Information - History

This fall, The Jewish Museum will present the first major museum exhibition devoted to Ben Katchor’s illustrations, graphic novels, set designs and drawings created since the late 1980s. Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories will be on view at The Jewish Museum from September 9, 2001 through February 10, 2002.

Creator of the character Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, and the best-selling graphic novel, The Jew of New York, Ben Katchor has refined the medium of the comic strip into an irreverent and insightful art that reimagines the urban experience. Katchor’s journalistically rendered characters populating the urban landscape mirror the poetry and futility of everyday life. His idiosyncratic vision of the metropolis is revealed in picture-stories, serial narratives influenced by the comic strip format. Katchor's picture-stories evoke memory and nostalgia both for the look and feel of mid-20th century New York and for the language intimately connected to one sector of the city's immigrant past -- Yiddish. Throughout his work he plays with language, in the names of businesses (Moyel Bros. Fine Men's Wear), foods (a Herbert water), and his characters (Knipl, himself, named for the Yiddish word for small treasure or nest egg, something you put away for a rainy day). As art that addresses the past and the shifting nature of time and memory, his work resonates for audiences today.

Ben Katchor is fast becoming a New York legend, creating gray and inky looking weekly cartoon strips that have appeared locally since 1988 in The New York Press, The Village Voice, The Forward, as well as throughout the U.S., and in a full color, monthly strip investigating urbanism, architecture and design in Metropolis magazine. Praised as one of the best and most original comic strip artists of our time, his work has won him numerous awards, national syndication and a significant cult following.

The exhibition, Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories, will feature work from the artist’s comic strip novels, Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay (1991), Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories (1996), The Jew of New York (1999), Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, The Beauty Supply District (2000), his forthcoming book, The Cardboard Valise, and recent strips created for Metropolis magazine as well as a new strip, Hotel and Farm, created for The Forward. In addition to the original ink drawings and digital reproductions from these novels, drawings from the visually stunning sets that Katchor produced for the 1999-2000 Obie Award winning comic opera, The Carbon Copy Building, will be on view. Multimedia components for the exhibition will include the aural renditions of the Knipl strips produced in 1995 for broadcast on National Public Radio by David Isay with actors Jerry Stiller, Brother Theodore, Joey Faye, Professor Irwin Corey and the klezmer contributions of Henry Sapoznik. Also on view will be a short documentary film about the artist by independent filmmaker Sam Ball, Pleasures of Urban Decay (1999). A "Clod of Earth from the Garden of Eden," "Pickled Herring in Captivity," "Sack of Earth from the Holy Land," and "Cured Tail" will be among the fabricated three-dimensional artifacts related to the story of The Jew of New York that will also be included in the exhibition.

Katchor's humorous meditations on city life are expressed in a visually frenetic pastiche of word and image. Past and present collide in anachronistic storefront window displays, commercial signs, public announcements, and other printed matter. Competing architectural styles clash; upscale and downtrodden neighborhoods vie for attention. In unnamed or fictitious locales, desperate businessmen invent new schemes, and traveling salesmen or tourists seek out the exotic as in the recent Cardboard Valise. Urban encroachment is never far away, bringing the city dwellers out to the farms featured in Katchor’s current strip in The Forward, Hotel and Farm, a narrative switching back and forth weekly between urban and rural environments.

Ruins are a recurring motif in Katchor’s drawings. As a sign of physical decay, they suggest the instability of the artist’s fictional worlds. His characters are exiles and emigrés, natives and tourists, whether they inhabit the nineteenth-century setting of The Jew of New York or the imperfect, contemporary island paradises of The Cardboard Valise. Through his fictional cast, Katchor explores national and cultural identities under a barrage of constant change. Each time he shows the viewer the next replacement for the newly obsolete, he frustrates a romanticized view of the past.

Katchor’s characters are observers of the slippage of time, noticing the often otherwise unremarked, yet uncanny, tenacity of the past to make itself seen, even if through the crack in the ceiling, the loose tile, the peeling paint. Often ill-mannered or uncouth, they are never quite up to the task, and will never quite make it in the world outside the frame - a nether world of true success and assimilation. The basic ordinariness of the people and the absurdity of the details of their lives combine to give these stories a powerful humanity. After viewing this exhibition, visitors will never see the city in quite the same way again.

Ben Katchor was born in 1951 in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and grew up there and in Crown Heights. His father, a Polish immigrant involved in Communist politics and Yiddish culture, was a small-time landlord. Katchor's exposure to the Yiddish inflected New York culture that flavors his work occurred simultaneously with his immersion into comics beginning in childhood. All of his friends were comic book aficionados and connoisseurs of individual styles, and by the time they were teens they were publishing their own comic strips in mimeo-graph form. Katchor studied painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the School of Visual Arts (where he currently teaches cartooning) and then art history at Brooklyn College. In the 1980s, he contributed to the underground comics magazine, RAW, and in 1988 he began the strip “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer” for The New York Press. He created The Jew of New York, a fictional narrative inspired by the failed attempt of a real-life figure, Mordechai Noah, to create a Jewish State in the Niagara River near Buffalo, New York, in 1825, for The Forward in 1992-1993. He has published four novels, Cheap Novelties: The Pleasure of Urban Decay, with Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer (1991), Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories (1996), The Jew of New York (1999), and Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, The Beauty Supply District (2000). Katchor is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship grant and most recently, a prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the so-called “Genius” Award in 2000. The comic book opera The Carbon Copy Building (1999), for which he wrote the words and designed the sets, won an Obie Award for best new production.

Katchor’s comic strips and illustrations are drawn for reproduction in newspapers and magazines. Drawings and strips representing various stages of Katchor’s process will be shown throughout the exhibition. He starts with a script, then creates underdrawings in ink. On reduced versions of the drawings made on a photocopy machine, he adds watercolor before the drawings are scanned for reproduction. For legibility, they will also be shown in the exhibition as enlarged Iris prints or color copies.

Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories is being organized by Susan Chevlowe, Associate Curator, Fine Arts, The Jewish Museum.

This exhibition has been made possible through the continuing generosity of public and private donors to The Jewish Museum’s Fine Arts Endowment Fund. Additional support has been provided by the Norman & Rosita Winston Foundation, Inc.