ART: Maira Kalman - Illustrator of Wit and Joy Droll, whimsical, adroit perspectives on the macro and micro realities of contemporary living: the bounty of 25 years of Maira Kalman illustrations, designs, and textile work. Now delightfully, a frothy yet grave retrospective is given us at the “other museum” in the Sepulveda Pass, Skirball Cultural Center, West Los Angeles, CA.

Droll, whimsical, adroit perspectives on the macro and micro realities of contemporary living: the bounty of 25 years of Maira Kalman illustrations, designs, and textile work. Now delightfully, a frothy yet grave retrospective is given us at the “other museum” in the Sepulveda Pass, Skirball Cultural Center, West Los Angeles, CA.

 

We’ll all recognize her when we recall the singular covers for The New Yorker Ms. Kalman has illustrated over the years. Her style, though maybe we don’t know her name (yet) is one we rely on for those tickles and barbs that our reading may not otherwise provide.

 She combines a colorful graphic style that melds Matisse’s “decorative” sheen with the uplifting daily joy of Chagall.  Her preferred medium is gouache (those deadlines dictate fast-drying paint). Then a reminiscence of Saul Steinberg’s visual intelligence, and the comfy barbs of James Thurber (see dog-lover).  Pop-culture grazing and folk Americana add a post-modern New York polish.  A rapier text darts at us, but freed of any known type style.  It’s hand-written (usually on vellum overlaid onto the illustrations digitally) in a leisurely printed scroll, across, through and around the fresh, bright paintings.

Ms. Kalman declares herself in love with Abraham Lincoln, this squinting, unprepossessing woman, whose latest victory was a guest invitation to The Colbert Report (October 28).  Unfazed by media or an auditorium of fans, funny light takes come quickly, with incisive sincere affirmations of life’s astonishing experiences slipped deftly between, like an omelet being flipped.  She’s that transient – quick, you will miss something.  She slyly illustrates us back to daily awareness.  

She tried to wear shoes that were too big “…to slow down time”, she tells us.  (It didn’t work.) Reading the daily obituaries each morning “…sets the tone of her day”.  She’s Israeli-born, and has lived in the United States since she was 4, her immigrant parents escaping the Nazis.  It’s this experience, it seems, that offers a perspective on American values that enriches us, obliquely warning of the “fear of fear itself”.

A most singular book is Fireboat, a children’s book about 9-11.  It required Kalman to paint the planes approaching the Twin Towers and the explosion of the buildings.  After “Maus”, by Art Spiegelman, using one’s style in a one-size-fits-all manner can’t be discounted.  Nonetheless, it’s a difficult book and it’s a difficult book to choose to give a child.  But it teaches that we must not deny evil or give in to despair, but “keep calm and carry on” (a parody of an aggressive Barbara Kruger graphic).

The portraits of people and dogs both have a flattened Hockney neutrality, with memorable eyes gazing deeply out at us.  Surely the sitters must have said, like Gertrude Stein when she saw the portrait Picasso made of her, “It is I.”  Sitters have included Pina Bausch, Laurie Anderson and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

Skirball’s gallery is “…a jewel box of an exhibition”, said her curator, Ingrid Schaffner, of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.  Deep cadmium red-orange walls background plaques and text, written in Kalman’s distinctive scroll, making the walls journal-pages to background an installation of glassed display tables, ladders, and memorabilia.  Kalman is a collector who permits herself to be edited, and the objects are funny and poignant:  odd onion rings (fast-food snowflakes?), stolen hand towels smeared with paint from her brushes. 

Hand-typed (old Courier-equipped typewriter) index cards affixed with thumbtacks identify many of the artworks, turning down the volume on serious, yet reversing it back up in a nod to memory and elegy.

A reading room, also painted that vibrant red-orange, invites further grazing among her children’s and adult’s books, along with some videos.

Ms. Kalman’s stitched textiles give her a medium and textural refreshment from paint and brushes.  Americana samplers, they needle us to strive for virtue and offer comfort. Ensconced in humor as she is, yet there’s a wee moralist in Ms. Kalman.  The textiles are also her most overtly feminist work, reminiscent of Orly Cogan, another New Yorker.