Out of Line: The Art of Jules Feiffer

381 Pages·2015·19.65 MB·English

by  Martha Fay

Jules Feiffer’s art portfolio (front), from a class taught by Max Wilkes in Feiffer’s junior year at James
Monroe High School in the Bronx, c. 1946.
Undated illustration from series appearing on this page.
Untitled dancer, June 2014.
Jules Feiffer as Fred Astaire, created for Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University, to
celebrate his visit as Flinn Foundation Centennial Lecturer and Scholar-in-Residence, November 27–
December 2, 2006.
Original art for portfolio sample, c. 1957.
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Boy with Pencil, Man with Pen
by Leonard S. Marcus
FOREWORD
Introducing Jules Feiffer
by Mike Nichols
ONE Beginnings…
TWO Apprenticeship
THREE The Army
FOUR Artist in Waiting
FIVE Sick Sick Sick
SIX Feiffer Is Famous
SEVEN Branching Out
EIGHT The Grown-up
NINE The Man in the Ceiling
SOURCES
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF JULES FEIFFER
INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS
Detail from The Man in the Ceiling, 1993.
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INTRODUCTION
Boy with Pencil, Man with Pen
by Leonard S. Marcus
ules Feiffer is an American original, an artist and writer of breathtaking
ambition, fearless honesty, impertinent wit, and unyielding faith in the
value of the quintessentially American act of having one’s say. For
more than forty years, as the creator of the weekly Village Voice
cartoon strip Feiffer, he blithely took the measure of the people in power at
every level of our national life: from megalomaniacal presidents to browbeating
parents, from buttoned-down corporate types to phony-baloney hucksters and
hipsters of every stripe and persuasion. Week after week, as the ultimate anti–
Organization Man, Feiffer demolished for readers the psychic distance between
his audience and the double-speaking people-in-high-places of the moment, as
much as to say, We’re all in this together and so have every right and reason to
know the score. A Feiffer strip was a bracing wake-up call. A prompt to keener
self-and civic awareness. It was also usually good for a laugh.
Throughout the tumult of the Cold War, Vietnam era, sexual revolution, civil
rights struggles, women’s movement, and trickle-down Reaganomics, Feiffer
kept his satirical cool, reading between the lines of mind-bendingly complex
issues with anthropological detachment and a comedian’s instincts for
incongruity and timing. The short-form cartoon strip format he adopted,
averaging six to eight panels per installment, proved to be an ideal perch from
which to parse the absurdity—or hypocrisy—of just about anything. A Feiffer
strip was part Nichols and May stand-up routine, and part breakthrough session