Of Mice and Men:
Putting a statue of Hitler in the Warsaw Ghetto. Painting Auschwitz Blue. Rendering the races in Nazi Europe as mice, cats, and pigs in a chilling, riveting, introspective biography of your own family, as Art Spiegelman did in his brilliant graphic novel Maus. These are some of the strategies today’s artists are using to help themselves and the public to remember what many find too painful to think about—or too easy to forget.
Learn more about the author of Maus in “The Art of Spiegelman,” a documentary screening January 21 and 22 at the New York Jewish Film Festival. See the sweep of his achievement, beginning with his earliest experimental comics from the ’60s, when his first (!) retrospective travels to the Vancouver Art Gallery in February, or when it arrives at New York’s Jewish Museum (its only U.S.) venue in November. Read more about the ways artists from Chagall to Cattelan and more are taking on the Holocaust at artnews.com.
Art Spiegelman, Sketch for the front cover of the first American edition of MAUS II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began, ca. 1991.
COURTESY THE ARTIST.
