WORDLESS! The Library of America’s Lynd Ward collection inspires new Art Speigelman show

A few years back (in the summer of 2010, to be precise) Art Spiegelman edited Six Novels in Woodcuts, The Library of America’s two-volume collection of Lynd Ward’s wordless novels. This past weekend he sent an e-mail message to LOA staff members: “Look what kinda ‘trouble’ you guys caused recruiting me into the Lynd Ward project and re-igniting my interest in Wordless books!”

The “trouble” we caused is WORDLESS!, Spiegelman’s self-described “odd hybrid”: a multimedia extravaganza featuring slides, talk, movies, and musical performance created in collaboration with acclaimed jazz composer Phillip Johnston. In his introduction to Six Novels in Woodcuts, Spiegelman wrote that Ward is “one of only a small handful of artists anywhere who ever made a ‘graphic novel’ until the day before yesterday.” WORDLESS! brings together that handful of illustrators—Frans Masereel, Milt Gross, Otto Nückel, and Si Lewen, in addition to Ward. The innovative performance also showcases new original work by Spiegelman.

In celebration of the show, Speigelman has set up a special Tumblr page, featuring a brief trailer, images, and reviews of the acclaimed worldwide premiere in Australia. The 90-minute program will make its American debut in Brooklyn this weekend before going on tour for two performances in Chicago and Colorado Springs:

• Saturday, January 18 – Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY
• Wednesday, January 22 – Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO
• Saturday, January 25 – University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

New documentary, O Brother Man: The Art and Life of Lynd Ward, celebrates the life and work of the visionary artist and storyteller

For their fourth film in six years the Connecticut-based independent filmmakers Michael Maglaras and Terri Templeton of 217Films have turned to the work of iconic American artist Lynd Ward to make the documentary O Brother Man: The Art and Life of Lynd Ward. The film will have its world premiere on March 8 at the New Britain Museum of Art, New Britain, Connecticut.

Ward’s legacy includes his innovative “novels without words,” books that tell their stories entirely through woodcut images. The Library of America published the six works he created between 1929 and 1937 in the two-volume boxed set Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts in 2010. Drawing on interviews with Ward’s daughter Robin Ward Savage and using more than 150 of Ward’s wood engravings, drawings, and illustrations, the documentary explores the many dimensions of Ward’s achievement: as path-breaking graphic novelist, prolific illustrator, and experimental printmaker.

One of the most remarkable segments in the film shows Ward deftly engraving into wood an image in his magnum opus Vertigo. In an exclusive interview with The Library of America Art Spiegelman discussed Ward’s choice of medium and how he became interested in wordless novels:

Spiegelman: Ward’s way of approaching the wood is appropriate to a very white Anglo-Saxon Protestant man with a great, great work ethic who loves working with his hands, loves the craft aspect as well as the expressive aspect of what he does. His pictures are a full expression of that sensibility. So it’s hard to say: did he choose wood engraving because he wanted to make a certain kind of picture, or did he make a certain kind of picture because he liked to work with his hands? Wood engraving is a careful process and an exacting one. There are many other ways to get an image across without having to get your fingers all bloody. There’s a lot that can go wrong if you chop at the wrong angle. I think his choice had to do in part with the roots of the tradition of printing, making books as objects. He cared about the history of type, the history of representing images—the history of woodcuts goes back to the origins of bookmaking as we’ve come to know it. I think that’s the core reason. 

Ward first became interested in the idea of stories without words while he was studying printmaking in Germany and the works of the Belgian artist Frans Masereel were the first he discovered. What’s interesting about that group of three, Masereel, the German artist Otto Nückel, and Ward: not only did they communicate in different media, their work expressed different sensibilities. Nückel did just one experiment, Destiny, in this area of stories without words. His work is informed by a delight in light; his pictures are infused with an almost impressionist way of making the image known. Masereel’s many works are freely hewn, chunked exuberantly into the wood and have a blunt visual approach. He is very eager to distort and cascade loud layers of information into pictures. For the most part Ward’s work has a methodical quality. Even in his first book, Gods’ Man, the pictures are very consciously rooted in the early tradition of what a woodcut might look like. He uses its emblematic qualities more and more as he goes on and pursues detailed picture-making to great reward.

Read the full interview with Art Spiegelman about Lynd Ward

Watch the trailer for O Brother Man: The Art and Life of Lynd Ward (YouTube):



Also of interest:

• Allen Ginsberg, Lynd Ward: The Moloch connection, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Glen Weldon reviews Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts on NPR

Related LOA works: Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts (boxed set)

Allen Ginsberg, Lynd Ward: The Moloch connection

The news that acclaimed scratchboard artist Eric Drooker has just published a graphic novel edition of Howl, his second illustrated book of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, brings to mind the inspiration Ginsberg drew from the stark and emblematic power of woodcut images. The haunting engravings in the Moloch section of Lynd Ward’s wordless novel Wild Pilgrimage influenced the “Moloch” section of Ginsberg’s famous 1956 poem, which includes the lines:

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

In his introduction to Illuminated Poems, the collection of thirty-four Ginsberg poems that Drooker illustrated in 1996—just a year before the poet died—Ginsberg acknowledges, “Lynd Ward’s images of the solitary artist dwarfed by the canyons of a Wall Street Megalopolis lay shadowed behind my own vision of Moloch.”

In 1978 Michael McCurdy, an accomplished wood engraver himself, commissioned Lynd Ward to create a new wood engraving to illustrate a broadside of the “Moloch” section of Howl for McCurdy’s Penmaen Press. McCurdy hand-set the broadside and hand-printed three hundred sheets, with one hundred and fifty numbered and signed by both Ward and Ginsberg. It ended up being one of Ward’s last published works. You can view an image of the 18" x 25" broadside here and a photograph of Ginsberg, McCurdy, and Ward here.

In his Library of America interview about Lynd Ward, Art Spiegelman recalls the Ginsberg connection to Ward’s Wild Pilgrimage and mentions Eric Drooker in particular as one of several artists who continue to demonstrate that “the power of Ward’s vocabulary is alive and well.” In a 2003 Comics Journal interview Drooker confirms that “I was deeply moved by [Ward’s] art, and inspired by the social realism in his work.” This month’s release of Drooker’s new book coincides with the release on September 24 of the new motion picture Howl; Drooker created the animated art in the film, which features James Franco as Ginsberg and Treat Williams as the critic Mark Schorer.

Readers curious about Lynd Ward’s other work can view his wood engravings for Frankenstein and the opening sequence of his wordless novel, Gods' Man.

Related LOA works: Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts (boxed set); Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (includes Ginsberg’s “Mugging” and “Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters”)