‘In Love with Art’ by Jeet Heer

Reviewed by Matthew TenBruggencate

The title for Jeet Heer’s brief biography of RAW Books co-founder and New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly is a triple play on words. In Love with Art sums up the grossly unequal attention paid to Mouly’s husband when the world considers how the two were a driving force in transforming American comics from shallow children’s reading and immature counter-culture graffiti into a mature art form. Art Spiegelman’s canon of work, including the much-celebrated Maus, certainly deserves critical study, but, as Heer lays out in his preface, media consideration of French-born Françoise Mouly has been almost non-existent.

Secondly, the book’s title follows the bloom of unwilling affection Mouly felt for Spiegelman. The disappointing child of a French plastic surgeon (she failed to become either a son or a doctor), Mouly learned her feminism and sense of identity during Paris’ heady student and labour action of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Not disposed to enter into any sort of domestic bliss or outdated institution such as marriage, her gradual meshing with a fellow depressed artist wasn’t the original plan – but the heart wants what it wants. In Love tracks a mutually reinforcing partnership fuelled by a passion for creation, cultural commentary and excellence. While the book only dips sparingly into the home life of the two New York powerhouses, their emotional and mental connection is thoroughly fleshed out in their intertwined professional lives.

Finally, and most obviously, the slender book’s title names the passion that distinguished Mouly’s career, initially to a select cartooning circle, then to the wider world when she took on the art editor role at the New Yorker in 1993. Heer takes great pains to reiterate Mouly’s deeply held belief that the intelligent fusion of drawing and text can be a stimulating, provocative reflection on the human experience.

And those pains can be painful to read. Mouly’s remarkable accomplishments – transitioning to New York knowing no English and no one, refining the work of rising “graphic artists” before that title even existed, founding a niche publishing house in a crowded, sexist industry, reinvigorating a tired, aged magazine – can stand as their own evidence of her talent and spirit. Heer’s adjective-rich chapters work on the assumption readers will resist giving her the time of day – that we won’t see the editing hero Heer has come to admire. It’s a false hypothesis and it gets tiring.

Heer, a widely published Canadian journalist whose articles orbit around comics, writing, pop culture and politics, does a better much better job surveying the graphic arts scene in America from the ’60s through the present, bringing a richly detailed description of the influential outliers and mainstream pressures that helped foment the conditions that aided Mouly’s and Spiegelman’s ascent. The wide shot of who was doing what where and when is woven into the text with enough detail to satisfy, but without being overwhelming or wandering off onto tangents.

There are fewer intimate moments and anecdotes to crystalize who Mouly is. One of my main problems on the final page was still having only a vague sense of the woman whose taste-making choices have guided a generation of influential artists. With her childhood and early life, there are only so many sources Heer can draw on and the speed he moves through those years is understandable. But from her arrival in New York to her move to the New Yorker, short story snapshots do a great job of relating Mouly’s acumen as an editor, business owner and artist, but don’t give a complete picture of her as a person.

It gets better when we move into the recent past: Mouly’s tenure at the New Yorker. Heer’s storytelling takes a leap as he brings us into the room for a number of significant editorial choices, with the inarguable highlight being the black-on-black 9/11 cover. Created by Mouly (and often wrongly attributed to Spiegelman), the Twin Towers cover was a critical test of an artist’s ability to articulate a response to raw, personal catastrophe. The enormous pressure Mouly felt, the initial indecision, then the emergence of a risky option Mouly could stake her position on – it’s all there without superfluous descriptions hammering home the importance of the moment.

While there are a number of illustrations in the book – including the 9/11 cover, the Obama fist bump New Yorker that inflamed so much debate, a few early RAW strips and covers of recent children’s books Mouly has turned her focus to – Heer does a surprisingly effective job describing pieces without accompanying graphics. There are sparse descriptions of the content of pieces, the narratives they fit into and overall tone, then on to the next piece. It works much more effectively than drawn out analysis usually found in art books, tightly conveying the relevance of the works to the unfolding story of Mouly’s life.

It’s a shame so much of this book is sabotaged by the author’s strongly held thesis. Not that Mouly’s importance and talent fail to come through, or that an under analyzed shift in western cartooning isn’t given its due, but both are gripping subjects without Heer’s voice chiming in to underline the fact. Far better to do what the preface suggests in the first few lines and let Mouly take centre stage.

Coach House  | 136 pages |  $13.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1552452783