By Shaenon K. Garrity
The college girl seated next to us at the sushi bar is testing her English on us. "Why…you are…in Japan?" she asks haltingly. Her little brother, a chubby, round-faced kid who just might be the cutest ten-year-old I've ever seen, and who for some reason is wearing pajamas, stares suspiciously at us before turning to his parents and firing off a barrage of observations I can't begin to follow.
"You be quiet," the sushi chef tells him in English. He's been using us to test his language skills, too. Everyone laughs. The college girl waits for an answer.
There is no way I can explain. We're in Japan because, two years ago, Andrew and I curated a show at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, where Andrew works as the curator and I hang around eating the free brownie bites at receptions. The show, "The Art and Flair of Mary Blair," was a retrospective of the Disney concept artist and illustrator, one of my favorite artists. It took the better part of
a previous Comixology column to explain how the Studio Ghibli Museum in Japan took an interest in the show, and how this led to Ghibli and the TV station NHK sponsoring a massive Mary Blair show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, but now here we are.
We're in Japan to courier the art to the museum, which means we took a taxi to San Francisco International at the crack of dawn to watch people load crates of Mary Blair artwork onto a truck, got on a plane, flew for thirteen hours, and got out at Narita to watch the crates get unloaded again. Then Mr. Nakamura from the NHK drove us to the museum, where dust-masked staff members moved the crates into the huge wood-paneled room where we will spend the next three days. There is no way I can explain this to a girl at a sushi bar with whom I share a vocabulary of twelve words.
The Museum of Contemporary Art is enormous. Built before the bubble economy popped, it's a behemoth of a museum, its massive, high-ceilinged spaces looking all the more empty because the current show is devoted to a minimalist experimental artist/musician whose pieces consist of, for example, a thin tape of tiny ones and zeroes stretched across the length of a wall. White album covers. Flickering black patterns. In a few months, these walls will burst with primary-colored concept paintings from
Alice in Wonderland and
Peter Pan, pink-cheeked little girls from the children's book
I Can Fly and ads for Meadow Gold Dairy, bright, bold collages for "It's a Small World." Ghibli is calling the show "The Colors of Mary Blair." They have shown us merchandise. It is devastatingly adorable.
To be honest, I don't have much to do for the three days in the big wooden room.
Andrew and Ms. Yoshimi, the museum curator, take over with their mad curatorial skills, painstakingly scanning each piece of artwork for condition reports. In addition to
the Mary Blair art, there's a selection of work by the other animation Blairs, Mary's husband Lee and brother-in-law Preston, who also worked for Disney. One crate contains a thick sheaf of animation pencil drawings done by Preston Blair for
Fantasia. Andrew is relieved that he doesn't have to file a separate report for each one.
The museum workers spread them out on a table, line after line of dancing hippos, and you can almost see them move.
The unpacking goes on. A set of handkerchiefs designed by Mary, with colorful elephants and airplanes and moustachioed organ grinders. Lee's painting of his wife, "Mary by the Sea," with charcoal study. Mary's unsettling later paintings, when she got into flourescent paints and collage and her vibrant colors turned garish or muddy. A big, heavy mural tile from the Contemporary Resort Hotel at Walt Disney World. Photos: Walt and El Grupo in South America, Jackie Kennedy reading
I Can Fly to Caroline, Mary and Lee fishing off a yacht, a public wading pool with Mary Blair mermaids in the tile floor. Lee's Olympic medal (did you know they used to give Olympic medals for painting?). Mary's glasses. Mary's hard hat. A life in nine crates,
ichi, ni, san…
Before the trip, Andrew gave me a present:
It's Better with Your Shoes Off, a 1955 collection of gag cartoons about
gaijin living in postwar Japan. The cartoonist, Anne Cleveland, is one of my ongoing fascinations and girl-crushes, not in the least because she drew a lot of cartoons about our mutual alma mater, Vassar College. (I went back to Vassar and got photos of Cleveland's on-campus art for
this column). Shortly before Andrew and I left for Japan, the news came out that Cleveland had died at age 92. I never got to speak to her, but some of her family members had seen my online columns and let me know. They all admired her cartoons and seemed happy that her work was being rediscovered here and there.
Anne Cleveland and Mary Blair belonged to the same generation of women but came from very different backgrounds. Cleveland was born in 1916 to a wealthy New England family, Blair in 1911 to poor Okies. They were, coincidentally, both twins; Anne had a twin brother, Mary a twin sister. Anne never took her art seriously, perhaps focusing on cartoons because fine art, especially the budding Greenwich Village art scene she joined after college, struck her as pretentious. Mary preferred fine art, painting Oklahoma poverty as part of the California Watercolor school, but was forced into a commercial art career by the Great Depression.
What they had in common were troubled personal lives and fear of success. When she graduated from the prestigious Chouinard Art Institute, Mary Blair had modest plans to become a homemaker and paint on the side, letting Lee get their pieces into local gallery shows. She felt out of place as an animation artist until the Disney staff's 1941 trip to South America inspired her, almost forced her, to develop and show off her talent. Later, her success, especially the admiration her work attracted from Walt Disney himself, caused friction with her husband, who struggled in the animation industry while his wife and younger brother seemed to succeed without trying. Lee and Mary both came from families with a history of alcoholism, and the disease struck them both in their later years.
Anne Cleveland published cartoons about Vassar life in little chapbooks, collaborating with her friend Jean Anderson, and was taken by surprise when the books became bestsellers outside the rose-brick walls of Vassar. She abandoned cartooning to marry and raise children, emerged at midlife with a flurry of witty cartoon collections (
It's Better with Your Shoes Off was the first, and probably the best), then disappeared again just as suddenly.
Her obituary in The Oregonian is entitled, "Terrific cartoonist of 1950s fled from her talent." In the article, her daughter Susan is quoted as saying, "She was the oldest, the only girl. . . . Throughout her life, her reaction was, 'How do I get rid of a desire?' as opposed to going for it."
Both women produced little work in their final years. Both women died in obscurity.
I admit this museum show is a little too personal for me. I've been drawing comics for almost ten years now, and I still can't bring myself to tell people to read them. I'm pretty good at this point, but I can never be good enough. I understand why Anne Cleveland channeled her art into what she thought of as silly little doodles, so no one, least of all herself, would have to take it seriously. I understand why Mary Blair wanted the life of a happy housewife with a happy, normal family, rather than the tumultuous artist's existence she was born to lead. I understand, so well, their desire to be overlooked, not to be singled out for attention, dissection, and rejection.
And I know they were wrong. So I'm writing these columns, and I'm doing this museum show, and I'm telling everyone about these brilliant, funny, lovable artists who keep getting ignored. I'm doing it for myself as much as them. I know that.
How do you get rid of a desire?
"We are…from museum," I tell the college girl. "We are bringing…Disney art…to museum in Tokyo."
"With Ghibli," says Andrew. "You know Totoro?"
It's the best I can explain it. I couldn't do any better if I were fluent.
Photos by Shaenon Garrity.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
