In any case, here’s the essay.<\/p>\n
Building a Better Abyss<\/p>\n
Hell is like Shakespeare: every generation invents its own. No surprise then that Art Young, who was born just after the Civil War and died in the middle of World War II, lived long enough to create several.<\/p>\n
Young\u2019s interest in the nether world started early. As an adolescent art prodigy in small-town Wisconsin, he got ahold of and devoured the edition of Dante\u2019s Inferno illustrated by Dore. It was, he later recalled,\u201c the first book to give me a real thrill.\u201d That initial impression was lasting: Young went on to study art in Chicago, New York, and Paris, and became something of an expert on the history of illustration, but his enthusiasm for Dore never wavered. \u201c[I] counted him the greatest artist of his time,\u201d he said. \u201cI estimated the gift of imagination in all of the arts as supreme. And Dore had it.\u201d [Art Young, Art Young: His Life and Times, John Nicholas Beffel, ed., New York: Sheridan House, 1939, pp. 52, 133.) <\/p>\n
Young\u2019s first book was a direct tribute to his hero. Hell Up to Date is what the title says — a trip through a modern Inferno, circa 1892, sprinkled with illustrations influenced by Dore\u2019s woodcuts. At the time of writing it, Young was in his mid-20s, and clearly going places. His cartoons were selling briskly in Chicago, and he was making friends and connections among both artists and newspapermen. He suffered a chastening setback in Paris, when he contracted a case of pleurisy which almost killed him. But even while painfully recuperating at his parents home, he had every reason to be excited about his future. <\/p>\n
Thus, Young\u2019s book is a hodgepodge. On the one hand, he faithfully imitates many of Dore\u2019s tropes: dramatic shading and composition, detailed draftsmanship, panels cluttered with figures, and long perspectives to suggest vast underground spaces. Yet, where Dore\u2019s goal was to overawe, Young\u2019s first version of Hell must be one of the least histrionic on record. Feeling that Dante and Dore were \u201ctoo serious about Hell,\u201d he created an Inferno which is basically an extended series of gag cartoons — Thomas Nast caricatures trapped in Renaissance paintings. Young\u2019s sinners tend to look annoyed or constipated rather than tormented, and the elaborate punishments he devises for contemporary pests are clever rather than gruesome. Unfeeling editors are consigned to red-hot wastebaskets, unattentive husbands are dressed in drag, and hobos are forced to bathe. The general tone of comfortable irony is embodied in the narrator, R. Palasco Drant. A wise-cracking city newspaperman, Drant is so filled with spunk and get-up-and-go that he greets the Ancient Enemy with a jovial \u201cHowdy, Sate!\u201d and then promises to give the Inferno a PR boost via \u201csix columns\u201d in a major metropolitan daily. (Art Young, On My Way: Being the Book of Art Young in Text and Pictures, New York: Horace Liveright, 1928, p.19; Art Young, Hell Up To Date: The Reckless Journey of R. Palasco Drant, Newspaper Correspondent, Through the Infernal Regions, as Reported by Himself. Chicago: The Schulte Publishing Company, 1892.]<\/p>\n
In his introduction, Young notes that his purpose in writing the book was \u201cto learn if the region of fire was the same as of old, or whether it kept pace with the triumphal march of progress.\u201d He claims that it has and that Hell is \u201cnow run on the broad, American plan.\u201d But this is a little disingenuous. Young\u2019s Hell has an agnostic sense of humor; it has modern sinners; and it is mechanized — with trolley-cars, pneumatic tubes, and the other technological paraphernalia of the late nineteenth century. Yet, for all these differences, Drant\u2019s Hell and Dante\u2019s Hell work in much the same way. Those who have sinned on Earth are cast into the Pit where they suffer retribution. Hades is a place where wrongs are righted and evil-doers punished. Hell has changed in form, not in function.<\/p>\n Hell Up to Date had decent sales, and over the next decade Young drew some further Hell cartoons in the same vein for various periodicals. These were published in book form in 1901 as \u201cThrough Hell with Hiprah Hunt.\u201d At that time, religious fundamentalism was associated with economic progressivism: William Jennings Bryant, for example, was famous for his opposition to both evolution and big business. The Hiprah Hunt of the title is probably meant to be a caricature of populist religious radicals. I say \u201cprobably\u201d because Young himself doesn\u2019t seem to know quite what he was doing with this volume. The new illustrations are excellent: Young has moved towards a looser, more cartoony style, and his devils are both cuter and creepier. A few ink-wash paintings are especially lovely. But the fact remains that most of the book is a retread of Hell Up to Date; many of the drawings are simply reprinted from the earlier volume, and many more are altered only so as to replace newspaperman Drant with preacher Hunt. To make matters worse, Drant\u2019s boisterous narration has been toned down, shifted to third person, and thereby robbed of much of its charm and humor. Here, for example, is a description of a careless dentist who Drant finds being tortured in Hell Up to Date:<\/p>\n \u201cIt was the very man who had, a few years ago, pulled me all over a new set of plush furniture, down two flights of stairs and back again, in a frantic endeavor to extract a tooth that I insisted didn\u2019t need extracting.\u201d<\/p>\n And a description of the same dentist from Hiprah Hunt:<\/p>\n \u201cHe sees a dentist he had known, a man who was just as sure to pull a tooth that didn\u2019t need pulling as one that did \u2014 whose filling work invariably had to be done over by someone else.\u201d [Art Young, Through Hell with Hiprah Hunt: A Series of Pictures and Notes of Travel Illustrating the Adventures of a Modern Dante in the Infernal Regions. New York: Zimmerman\u2019s, 156 Fifth Avenue, 1901.]<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to present a convincing afterlife when you\u2019re experiencing a crisis of faith, and that is more or less what Young was going through at the time he put together his second book. Up to the turn of the century he had been a \u201cRepublican without knowing why;\u201d the newspapers he worked for expected him to draw cartoons promoting the tariff and attacking the Haymarket rioters, and so he did. But in the early 1900s he began to move sharply to the left. He listened to lectures by British labor leader Keir Hardie and read the work of muck-rakers like Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair. In 1902 his opinions had shifted enough that he decided to volunteer for the populist campaign of Gov. Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. Eight years later, in his mid-forties, he considered himself a socialist. Unwilling to draw cartoons in support of the editorial positions of mainstream papers, Young increasingly turned to the radical press, especially to The Masses, which he helped to found and edit. (quoted in Young\u2019s entry in The Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement Three, 1941-1945.)<\/p>\n Young himself believed that he did his best work after what he called his \u201cawakening\u201d in 1906. This was certainly the case for his illustrations of Hell. Socialism had taught Young to believe in injustice, in cruelty, and in evil. His drawings of the nether-world were no longer entertaining goofs; they carried a new conviction, and even a theological weight. For example, \u201cThis World of Creepers\u201d from 1907 shows an unending stream of terrified nonentities crawling through a bleak landscape while the word \u201cFear\u201d hovers grimly overhead. Though not strictly a picture of Hell, the image is more convincingly infernal than anything Young had done earlier. On the other hand, the 1918 cartoon \u201cHaving Their Fling,\u201d explicitly suggested that capitalists, politicians, and others who supported World War I were doing the work of Satan. The notoriously humorless Wilson Administration was not amused, and used the cartoon as evidence when it prosecuted Young and several other members of The Masses\u2019 staff for conspiracy to obstruct recruiting. (quote from Young\u2019s introduction to Art Young, The Best of Art Young, New York: The Vanguard Press, 1936, p. xvii.) For a fuller account of the history of The Masses, including the trial, you can read Madeleine Baran, \u201cA Brief History of the Masses,\u201d (April 2003) Brooklyn Rail , available online here<\/a> . Even better is Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses (1911-1917): A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1985. This is also one of the few books in print that includes a substantial number of Art Young\u2019s cartoons.)<\/p>\n Young continued to dabble in devil imagery over the next decade. A semi-regular series called \u201cPostcards in Hell\u201d ran in Young\u2019s own publication, \u201cGood Morning,\u201d from 1919-1921. A group of fanciful illustrations of neurotic complexes for The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1920s seem demonically inspired. But it wasn\u2019t till 1931 that Young once more turned his full attention to the Pit. The Great Depression had just set in, and Young was finding it difficult to sell his cartoons; to make matters worse, he was now over sixty, and his health had taken a serious turn for the worse. Tired and disheartened, he nonetheless remembered that <\/p>\n \u201can idea took hold of me which lifted my spirits away up\u2026. Before I go to the poorhouse, I told myself, I\u2019ll write and illustrate one more book. Though nearly forty years had gone by since the publication of my first volume, Hell Up to Date, the curious interest I had had then in the infernal regions once more absorbed my thinking. I had seen so much hell on earth that I was eager now to find out what the ancient theological region was like after the passage of four decades.\u201d [Art Young: His Life and Times, p. 416. Ellipses in the original.]<\/p>\n As it turns out, Hell had changed a great deal since Young\u2019s first exploration in 1892. In Art Young\u2019s Inferno, published in 1934, Young reports that \u201cBig Business organizers and Bankers\u201d had been going to Hell in such numbers that they had managed to take over. Satan retains a ceremonial role, but the real power is now vested in an All-Hell Congress controlled by business interests. The new overlords have no interest in punishing the unjust; rather they want to \u201cmake money out of Hell.\u201d To this purpose, they establish schools which are \u201coperated like factories to produce standard size thought\u201d and hospitals to which \u201cpoor sinners are sometimes grudgingly admitted.\u201d The sophisticated Hellions have even, Young notes, \u201clearned to use the word \u2018sorry.\u2019 A gentlemanly Hellion tears out the heart of his brother, spits on it and says, \u2018I\u2019m sorry.\u2019\u201d [quotes from Art Young, Art Young\u2019s Inferno, New York: Delphi, 1934.)<\/p>\n Not many critics have mentioned Young, but those who have tend to agree that he was a backward-looking artist. Journalist and admirer Heywood Broun claimed that \u201cmodern art never so much as rumpled [Young\u2019s] hair.\u201d More recently, Rebecca Zurier has commented that Young \u201chad little patience with formal experiment.\u201d Young certainly did enjoy sneering at \u201cabstract, obfustic, neo-mystic and 4 dimensional painting,\u201d as a sign advertises in one of his Inferno\u2019s art galleries. But he also learned from them. In his first Hell book, he could almost have passed for a nineteenth century illustrator. But by the time of the Inferno, his figures\u2019 anatomy is simplified, backgrounds are sometimes eliminated altogether, and the compositions — like much of European modernism — have been influenced by Japanese design. Young does include a few imitations of Dore illustrations, but even these serve only to demonstrate how far his style has diverged from that of his childhood hero. Gone are the individualized caricatures; this version of Hell is populated by undifferentiated souls, writhing blindly in a flattened, expressionist landscape. By embracing new forms, Young has finally managed to capture Dore\u2019s gothic romanticism — and in some cases even to surpass it. [from Broun\u2019s, introduction to The Best of Art Young, p. xi; Zurier, p. 133.]<\/p>\n Young never loses his sense of humor, however, and thereby avoids two of Dore\u2019s characteristic flaws: melodrama and vindictiveness. Young\u2019s Hell can be gruesome, as when he shows \u201cthe blind, Idiot Giant War\u201d eating people like popcorn.. But it can also be petty: overcrowded trains, a lack of public toilets, having an ear catch on fire. Hell is in the details, and nobody escapes — demon and damned alike are tormented by the quest for money, by fear of their fellows, by a society in which everyone is dedicated to making everyone else\u2019s life both a misery and a woe. All suffer, all are to blame, and Young manages to present all with at least a touch of sympathy. Satan, of course, is a pathetic figure \u201cAn anachronism — a failure — beaten at my own game!\u201d as the Devil himself puts it. But even Young\u2019s real nemeses, the capitalists, \u201care also in misery peculiar to their caste\u2026,\u201d gripped by the fear that \u201cfriends are mere money-friends, that love is money-love, that hands everywhere would snatch their money from them.\u201d <\/p>\n If all of this sounds familiar\u2026well, that\u2019s only because you\u2019re living it. Young\u2019s nether-world is simply the capitalism-dominated earth of 1934, prey to money-lust, greed, fear, injustice, and war. Young would be saddened but not surprised to learn that it also reads remarkably like an account of the capitalism-dominated earth of 2005. This particular Inferno may not be everlasting, but it does seem likely to be around for a while.<\/p>\n *******************************<\/p>\n Young placed himself \u201cin the ranks of those who do the world\u2019s work, get no credit for it, and die forgotten.\u201d It\u2019s unclear whether it is Young\u2019s socialism, his romanticism, or simply bad luck which has doomed him (and peers like Boardman Robinson) to obscurity. Whatever the reason, though, the fact remains: Young\u2019s art may be as relevant as ever to our own time, but it hardly matters since no one is looking at it. None of his books are in print, and only a handful of his drawings are available online. <\/p>\n Nor is his influence any easier to locate than his pictures. Young\u2019s work is a remnant of a time when it made sense to mention periodical illustration and fine art in the same breath. Young himself was, he says, initially as interested in painting as in cartoons \u2014 he chose the later only because he felt that by doing so he could reach more people. [Life and Times, p. 9] He stuck to his path once he had chosen it, but that didn\u2019t mean that he stopped experimenting. Though I\u2019ve focused here on his most allegorical work, he also did more straightforward political cartoons, as well as slice-of-life drawings and social satire. His style varied widely depending on his theme, and so did his medium — most of his work was with pen and ink, but he also did ink brush painting, crayon drawings, and seems to have also used chalk on occasion. In contrast, political periodical illustrations today are divided between single-panel, caricature-laden one-liners and comic-strips in which poorly-drawn pundits reiterate talking-points from yesterday\u2019s news cycle. Young\u2019s invention and craftsmanship have been almost entirely lost. (One contemporary cartoonist who does cite Young as an influence is Eric Drooker). I\u2019m sure there are others as well, but they are not exactly thick on the ground.)<\/p>\n For some examples of Young\u2019s work, see this gallery<\/a>. Rebecca Zurier\u2019s The Art of the Masses, mentioned earlier, is available from Amazon last I checked. Also relatively easy to get a hold of is Willaim L.O\u2019Neill Echoes of Revolt: The Masses 1911-1917, Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1989. Syd Hoff\u2019s Editorial and Political Cartooning (1976) and Stephen Hess\u2019 The Ungentlemanly Art (1968, 1975) both have a few Art Young images as well. The Inferno has been reprinted twice; once in 1970 by A. Saifer, with adequate though not stellar reproductions, and once in a lame and incomplete edition by Quixote Press in 1980. Young\u2019s magazine Good Morning was collected by Greenwood Reprint Corporation in 1968. After that you\u2019re pretty much left to the original publications\u2026good hunting!<\/p>\n I’m reprinting here the essay on socialist cartoonist Art Young which ran in TCJ 273. I lack the technical expertise for footnote capabilities, so the relevent source info is sprinkled throughout rather than referenced with tiny numbers. I’ve also edited … Continue reading ![](\"http:\/\/i124.photobucket.com\/albums\/p13\/NBerlatsky\/Art%20Young\/dante.jpg\")
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The Renaissance is dead but not buried: one of Dore’s illustrations for The Inferno.<\/i><\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/i124.photobucket.com\/albums\/p13\/NBerlatsky\/Art%20Young\/havingfling.jpg\")
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“Having Their Fling”, the Masses cartoon for which Young was prosecuted.<\/i><\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/i124.photobucket.com\/albums\/p13\/NBerlatsky\/Art%20Young\/youngdante.jpg\")
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Dore is dead and resurrected as modern art, from Art Young’s Inferno.<\/i><\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/i124.photobucket.com\/albums\/p13\/NBerlatsky\/Art%20Young\/sketchingdevils.jpg\")
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Self-portrait of Art Young sketching devils, from Art Young’s Inferno.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"