Portrait of the City

Two weeks ago, posted on Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York was, at least for me, an eye-opening account of New York artist-cartoonist, Denys Wortman. Despite his productivity, and despite his obvious talent, the name of Wortman has remained obscure over the years since his long period of steady work during the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Following his death in 1958, the artist’s work was relegated to storage boxes and dusty closets. The failure to give Denys Wortman the recognition he deserves is close to a crime.

Born in 1887, Wortman knew from a young age that he wanted to draw and enrolled in the New York School of Fine and Applied Art. His teacher was the near-famous Robert Henri, and his classmates included Edward Hopper, George Bellows and Rockwell Kent. In 1924 Wortman began drawing the comic panel, Metropolitan Movies in the New York World newspaper. This was the work that revealed his true strength and talent. He ultimately did over 9,000 drawings for the newspaper over thirty years. His work was also seen regularly in World Telegram, Sun, The Saturday Evening Post, Life and The New Yorker. Compared to such greats as Hogarth, Daumier and Renoir, the Metropolitan Museum and New York Public Library both maintained a complete collection of proofs of all his cartoons. Wortman’s work is a catalog of life in New York City during the Depression and years following.

Contemporary cartoonist and editor James Sturm only recently discovered Wortman in a vintage copy of his book, Mopey Dick and the Duke. Strongly impressed, Sturm set out to learn more about Wortman, eventually contacting the artist’s son, Denys Wortman VIII. Unbelievably, the son was holding an archive of more than 5,000 illustrations packed away in an old shed, battling rats, snow and rusty paperclips. The result of that find has become an exceptional tribute to this artist: Denys Wortman’s New York.

Wortman’s genius was not only his artistic excellence, but accuracy in portraying a city and its people through the Depression and the prosperity of World War II. He took seriously the advice of teacher, Robert Henri, to depict the world around him. If in nothing else, Wortman succeeded hugely in that aim. Almost every aspect of homelife, street life and the workplace has been depicted by the artist. His characters are working people, mothers, sailors, soldiers, actresses, bosses, children and nearly every other type found in New York City during the 30s and 40s.

What grabs the viewer at once in a Wortman drawing are composition, his distinctive arrangement of figures around the setting, be it street, rooftop or workplace, and the character of his models. Looking at his cartoons they practically exude a smell and feel of the location, drawing us into the world of his colorful, breathing characters.

Residents of New York are fortunate to now have an opportunity to see an exhibition of Denys Wortman originals at the Museum of the City of New York. “Denys Wortman Rediscovered” will continue through March 20.

Looking through Sturm’s book of 287 Wortman drawings, beyond the power of those drawings is the big puzzle: What explains the absence of Denys Wortman from fine art and comics history?

Evening Calm

There’s no other way to say it — Japan is a country besotted with the art of comics and graphic novels. For years it fascinated me that so many Japanese people from the young right up to the middle aged read comic books with such visible enthusiasm. My first year here, I was amazed by the stacks of thick, pulpy comic books at newsstands, all printed with gaudy front covers, but in what I perceived as boring black ink drawings on pale orange or green pages. And all of the comics at least one inch thick. A huge handful of pulp paper that could never be rolled and stuck in a back pocket. Eager to see what the excitement was about, I bought one of the just delivered comics and took it home to ‘study.’ At the time I was a long, long way from being able to read and appreciate the stories inside, so my purchase was much more a research project than the hope of a relaxing hour or so with funny stories about familiar characters. There was very little I could fathom the first time I pored over the pages of a Japanese comic book. It was way beyond my language skills.

But that was a long time ago, and since then I have gradually acquired at least a fair understanding of what’s going on in those pages. I’ve not read or tried to read a great number of them, but from my limited experience I learned enough to know that these comics are not really the kind of reading I most enjoy. I have an appreciation of the art, but less for the stories that the art illustrates or propels. Never seemed to be enough depth to the stories, but I say that knowing it can’t be true for all comic based stories. Unfortunately, I don’t have the degree of interest necessary to hunt down the higher quality or ‘classic’ examples of this genre.

Having said all that, I must now talk about a comic — or in another choice of words, ‘graphic novel’ — that knocked me right off my chair. A friend casually asked me one day what I thought a certain English sentence meant in a graphic novel called Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. He was trying to get a better understanding of the English, despite having the original Japanese version at hand. I gave my opinion of the meaning of the sentence he was pointing to, but added that it seemed a rather deep psychological conflict for a comic character of some twenty-five pages. The friend offered me both the original Japanese version, and the English translation to take home and read. And later that night, this comic book, or graphic novel, a meagre twenty-five pages of illustrated story knocked me off my chair.

The story of Town of Evening Calm takes the reader back to Hiroshima, ten years after the 1945 dropping of the atomic bomb. The main character of Yûnagi no machi, as the story is called in the original Japanese, is a young woman named Minami Hirano. She lost her father and a sister in the atomic bomb blast, and is one of the many victims of radiation sickness who lived through the nightmare of August 6, 1945. The story begins in 1955, when Minami is troubled by horrible dreams of 1945, by “survivor’s guilt,” and the question of why she is alive.

Despite an outward appearance of being well-adjusted and content in life, the character is deeply troubled by nightmares of the atomic bomb, of guilt she feels over being alive when so many others died. There is guilt as well for not helping others at that time, thinking only of her own escape. Ten years later, each time a moment of joy or possible happiness comes into her life, Minami flashes on scenes of the bomb blast. The radiation sickness begins to weaken her more and more, and as her life slips away day by day, she wonders if the people who dropped the bomb (the Americans) are happy that one more Japanese is dying.

The graphic art in this book is especially good, and the writer/artist has used her drawings to fuel the movement of her story. There is the feeling in reading the book that story and art are carefully, skillfully wedded to produce the richest possible understanding of war, its aftermath, and the plight of the main character.

Read it and you’ll be glad you did.

Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms

by Fumiyo Kouno

First published in Japan by Futabasha in 2003.

English version published by Last Gasp, San Francisco, CA.