Educational Media Reviews Online

The Art of Spiegelman is a concise, informative survey of the life and work of the iconic cartoonist Art Spiegelman. Directors Clara Kuperberg & Joelle Oosterlinck give Spiegelman ample space to speak eloquently and expansively about his creative philosophies, techniques and motivations in intimate, revealing interviews that create a portrait of the artist’s psychology as well as a taxonomy of the specific obsessions pervading his work. These interviews are augmented with carefully chosen panels from Spiegelman’s published oeuvre, notebook sketches and family photographs which provide a fluid visual counterpoint that serve to balance and flesh out Spiegelman’s articulate narration of his psyche.

The film traces the arc of Spiegelman’s career which happened to coincide with the genesis and subsequent rise of the underground comics movement in the United States in the late 60’s and early 70’s, giving the viewer of brief overview of this influential movement whose reverberations are still being felt today. Spiegelman’s early work culminated in the harrowing expressionist strip dealing with his mother’s suicide, “Prisoner of the Hell Planet.” Amazingly, those drawings inspired his future wife Francoise Mouly to initiate contact with him.

The terrible shadow of his mother’s suicide looms large over Maus and Spiegelman’s subsequent aesthetic and material. One of The Art of Spiegelman’s core strengths is that it provides viewers a sense of the truly epic and painstaking process of Maus’s creation, including trips to Auschwitz and other sites in Poland where Spiegelman actually retraced the movements of his parents. Maus initially appeared and was serialized in Raw, a joint DIY comics magazine published by Spiegelman and Mouly that also introduced the work of artists like Charles Burns.

Another of the more interesting segments of the film is the glimpse at Spiegelman’s sometimes overlooked tenure at the New Yorker where he produced some of his most pointed, provocative and politically motivated work as an illustrator, including the widely controversial Hasidic Kiss and Lower Voice magazine covers.

Spiegelman openly admits that he considers “disaster" his muse so it’s should be no surprise that the tragedies of September 11th, 2001 profoundly impacted the long-time New Yorker, inspiring the creation of In the Shadow of No Towers, possibly his most significant post-Maus work. Candid interviews with Spiegelman’s daughter Nadja, a student attending school blocks from the World Trade Center, illuminate the personal anguish and anxiety sloshing through the panels of the In the Shadow.

Ultimately, Spiegelman’s honesty and willingness to reveal himself is the key to the film’s accessibility and this openness enables The Art of Spiegelman to succeed in giving viewers valuable insight into the mind of one of the most decorated and important cartoonists that the medium has ever produced.