PopImage

THE PLACE OF COMICS IN THE WESTERN ARTISTIC TRADITION
By Albert Boime.

I consider the controversy over the comic strip's status within the realm of the visual arts a largely meaningless one. Since I define art as the activity of human beings engaged in shaping their thoughts and feelings I make no distinction between "high" and "low" art. BLONDIE and SUPERMAN are in this sense no less deserving of our scrutiny than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and Chartres Cathedral. This is totally independent of judicial criticism: while the spectator is perfectly free to evaluate such activity in terms of some canon or aesthetic frame of reference, the individual "shaper"--his or her own best spectator--needs no audience to satisfy the conditions of this experience. Comic strip artists, cabinet makers, plumbers and mathematicians are essentially no different from "old masters" when viewed from this perspective.

Even in normative terms, however, the comic strip is integral to the history of art and merits equal recognition with other branches of the fine arts. Essentially an American idiom, it is not only intimately associated with the development of modern art in the United States but with the avant-garde art of the entire Western world. The simplification of form, integration of word and image, flat patterns of bold, garish colors, and heavy contours are common to both, and it is not surprising to learn that several major avant-garde artists in both Europe and the U.S. either began their careers as cartoonists and/or admired the work of cartoonists.

Comics and American Journalism

As a graphic medium, the American comic strip quite naturally shares many features with antecedent European forms, but its origin and definitive character derive from an indigenous set of conditions. While comics attained their maturity in the United States as a result of newspaper growth and mass circulation, this unfoldment did not occur in isolation from other forms of journalistic art. It is related to the general evolution of illustrated journalism in America just prior to the Civil War, when publications like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly hired reportorial artists to perform the work now done by the tabloid photographer.

This practice quickly consolidated itself during the Civil War and the art department soon became a necessary adjunct to most newspapers. These art departments offered aspiring young artists their primary professional outlet. Unsupported by government patronage as in France and lacking the rich resources of an English Royal Academy, would-be American artists frequently took jobs with the burgeoning illustrated newspapers.

Like the Academies, newspapers legitimized the artist's profession in the eyes of middle-class parents, and offered a kind of "graduate" program by virtue of its technical training. The dream of every art student was to see his work "in print"-- the equivalent distinction of a Prix-de-Rome winner in France. Winslow Homer, Elihu Vedder, Thomas Nast, Thomas Hart Benton and a host of others commenced their professional careers as graphic journalists. Indeed, this tradition etched itself deeply into American life, and Dreiser's use of it as the backdrop for his novel THE GENIUS parallels Zola's use of the French academic and official institutions in L'OEUVRE.

As pictorial journalism developed, artists experimented with techniques appropriate to the newsprint medium. Most of the periodical illustration after mid-century was done in "white-line" wood engraving, which attempted to reproduce subtle tones and values. The most that could be achieved was a monotonous flatness and grayness. But newspaper draftsmen began playing around with a blackline medium, preferring to build form by line rather than by tone. The raw power of strong outlines and sharp tonal contrasts were exactly suited to the special character of graphic journalism.

It was at this time that the modern editorial cartoon emerged, and not fortuitously, America's first major political cartoonist, Thomas Nast, began his career as a pictorial reporter. Experiments with the new techniques were dramatically advanced in the hands of the editorial cartoonists. Newspapers encouraged these experiments when their owners observed the impact they made on readers. For the first time in American history, editorial cartoonists and feature artists began building audiences and enjoying a sustained influence over the public. Newspaper publishers not only increased sales but also discovered that they could promote their editorial viewpoint in this fashion as a kind of bonus premium.

The discovery of the potentialities of the medium and the growing emphasis on crispness and immediacy induced graphic journalists to produce shorthand techniques close in spirit to European caricatural trends. Out of this tradition the modern comic strip was born. Comic strips are in fact the final manifestation of old-fashioned illustrated journalism, and their origin is thus related less to technological advances than is generally claimed.

Almost all the pioneer comic strip artists did political cartooning in their formative years, and some, like Windsor McCay and George Luks, could practice it throughout their careers. Frederick Burr Opper, the inventor of ALPHONSE AND GASTON and HAPPY HOOLIGAN, was as well known for his editorial cartoons as for his comics. Robert Carter quit his popular strip COFFEE AND SINKERS to become one of the First World War's outstanding editorial cartoonists. Rube Goldberg also shifted back and forth from sports cartoons and comics to political cartoons. Frank King, creator of GASOLINE ALLEY, ran the entire evolutionary gamut, beginning as a reportorial artist, then going on to do political cartoons and ultimately his famous comic strip.

What related such early strips as Outcault's HOGAN'S ALLEY, McKay's DREAMS OF A RAREBIT FIEND and Opper's ALPHONSE AND GASTON to editorial cartoons was their topical character. The newspaper illustrators not only transferred to the comics their reflections on contemporary life but filled them with the vernacular and settings of urban America. In their infancy comics consisted of a few large panels on a single page and displayed few daily continuities, thus fulfilling a similar role as the Sunday feature supplements of modern newspapers. Cartoonists attempted to express breezy commentaries in the editorial style. Not subject to the taboos that plagued later comic strips, the early cartoonists felt free to satirize religious and ethnic groups and to lampoon the seamy side of American life.

Walt Kelly is a modern who continued this tradition, and he not only drew pure political cartoons but couched his popular POGO in contemporary political allegory. Even Jules Feiffer, Gary Trudeau, and the (once) underground cartoonists sustain the ancestry of the American comic strip in their primarily political viewpoint. More recently, Mike Peters shifted from political cartooning to the strip MOTHER GOOSE AND GRIMM, and the late Jeff McNelly, a rare political cartoonist with a conservative viewpoint, also made the transition with his misanthropic owl named SHOE. An interesting development has been the use of the comic strip format for political cartoons, most notably exploited by Tom Tomorrow in THIS MODERN WORLD. The strip, however, is so wordy that the drawing is overwhelmed and the powerful synthesis that was the hallmark of the older generation is lost.

Comics and Neo-Classical Allegory

The comic strip artist, like the editorial cartoonist, has to embody a general idea in a characteristic physiognomy. One often hears the complaint that the comic strip artist vulgarizes reality by condensing it to a set of visual cliches, thus forcing his audience to accept the crass devices for their natural equivalent.

To a large extent this vulgarization is imposed on the artist by the repetitious character of the medium and the need to convey simple ideas. The artist has to convince his audience that it is always seeing the same character in each panel, and to facilitate this task--and his assistant's who may one day replace him--he exploits features like pupilless eyes, lipless mouths, angular chins and ovoid heads which can easily be depicted from all angles. Summarily drawn figures and standardized forms are thus crucial to the effectiveness of the strip's communication. In his important UNDERSTANDING COMICS, Scott McCloud amplifies our understanding of this process by suggesting that cartoon simplification is related to its universal appeal and that in the end the less realistic the cartoon the more we tend to identify with it and read into it our innermost desires. (Anthropomorphic animals operate this way as well, as Spiegelman's MAUS demonstrates.)

Eventually these forms and the personality they project assume an allegorical guise: Mickey Mouse, Superman, Dick Tracy and L'il Abner culminate as abstract personifications on a level with Justice, Charity, Valor and War. This is why Flaxman, Blake and Girodet (in his ANACREON illustrations, for example) bear strong affinities with Windsor McCay, George McManus and Charles Schulz. The drawing of neo-classicists and comic strippers reveals the same purity of outline and controlled precision, and not uncommonly, the former make use of as many stylistic cliches as the latter. Both groups endeavor to represent a rational style appropriate to the communication of simple ethical ideas.

If the propagandistic content of comics is not always evident, the simple homilies and chauvinistic content preserve the relationship with neo-classicism. Cartoonists of every specialty generally have to moralize since the majority of their ideas and story continuities are strictly based on medieval categories of Good and Evil. This "blockbook" mentality has ironically intensified since the early days of the comics, when the acerbic, vulgar satire appeared as immoral at best, amoral at worst. In the course of the comic strip's evolution, however, the artists became limited by their very effectiveness in increasing newspaper circulation.

The expansion of circulation led to a proportionate increase in the number of restrictions imposed on the artists by calculating syndicates. Syndicates, trying to reach as broad an audience as possible, forced comic strippers to subscribe to innumerable taboos. In the process of coping with these taboos--which surpassed even those of Hollywood, whose monopoly assured it a measure of autonomy--the comic artists forfeited the earlier advantages of contemporary social involvement. Except for the underground artists who attempt to recapture the spirit of the first comics, the comic strip has projected an appeal based on neo-classical and medieval moral values.

Until recently, comic strippers had been bound by so many interdictions that they were forced to project an immaculate, impersonal world, wholly efficient and barely sullied by human frailty. Ideas had to be conveyed through symbolic and allegorical types, even while retaining the outward participation in the contemporary world. There was an endless repetition of theme and character with the inevitable "moral" ending. Perversely, the highly generalized appeal and proscription of reality culminated in the depiction of the dream world of Americans, just as the neo-classicists' cult of antiquity stimulated reveries of an Arcadian paradise.

The majority of the popular adventure comics emerged during the Depression and became firmly entrenched during World War II. The public was led to identify with some single all-powerful character who dominates everyone about him and for whom the major problems of society are non-existent. Americans, noted for their apathy and hero-worshipping, could easily accept a superman-messiah capable of overcoming the limitations of space and time and defending the "good" from the machinations of the "wicked."

The comics increasingly offered a rich fantasy world in a society where conformity became a matter of survival, and assertion of the individual required the courage of a superhero (think Ralph Nader). This fantasy occasionally incorporated the satirical bent and ethnic humor of the older strip, as is seen clearly in Al Capp's L'IL ABNER, a hillbilly personification of the innocent American who nevertheless is the equal of the most scheming adversary. Here we see clearly how allegorical fantasy reshaped more specific political concerns. If Capp occasionally took swipes at Big Business, more often than not his plot assumed the form of an Horatio Alger epic in which Abner set forth to "New Yawk" to master the intricacies of finance capital with more brawn than brains. His egregious "All-Americanism," moreover, may be equated with the type of Nordic hero once exemplified in DER STUERMER, while his adversaries eerily dove-tail with the Semitic-Alien type. L'IL ABNER's success was grounded in the fantasy of a nation of immigrants looking to the hillbilly as the embodiment of indigenous American culture, seen perhaps most dramatically in the number of Jewish folksingers in the postwar period.

Related to this phenomenon is the fact that foreigners were often ridiculed or depicted as villains: they remind Americans of the past from which they have attempted to escape. The fanciful Anglo-Saxon names of comic heroes--which fairly caricature the English upper classes--also support the American ideal: Kerry Drake, Don Winslow, Rip Kirby, Brick Bradford, Buz Sawyer, Clark Kent (like Kenneth Clark), Dick Tracy, Rex Morgan, Vic Jordan and Steve Canyon are not nearly as representative of American society as the names of the authors of these strips. Only JOE PALOOKA caught the immigrant flavor but in comportment, looks and ideals he belonged more to the general class.

Often, the blatant chauvinism of the popular comics is painfully embarrassing, as is the false picture of an harmonious society. Yet it can hardly escape anyone's notice that this very naive optimism expressed in the comics lies behind the energetic transformation of contemporary American society. BLONDIE anticipated the suburban development, BUCK ROGERS and SUPERMAN the mastery of matter and space. It is as if the fantasies projected by the comics have been realized in fact, but with all their attendant implications of repression. The real shortcomings of American life consist in the very elements normally tabooed by the syndicates and have as yet to be solved in actuality. While the fantasies have been acted out, the reality of everyday existence continues to be ignored, precisely as it had been proscribed by the popular press.

In the 'fifties and 'sixties a new myth, the fantasy of the nuclear family, became increasingly evident in the comics. This has been most obvious in the newspapers, where family strips have to a large extent replaced adventure strips. Here too we are in a remote realm of experience: PEANUTS, MISS PEACH, LUTHER, and HI AND LOIS exhibit infant prodigies who play on the daydreams of anxious parents in an IQ-oriented society, while comics like JUDGE PARKER, REX MORGAN M.D., and BRENDA STARR project hero-types in glamorous vocations like the old soap operas. Rather than reflect reality, they personify the fantasy-ideals of the American majority.

In the comic books, this new material first made its appearance in the Marvel comics written by Stan Lee, most notably THE FANTASTIC FOUR, where a superhero team was portrayed as a family that fought enemies together but bickered amongst themselves. Lee's fascination with a relationship-based emotional vulnerability was at the root of a whole string of characters-The Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Daredevil, and most famously, Spiderman. In SPIDERMAN, "the hero who could be you," Lee captured the multiple identities employed at home, work and school by the teenage male readership that continued to demand moralistic adventure tales. Lee was also fortunate in being able to rely on the talents of artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko- the work of these artists was more dynamic, more noirish and grittier than was usual under the Comics Code instituted in the 'fifties, but they retained the moral and allegorical clarity they had honed over years of comics work.

Significantly, comics emerged as an enhanced medium during the Vietnam War, at a time when chauvinism and nationalism was decried and war condemned by a major segment of the population. The opposition between mainstream and underground fell away as DC and Marvel experimented with new characters, and ZAP! and THE FANTASTIC FOUR found some common ground. Lee and Ditko's DR. STRANGE negotiated a morally ambivalent astral world where occult knowledge was of more value than strength, and Gil Kane's HAWK AND DOVE debated the need for violence as a tool against crime. The most remarkable product of this era was Jack Kirby's FOURTH WORLD stories: Kirby, a veteran of combat in WWII, portrayed in no uncertain terms his admiration of the counterculture in comic books he meant as a mythology for a more moral and peaceful American society.

Since the early seventies, this oppositional perspective has been most at home in the mainstream in works which aspire to the coherence and narrative complexity of the novel. Will Eisner, working outside the mainstream, but not as an "underground cartoonist," has been the greatest inspiration to such work, even coining the term "graphic novel" for his pioneering work A Contract with God of 1978. A further guide has been found in Japanese manga, where sustained narratives of thousands of pages, dealing with a range of themes, are common.

In 1986, Frank Miller revived the Batman mythos for DC in a limited series, THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. Thematically, it followed the Marvel line of vulnerable heroes as an aging Batman copes with his bodily changes, and formally, its cinematic vividness, madcap angles, and dazzling compositions showed the influence of manga and the undergrounds. Alan Moore's WATCHMEN goes even further by portraying his costumed heroes as well-meaning bunglers and old-fashioned hustlers. But the most remarkable has been a comic series of the 1990s that became a cult favorite and was eventually turned into a series of graphic novels, Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN, a riveting mixture of conventional myth, history, Shakespearean fantasy, and dark conspiracies of humans, demons, and animals in which the bigger-than-life embodiments of Good and Evil are all fair game.

In recent years, even the newspaper strips have made some headway into acknowledging reality. The family strip itself has gradually come of age: the feminist-inspired SALLY FORTH is about a liberated housewife, but depicted from the male perspective of Steve Alaniz and Francesco Marciuliano, reminiscent of the old Wonder Woman comic, while BABY BLUES by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott trashes the cute kid syndrome. Despite the current obsession with multiculturalist representation, however, "political correctness" still weighs heavily over the mainstream press and has all but replaced the old code; cartoonists still seem loath to represent the full range of ethnic and gender minorities in the new millennial society.

Only token feminist and African-American strips have made a breakthrough; the feminist strips include Nancy Guisewife's CATHY, in which the eponymous character copes with psychological tension between careerist ambitions and social relations and Nicole Hollander's SYLVIA, a more savvy examination of American culture and gender issues. Both have their own unique formal approaches: Cathy faces the viewer in helpless despair, while Sylvia is seen in profile wisecracking to an offstage character. Unique is the lesbian feminism of Alison Bechdel's NO DYKES, although its circulation is mainly limited to speciality journals. (There is a gay equivalent in Howard Cruse's STUCK RUBBER BABY, about a gay man coming out in the Bible Belt.) African-American strips run the gamut from Robb Armstrong's JUMP START, which depicts a working-class family (the father is a cop) not unlike the typical Blondielike strip with occasional references to black/white issues, to Aaron Magruder's controversial THE BOONDOCKS, presenting inner-city kids transplanted to the suburbs and their contiual critique of the local culture. Huey, a perpetually irascible black nationalist, gives the strip its edgy position in the mainstream press.

The most sophisticated challenges to the moralistic fantasies of the American comics tradition are the "alternative" cartoonists who have succeeded the underground cartoonists of the 'sixties and 'seventies. Often such efforts take the shape of an exploration of the seamy underbelly of American culture in order to recuperate the flipside of the American success story. One of the most original of these comic creators is Dan Clowes, who exploits a clean, sharp style to communicate his mad obsessions in EIGHTBALL and GHOST WORLD. The protagonists of GHOST WORLD, Enid and Becky, display Generation-X sensitivities and independence that show remarkable insight on the part of a male artist. Clowes also satirizes comic book truisms more directly in his stories of the sadsack cartoonist Dan Pussey, where comic-book myth-makers like Stan Lee are held up for ridicule.

Comics and Modern Art

Yet despite the connection of the comic ethos to neo-classicism, it is evident that caricature and cartoons also contained the elements of contemporary art. This is not only reflected in the fact that we count among our great artists caricaturists like George Grosz and Saul Steinberg, as well as painters like Klee, Picasso, Dufy, Miro and Chagall whose styles are often indistinguishable from that of cartoons, but in the sanctification of Pop Art as a seminal direction in the art of the sixties and in the increasing number of clubs and shows given over to the subject.

This change in the status of the cartoon is linked to the revolution which began in Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when an international group of artists attempted to transcend what they felt to be the limitations of an outworn classicism and a dissolute naturalism by turning to caricatural forms for new solutions. Degas and van Gogh--both of whom deeply admired cartoonists--and a vanguard including Seurat, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch, Ensor, Hodler, Klinger, and Stuck (who began his career as a cartoonist for the FLIEGENDEN BLAETTER) all veered toward popular imagery to express a fresh vision of the world.

Curiously, their ultimate achievement derived in large part from synthesizing the academic and naturalist traditions under the impact of popular illustration. Their forms were expressed in outline, their themes were socially or psychologically oriented, and with the exception of Stuck their pictorial content was drawn from everyday life.

If in the use of distortion for effect--the fundamental contribution of caricature to modern art--the young artists differed radically from the conservatives, like the original neo-classicists they used a distinct linear emphasis and psychological content to avoid prettiness and superficiality. Thus they shared the common heritage of the comic strip, which likewise absorbed the neo-classical and naturalist tendencies late in the century under the influence of journalistic illustration. It should therefore not be surprising to find that the fortunes of contemporary art and the comic strip ultimately overlapped.

The relationship of modern art to caricature and comics is impressive. Picasso, who admired "The Katzenjammer Kids," shows the influence of American comic strips in THE DREAM AND LIE OF FRANCO and in certain characteristic distortions such as the anatomy of the central figure of NIGHT FISHING AT ANTIBES, where the debt to ALLEY OOP is unmistakable.

More significantly, Cubism may have been generally influenced by the fragmentation and distortions of the comics, and the introduction of floating textual signs in the pictorial space was foreshadowed by the cartoonist's insertion of free-floating letters and pictographic symbols into the image area. Nor is it fortuitous that, when looking at a Cubist papier colle with its combination of caricatural elements and newspaper fragments, the configuration of a comic strip seems to emerge. Juan Gris, a leading figure in the Cubist movement, actually began his career as a cartoonist, and his early Cubist works display in their heavy linearism and exaggerated physiognomies a distinctly caricatural effect. Metzinger and Léger (especially in his later years) also seemed to have been influenced by caricature and comics. The Cubist-inspired Americans Stuart Davis and Romare Bearden were influenced by comics, and Bearden began his career as a political and gag cartoonist.

It is probably no coincidence that Lyonel Feininger, the first artist in Germany to understand Cubism's importance, began his career as a periodical cartoonist and comic strip illustrator. A native American of German descent who settled in Europe, Feininger's early development shows the typical American proclivity for pictorial journalism, when he contributed both regular illustrations and editorial cartoons to German, American and French periodicals. In the period 1906-1907, Feininger created two comic strips for the CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE KIND-DER-KIDS and WEE WILLIE WINKIE'S WORLD. The angular settings, mechanized objects, animation of landscape phenomena and delicate line-work of these comics anticipate his painting style, as do the thematic confrontations between architecture, nature and the elements which mark his mature production.

Klee and Kandinsky, Feininger's colleagues at the Bauhaus, similarly disclose a fascination with caricatural features, perhaps as an outgrowth of their study with Franz von Stuck who started out as a professional cartoonist. While the impact of cartoons is most conspicuous in the work of Klee, Kandinsky's distorted settings in the early landscapes, the character of motion in his images of riders and the exaggerated use of black lines are reminiscent of early comic strips.

The Futurists' search for forms which would express the dynamic quality of modern life undoubtedly led them to contemplate the comic strip, where visual suggestions of speed and action are generally the most common ingredient. The Futurists' notorious "lines of force" are none other than the "speed lines" dear to all practitioners of the comics and date from the earliest of the strips. Duchamp exploits these same speed lines around the lower portion of the NUDE DESCENDING STAIRCASE, NO. 2.

Indeed, it would be difficult to conceive of either Dada or Surrealism apart from the humorous illustrators of the last century who served as their immediate forerunners or the contemporary comic strip artists and cartoonists whom their protagonists admired. Not only did Duchamp (following in the footsteps of brother Villon) begin as a cartoonist, but in his review NEW YORK DADA, Duchamp published the work of the American comic strip artist Rube Goldberg, whose weird machines and lunatic inventions may very well have inspired some of the pictorial contraptions of the Dadaists. Goldberg's contribution was not neglected in Barr's pioneering show of 1936, FANTASTIC ART, DADA, SURREALISM. Significantly, Duchamp signed his famous readymade, FOUNTAIN, "R. Mutt," a name compounded of the manufactuer of the urinal and the character from Bud Fisher's strip MUTT AND JEFF.

Victor Brauner, Max Ernst and René Magritte subdivided several of their pictures into multiple compartments like comic strips, and such a work as Magritte's MAN READING A NEWSPAPER--often mistakenly associated with film technique--parodies the sequential format of the daily "gag" strip and its "punch line."

Much later, Kurt Schwitters introduced the fragment of a comic strip into one of his collages, and thus forged a direct link between the Dadaists and Neo-Dadaists--the Pop artists who systematically exploited the comics. Jasper Johns made a painting in 1959 with a sequence of ALLEY OOP attached to it, and not long afterward Warhol and Lichtenstein began singling out cartoon characters as subjects. The contemporary artists Jim Nutt and Mike Kelly produce works that are closer to comic creation than to Pop Art which appropriated already published comic imagery.

The association of comics with high art modernism inspired the innovation of certain comic magazines in the 1970s and 1980s that had a frankly modernist perspective. These included Art Spiegelman's ARCADE and later RAW, a large format, European-influenced title that embraced most of the new generation of underground cartoonists that he admired. RAW especially gave as much attention to the design of individual pages and abstract patterning as the storytelling. The compositions of panels and powerful singularity of the artists like Joost Swartes, Ever Meulen, Sue Coe, Charles Burns, and Gary Panter enhanced the cultural level of comics and paved the way for the notable achievement of Spiegelman's graphic novel, MAUS, first serialized in RAW, that makes use of many of the formal innovations first developed in his magazines.

Another important figure to make the transition from underground to mainstream is Bill Griffith, whose ZIPPY comments insightfully on the passing bourgeois scene with panels that approach the grandeur of high art. Finally, the process came full circle when Gilbert Hernandez (who together with brother Jaime has reworked the language of comics to portray Latino life in the monumental series LOVE AND ROCKETS) sketched a fantastically surreal biography of Frida Kahlo in FLIES ON THE CEILING (THE LOVE AND ROCKETS COLLECTION, v. 9, Fantagraphics).

The comic strip thus has every right to be embraced in the history of art. As a reflection of the cultural and intellectual development in the United States it belongs to the history of ideas, and as an art form it must be studied under the rubrics of neo-classicism and modern art. Finally, just as one can perceive aesthetically "the rocket's red glare," so the comic strip can be regarded by the spectator as "high art." Art is in itself neither good nor bad in an ethical sense; and it may become a force for either without the least bit diminishing itself as art. Here it is not simply a question of the despotic patronage of popes and syndicates, but of the final product as well.

(A more extended presentation of the ideas of this essay appeared as "The Comic Stripped and Ash Canned," a review of the catalogue for the exhibit, The Art of the Comic Strip, in Art Journal, Spring 1973.)

Albert Boime is Professor of Art History at UCLA. His most recent book is ART AND THE FRENCH COMMUNE, IMAGING PARIS AFTER WAR AND REVOLUTION, published by Princeton University Press.

PopImage Forum - Discuss this message at the PopImage forum.