Hardcover. 8vo. 144 pp. Illustrated boards with red and black lettering to front and spine, fine.
Ernie Bushmiller’s 1930s popular cartoon character Nancy is one of the central motifs of Joe Brainard’s work. He first used the character in 1963 and continued until his quasi-retirement from art in 1978, producing over 100 works in various media. Works from this series are the most highly prized of Brainard's oeuvre.
Born in Arkansas in 1942 and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Brainard moved to New York City in late 1960. A writer and an artist, he became associated with the New York School, an informal group of artists and poets that included Joseph LeSueur, Frank O’Hara, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, John Ashbery, and others. In New York, Brainard also became interested in Pop Art and their use of comics as a poetic medium. In the words of his lifelong friend, the poet and essayist Ron Padgett:
"Joe began using Pop elements in his visual artworks soon after his arrival in New York in late 1960—images of consumer goods such as Fab, Tide, Alka-Seltzer, Lucky Strikes, and 7-Up—and in 1963 he began including comic strip characters such as L’il Abner, Dick Tracy, and Nancy, whose adventures he was following in the New York Post. Nancy quickly emerged as his clear favorite, culminating in the “If Nancy was…” series of 1972 and the large Nancy Diptych of 1974." (“The Origins of Joe Brainard’s Nancy,” in The Nancy Book(2008), p. 28).
The original character of Nancy first appeared in the comic strip Fritzi Ritz, “a stereotypical flapper strip that capitalized on the excitement of the Roaring Twenties and the emancipation of American women… Fritzi Ritz related the story of a New York glamour girl turned movie actress.” (Brian Walker, The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, p. 17). Published by the New York Evening World, the strip was written and drawn since 1933 by Ernie Bushmiller, the son of a German immigrant and a student at the National Academy of Design. In one episode, Fritzi travels to Hollywood and is joined there by her niece, Nancy, who less than a year later becomes the focus of the daily strip.
From the collection of Frank Bidart, who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, and the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry for his book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016. Perhaps Bidart's most celebrated poem, "The Second Hour of the Night," is partly based on his relationship with Brainard. "The relationship was," as Bidart has said, both "more than friendship and less than a romance." His "In Memory of Joe Brainard" is a profound elegy for his friend who died of AIDS-induced pneumonia in 1994.
Hardcover. 8vo. 144 pp. Illustrated boards with red and black lettering to front and spine, fine.
Ernie Bushmiller’s 1930s popular cartoon character Nancy is one of the central motifs of Joe Brainard’s work. He first used the character in 1963 and continued until his quasi-retirement from art in 1978, producing over 100 works in various media. Works from this series are the most highly prized of Brainard's oeuvre.
Born in Arkansas in 1942 and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Brainard moved to New York City in late 1960. A writer and an artist, he became associated with the New York School, an informal group of artists and poets that included Joseph LeSueur, Frank O’Hara, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, John Ashbery, and others. In New York, Brainard also became interested in Pop Art and their use of comics as a poetic medium. In the words of his lifelong friend, the poet and essayist Ron Padgett:
"Joe began using Pop elements in his visual artworks soon after his arrival in New York in late 1960—images of consumer goods such as Fab, Tide, Alka-Seltzer, Lucky Strikes, and 7-Up—and in 1963 he began including comic strip characters such as L’il Abner, Dick Tracy, and Nancy, whose adventures he was following in the New York Post. Nancy quickly emerged as his clear favorite, culminating in the “If Nancy was…” series of 1972 and the large Nancy Diptych of 1974." (“The Origins of Joe Brainard’s Nancy,” in The Nancy Book(2008), p. 28).
The original character of Nancy first appeared in the comic strip Fritzi Ritz, “a stereotypical flapper strip that capitalized on the excitement of the Roaring Twenties and the emancipation of American women… Fritzi Ritz related the story of a New York glamour girl turned movie actress.” (Brian Walker, The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, p. 17). Published by the New York Evening World, the strip was written and drawn since 1933 by Ernie Bushmiller, the son of a German immigrant and a student at the National Academy of Design. In one episode, Fritzi travels to Hollywood and is joined there by her niece, Nancy, who less than a year later becomes the focus of the daily strip.
From the collection of Frank Bidart, who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, and the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry for his book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016. Perhaps Bidart's most celebrated poem, "The Second Hour of the Night," is partly based on his relationship with Brainard. "The relationship was," as Bidart has said, both "more than friendship and less than a romance." His "In Memory of Joe Brainard" is a profound elegy for his friend who died of AIDS-induced pneumonia in 1994.