[11] - and later meets Trajan in

the Heaven of the Just. Dorothy L. Sayers has this to say of the Trajan episode in Purgatory:

‘Whereas the modern art critic is apt to praise the art of the middle ages for its symbolism and

stylisation, the medieval critic himself tended to rejoice in an almost photographic realism....

However... the quality (Dante) admires is not so much realism as a (literally) supernatural

expressiveness.’[12]

[11] Alighieri, Dante. Purgatory. London: Penguin, 1955. p. 145

[12] Sayers, Dorothy Leigh. Purgatory (translation and commentary). London: Penguin, 1955.

p. 148-9

[13] The process wasn’t conned to Europe. The tale of Aladdin seems now to have been

invented by Galland, rather than translated from any Arabic original; but the tale went back

into Arabic from the famous French version, so that a pseudo-Arabic tale has become ‘genuine’.

[14] Sekules, Veronica. Medieval Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. p. 56.

[15] O’Connell, Sheila. The Popular Print in England. London: British Museum Press, 1999.

p. 162.

[16] French Popular Imagery: Five Centuries of Prints. London: Arts council of Great Britain,1974. (Catalogue for an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.) p. 7.

[17] There is, however, a marked distinction between the subject matter of continental prints

and those in England. In continental Europe, prints were overwhelmingly of a religious nature,

while in England they were overwhelmingly ballads. In 1709 Jonathan Swift wrote of:

Ballads pasted on the wall

Of Joan of France and English Moll,

Fair Rosamund and Robin Hood,

The little Children in the Wood...

Dramatist Thomas Holcroft recalled such titles as ‘Death and the Lady’, ‘Margaret’s Ghost’

and ‘King Charles’ Golden Rules’. (Both references from O’Connell, op. cit., p. 17-18.)

O’Connell notes that ‘literacy in Britain was much higher than has often been thought’ in

contrast with the continent.

[18] O’Connell, op. cit., p. 14.

[19] O’Connell writes: ‘With his book Histoire de l’imagerie populaire (1869) (Champeur)

hoped to encourage French artists to turn for inspiration to what he saw as the naïve but

vigorous work of provincial printmakers rather than the mediocrity of the Salon. Popular

prints were seen, not as in England as an antiquarian interest, but as a vital source for future

development.’ (O’Connell, op. cit., p. 220.)

[19.5] Nineteenth century France’s trashy illustrated novels, like many popular prints (such as

those commemorating executions) and television, appealed to popular and sometimes prurient

tastes. They were far more risqué and also far more widely read than Victorian serialisednovels, thanks to a British tax which made such books affordable only to the middle classes. Out

of the mass of anonymous feuilleton writers and illustrators rose giants like Balzac, Dumas and

Doré. V.S. Pritchett describes the rise of feuilleton as the result of a collapse of religious faith

and the orthodoxy of the eighteenth century.

...A new kind of writing was gobbled up by a public that sought its entertainment

in cheap novelettes of terror and cruelty, sexual license, improbable mystery and

melodramatic fantasy. Now wonder, adultery, sexual aberration, violence and

supernatural terrors were exotic subjects. They were imported from the Gothic novelists

in England, for with the fall of Napoleon English fashions ruled. (Pritchett, V.S. Balzac.

London: Chatto & Windus, 1973. p. 50.)

[20] Roberts, Keith. Bruegel. London: Phaidon Press, 2002. p. 6.

[21] Hallett, Mark. Hogarth. London: Phaidon Press, 2000. p. 88.

[22] Robert L. Delevoy argues the interest in symbolically rich art at the time he was writing

in the mid-seventies (and, I would argue, again today) is triggered by ‘a sudden awakening to

the symbolical void produced by electronic civi lisation’. Other symptoms are ‘the expansion



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of psychoanalysis; the spread of sub-rational ethnological lore; the fashion for science

ction and the occult sciences; the demand for holidays and escape; the attraction exercised

by clairvoyance; the fascination exercised by death’. (Delevoy, Robert L. Symbolists and

Symbolism. London: Macmillan, 1978. p. 9)

[23] Ended November 29, 2003, Earl McGrath Gallery, 20 W. 57th Street, New York, NY

10019. (Baseman, op. cit.)

[24] From ibid., some of Baseman’s many inuences:

I love toys. I have a collection of old advertising gures— the Michelin Man, FreddyKilowatt, old Felix the Cat toys as well. I don’t see them as toys, I see them as sculpture,

as works of art that happened to be created in the 20s and 30s and 40s. Pete the Pup

from the 30s is another obsession of mine. I don’t think he ever had a cartoon, so I see

him as a failed cartoon character and use him as a personal analogy. I own like 14 or 15

of these guys.... The inspiration comes from all over. I went to elementary school with

Bob Clampett’s daughter. He was responsible for a lot of the Warner Brothers cartoons

including Beany & Cecil, and is generally credited with creating Tweety Bird. Meeting

him at age 12 was major - I could see that a living person could accomplish things like

that. I come from an Eastern European heritage, so I really identity with artists and

painters that are very expressive and iconic; a lot of painters from the 30s and 40s;

Mexican art and Day of the Dead; Japanese artists like Nara and Murakami; Saul

Steinberg, Antoine Francois; humorists like Charles Adams and James Thurber, modern

painters like Schnabel and Koons; friends like Mark Ryden, Tim Biskup, the Clayton

Brothers, Shag; music like Elvis Costello and Leonard Cohen; John Lennon… there arealways people who saved your life at different times.

[25] ibid. It isn’t a stretch to say that the Dumb Luck gure is in the same spirit as a symbol like

the Rota Fortuna (‘Wheel of Fortune’, g 12), found in innumerable medieval manuscripts and

cathedral carvings, as well as in antiquarian Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Goth computer art and

hippy/New Age Tarot decks. (A friend of mine from San Antonio, Joe Rosales, once adapted

the symbolism of the Tarot deck to the Hello Kitty universe, which, while it didn’t have any

particular personal meaning for Rosales, worked surprisingly well. See g 17.) Below are the

words to the Latin lyric Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (used in Carl Orff ’s Carmina Burana) in a

literal English translation. Baseman’s comment on his philosophy of life is pretty much in the

same spirit.

O Fortune,

like the moon

you are changeable,

ever waxing

and waning;

hateful life

rst oppresses

and then soothes

as fancy takes it,

poverty

and power

it melts them like ice.

Fate - monstrous

and empty you whirling wheel,

you are malevolent,

well-being is in vain

and always fades to nothing,

shadowed

and veiled

you plague me too;

now through the game

I bring my bare back

to your villainy.

Fate is against me

in health

and virtue,driven on

and weighted down,

always enslaved.

So at this hour

without delay



2 0


pluck the vibrating strings;

since Fate

strikes down the strong man,

everyone weep with me!



2 1


Select bibliography

Aichele, K. Porter. Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Alighieri, Dante. Purgatory. London: Penguin, 1955.

Anglo, Michael. Penny Dreadfuls and Other Victorian Horrors.

London: Jupiter, 1977.

Ashton, John, ed. Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century. London:

Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly, 1882.

Ayres, James. British Folk Art. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1977.

Baseman, Gary. ‘Gary Baseman’s Happy Idiot’. Web: Strangeco.com,

2004. (Interview with illustrator Gary Baseman.) See: http://

www.strangeco.com/news/events_baseman.html

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