Word: artistes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...winter's main show at Manhattan's Japan House Gallery, "Paris in Japan," is not popular stuff. Its subject looks almost quaintly peripheral. It sets out to describe the impact of French art on Japanese artists who went to Paris between 1890 and 1930, the highest years of French influence on world culture. It does not contain a single masterpiece; almost everything in it is derivative, and not always very intelligently so. One would not normally cross the street to see earnest Japanese pastiches of Renoir, looking like inflamed rubber dolls. The only artist in it whom anyone in America...
...some citizens cheer, others denounce him as the Bernhard Goetz of Gotham City, and the police commissioner issues a warrant for his arrest. He is not only a hero for a more cynical time, but the standard-bearer of a fresh form of imaginative fiction. In 1986, when Writer-Artist Frank Miller created his formidable Batman epic The Dark Knight Returns (Warner; 188 pages; $12.95), he conceived the adventure as a single narrative flow. Pictures went with the story, which was told like a movie in panels on paper. By strictest definition, that made The Dark Knight Returns a comic...
Something was stirring, all right, not only in the Batcave but also on the fringes of cultural experimentation. There another writer-artist, Art Spiegelman, brought forth Maus, a black-and-white line-drawn memoir of Hitler's Germany, where the Nazis are cats and the Jews are mice. Like The Dark Knight Returns, Maus (Pantheon; 159 pages; $8.95) came out in 1986. Warner has 80,000 copies of Knight in print. Pantheon reports that Maus, after eight printings totaling more than 100,000 copies, still sells an average of 1,000 a week. Spiegelman's tale is a hellish metaphor...
Graphic novels use, as the comics have for some time now, a whole battery of movie techniques. An artist like Miller or Dave Gibbons, who worked on Watchmen with Moore, can storyboard a zoom, a cross-fade, a jump cut or a lap dissolve with a deft immediacy that would beat many directors at their own game. Indeed, for anyone used to working the controls on a Laserdisc or VCR, freezing the frame or strobing the action, the expansive technique of graphic novels will seem comfortable and accessible...
Exports are up and imports are down, but the gap between the two is still large enough to keep the U. S. deep in debt. -- Once the hot new investment strategy, portfolio insurance loses popularity and takes part of the blame for Black Monday. -- A glib scam artist nets $10 million and a mail- fraud < charge. -- Digital audiotape is on the way. -- Sony will sell VHS as well as Beta...