In praise of the 'non-art'

Comic legacy of Rodolphe Topffer exhibited at the Istituto

Ever since Art Spiegelman's Maus won the Pulitzer Prize, high culture has conceded that comic art may in fact be just that - art. No longer are comics simply the domain of children. The comic form has introduced a more palatable form of political satire, and despite technological inventions, has refused to die. Instead, comic art has absorbed innovations in the graphic design world and has expanded to embrace new possibilities for storytelling.
This month at Toronto's Istituto Italiano di Cultura, we see the multifarious repercussions of a European comic legacy, that of Rodolphe Töpffer - a man who wrote stories, drew comics, and started his own boys' boarding school in the 1800's. Töpffer was Wolfgang Adam Töpffer's son and so he began painting in the tradition of his famous artist father.
But because of an early eye injury, Töpffer initially avoided and feared visual arts, only to pursue a life in writing. His works, including "My Uncle's Library", "Nouvelles genevoises" and, especially, "Voyages en zig-zag" have now become Swiss classics.
He pursued teaching in Paris, then also taught in Geneva, eventually becoming a professor of rhetoric - whatever that might mean - at the Geneva Academy of Belles-Lettres.
But Töpffer would not be able to stay away from the visual arts for long, and the love for the image ousted itself as he reinvented a visual iconography that could accommodate his verbal narrations. He drew inspiration from his experiences with children and early childhood, but also fed audiences satires about the adult-world in all its contradictory complications.
Töpffer's real brilliance was his ability to please both children and adults, sketching across the page with a freedom which made his characters look as though they barely had the time to linger there, that they wanted to move elsewhere, perhaps onto the very next page. They very much wanted to get on with their lives.
What made Töpffer a household name among the Swiss were his picture-stories, aka comics, aka "histories en images"; these included Histoire de M. Jabot (1833), Monsieur Crépin (1837), Les Amours de M. Vieuxbois (1839), Monsieur Pencil (1840), Le Docteur Festus (1840), Histoire d'Albert (1845) and Histoire de M. Cryptogame (1845).
After his death in 1846, these stories were posthumously anthologized in a series of books called Histoires en Estampes.
Domenico Lucchini of the CCS in Milan, writes of the importance of Töpffer's influence: "In our hyper-technological society it is fundamental that the sensible universe, the universe of imagination and creativity be a counterpoint to the world of rational thought... What better than an exhibition on comics' 'non art', maybe unjustly believed to be less noble than the other forms? ...Animation means creating life, instilling vitality into unanimated things. Animation is a complete art, the perfect syntax of diverse artistic expressions; pictorial art for techniques of animation, the music for time and the rhythm, dance for movement and space, literature for the script and imagination for the content... "
What this translates to for this particular exhibition is a glimpse of contemporary Swiss graphic designers. From grand oils to miniature collages, from computer wizardry to refined black and white designs, the artists here invert the form of the comic in a final tribute to their hero.
Ultimately, it is an exhibition which ensures the comic will never stay true to a single format, that it will resist always the linear structure of the page, and break open they ways in which we think about narratives, about characters and their movement across the page, about the three-dimensionality of humour.

Töpffer & Cie: Exhibition of Swiss Illustrators shows at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, 496 Huron St., 416.921.3802.

Publication Date: 2004-01-25
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3561