Fragments of the Pop Years, 1960-1970

PREVIOUS SPREAD: Guy Peellaert, photographed in 1968 on the set of his musical short Machine In Out. opposite: The artist (RIGHT) is shown

directing a photographic shoot. Peellaert would insert pictures of his model into one of the later experimental comic strips he produced around 1968.

83

84

foreword by orson peellaert

Unclassifiable illustrator. Image regurgitator. Icon painter. Hybrid photographer. Mixed-media maestro. Even the Michelangelo of Pop. Many have tried, but all have failed, to classify Guy Peellaert. When, toward the end of his life, a journalist attempted to press him into defining his own work, he responded, with his characteristic brilliant vulgarity: Im a bastard. And that will have to suffice. Few artists who have achieved such cultfavorite status have taken such consistent pains to defy any and all categorization. Peellaert left it to his admirers to bring up the artist word in their hagiographies, but from his first celebrated achievements to his final works, created in isolation and ill health, his unwavering, visceral rejection of any kind of artistic posturing surely comprises a vital first clue for anyone attempting to explicate his profoundly indefinable oeuvre. Reader, relax: We are not going to indulge in any such treacherous exercise within these pages. However one might choose to define him, Guy Peellaert was never a comic book artist. His first, explosively brilliant achievements borrowed the form for a short while, but, to the discomfiture of comics historians worldwide, he was quick to jettison it, as if to illustrate the essential fluidity that characterized the Pop eras thirst for experimentation. The Adventures of Jodelle and Pravda will forever be seen as twin volcanic eruptions instant classics that propelled comic books into adulthood and contributed to the ongoing evolution of the art form. He revolutionized the medium with these two masterpieces but it was just a gift made in passing, because there was never any follow-up, never any question of his staying once the accomplishment had been logged. I am not a man of the chapel, Peellaert would declare a few decades later. And so it was impossible for him to envision comics or any other discipline whose perimeter was too sharply delineated as any kind of long-term vocation. Lets just say I leave my chewing gum under the table. To remain free, in a state of flux, to enjoy the kind of perpetual forward motion that forces you to systematically abandon the fruits of the previous stage, in order to thwart the threat of institutionalization that would hobble your creative impulse: This was Guy Peellaerts vital modus operandi the only way he could remain connected to real life. That, more than anything else, is what makes him a Pop artist: From Rauschenberg to Warhol and passing through Lichtenstein, the new ways of making art that rattled the status quo throughout the 1950s and 60s shared a common iconography that had been mined directly from the flow of images that was being generated by society at large, especially this new paradigm that emphasized a deliberate link to everyday life. Guy Peellaert took this logic to its conclusion by making his initial mark through comics, a quintessentially popular medium upon which he had seized to capture an era and its customs, to synthesize them to close the circle, as it were and then to move on. This is why Jodelle and Pravda remain to this day the only comics that are recognized as genuine Pop Art achievements: Displaying a level of radicalism unprecedented for this medium, they expressed this movements spirit on a level that far transcended the obvious aesthetic similarities. This is why his technical wizardry ought to be appreciated on a secondary level: the virtuosity of his line, the skill of his perspectives, the picturality of his compositions, the boldness of his colors: These do not comprise the crux of his achievement. This first reprinting of The Adventures of Jodelle, nearly fifty years after its creation, gives us an opportunity to re-contextualize this work within its original era, marked as it was by an extraordinary convergence of innovation in the arts, entertainment, and show business. Throughout the 1960s, Guy Peellaert would lay his hands on nearly every medium at the whim of his spur-of-the-moment experimentation, usually under the radar but in ways that prefigured the breaking down of barriers between the arts. This essay bears witness to an era when the loosening of traditional morals, the youth explosion, and the rise of the consumer society converged in an insatiable desire to rebuild the world. Jodelle and Pravda are two guideposts that frame this field, which had now been opened to every creative possibility. Jodelle defined itself with its prolongation of childhood fantasies, through its resolutely upbeat exaltation of a cosmic and liberating American dream, whose sinister undercurrents had not yet become evident. Less than two years later, Pravda sprang from a thirst for absolute emancipation and a radicalization that proclaimed the anti-establishment movements of the late 1960s. It would lead Peellaert to gradually move away from Pop in favor of the underground. During the first few years of the following decade, the unforgettable Rock Dreams would seal, as if with a red-hot iron, the ultimate conclusion of this entirely original approach.

opposite: Guy Peellaert at his desk, 1968.

85

the years of gestation

Since one is required to unearth formative influences from the tortuous paths of childhood, let us highlight a World War II-era experience that had a profound impact on Peellaert. It was not a matter of deprivation or persecution: Born in Brussels on April 6, 1934, he came from an upper-middle-class Catholic Belgian family. His father, who had inherited a comfortable income from a coalmine, would have no concerns during his lifetime beyond managing his stable of racehorses. Young Guy was raised, along with his sister, by nannies. He summered in Cap dAntibes, wintered in Switzerland, and spent the war years sheltered from any kind of need. Thus his seminal wartime experience was not related to any trauma: On that September day in 1944 when the American army marched into Brussels to the sound of thunderous cheering, the 10-year-old lad was allowed to climb into a Jeep, where he breathed deep from this spirit of popular elation. The fascination he felt for America and his liberating heroes, who had choreographed their own entrance with such skill, would ignite his romantic imagination, leading him to tout, for many years to come, the gulf that separated the gloomy old continent from this conquering New World, which seemed like a veritable Wonderland. These first whiffs of freedom no doubt spurred on early manifestations of his rebellious spirit, which the Peellaerts were determined to break by shipping their child off to a feared Jesuit boarding school. But one day, an instructor informed them that Guy was spending every waking hour drawing, and even recommended that they send him to the Institut Saint-Luc to study Monumental Art much to the discomfiture of the tyrannical paterfamilias who had predicted a future spent sleeping under bridges for his wayward offspring. The massive worldwide dissemination of images by America in the postwar years formed a keystone of its cultural domination, and Belgium acquiesced to this hegemony with surprising docility. All the movies shown in Brussels theatres at the time came from the Hollywood studios, and Guy Peellaert, who spent his entire adolescence living less than a quarter mile from the American Cultural Center, consumed them avidly. He embraced the vision of the world reflected in Life and National Geographic magazines, and pored over the photographs and advertisements they contained. The tantalizing, eye-singeing aesthetic of Gottlieb pinball machines called out to him from the dive bars where the young man, attracted by the sin-soaked atmosphere, also discovered jazz and rhythm n blues. These new sounds, with their visceral pulse, fed a spirit that was increasingly in revolt against the deathly bourgeoisie of the family yoke. The unlikely collision of classical references ingested at Saint-Luc where Peellaert diligently studied the masters frescoes and paintings and this seething mass of vulgar elements resulted in a new, thrilling tension. It comprised the DNA of the work that would follow these years of gestation, a hybrid of noble academicism and sublimated triviality. In 1953, his revolt reached a flashpoint: When he came of age for his military service, Peellaert joined the United Nations Belgian Battalion in Korea. In February of 1954, he took in, cheek-by-jowl with a crowd of G.I.s, the legendary show performed by Marilyn Monroe to entertain the American troops. This trip provided a genuine shock to his system: Upon his return
86

from the months-long initiatory journey through Asia, the young man now had to deal with his immediate needs. He took his first steps as an assistant set designer for the Brussels National Theatre, before being hired, in 1957, by the advertising agency in charge of the Max Factor account. This American brand had taken off in the 1940s thanks to what was a unique concept for the time: the make-up of the stars. Over a three-year period, Peellaert rose to the position of Business Manager, in charge of the European Max Factor account, during which time he created countless fashion drawings for

BELOW AND NEXT PAGE: After giving up his career in advertising in 1960, Peellaert worked in Brussels as a freelance illustrator. The Belgian national airline Sabena was among his first clients: In 1963, it commissioned him to create the images for its prestigious annual calendar, an early work in which the influence of Surrealism and Peellaerts deep-rooted fascination with machinery are already manifest. Also noticeable are the artist's formal study of murals and friezes, as well as a pronounced taste for seriality, which he would use profusely in Jodelle to depict soul-deprived human beings. At the time, Sabena was a major sponsor of Belgian art, notably giving a similar commission to Ren Magritte the following year.

the agency and saw thousands of portraits of the cream of American cinema cross his desk. Dismayed by the suffocating constraints of the commercial world, he tendered his resignation as soon as his tasks had been drained of all creative dimension, but these years in the advertising field helped him acquire a sharp sense of glamour and the ability to depict women, skills he would soon use to his advantage. From 1960 on, Guy Peellaert worked at fashioning his own personal style even as he was furnishing illustrations to a variety of clients. Very few of these
87

works have survived, but a handful are featured in a 1964 issue of the prestigious Gebrauchsgrafik International Advertising Art, which devoted a sizeable spread to the 30-year-old artist, whom it described with the untranslatable German word Fantast (a man of great imagination in the shaky English translation accompanying the article) and went on to say: He draws and paints strange flying machines; he designs bold perspectives; he perceives human beings and their limbs in extraordinary

distortion. Peellaerts view of reality is unique. He conveys his astonishment at our world to anyone who gazes at his illustrations, whose own imagination is then fired up by these thoughts that have been put on paper. Yet this artist is no dreamer, his fertile imagination notwithstanding, and his drawings are created not for rarefied literary works, but to meet the demands of everyday, day-by-day life. He depicts the rough-and-tumble, uncompromising world of sports just as convincingly as he does a contemporary love story, or thrilling scenes from the early days of aviation () Peellaert is a chronicler with a mind of his own, fulfilling this new generations yearning to see things as they are, not prettified or romanticized.

OPposite: La Radio et Tlvision Belge,

which produced numerous cultural events, was one of Peellaerts major clients during these exploratory years. This brochure, created for an Orkest festival in 1964, is particularly interesting: the mosaic appears to foreshadow his comics work, and its graphic style, consisting of flat, bright colors, white areas, and stylized, faceless silhouettes, prefigures major elements of the Jodelle approach.
Far Left: As an art director in charge of the Max Factor cosmetics brand throughout Europe in the early days of marketing, Peellaert worked from countless photographs of film stars under contract with the brand, including Brigitte Bardot for this 1959 magazine ad. Left: These illustrations are among dozens that Peellaert produced for the womens lifestyle book Le Conseiller de la Femme. Published in 1961, soon after his resignation, they comprise some of the artist's oldest known surviving work. Peellaert would go on to create many more fashion drawings for womens publications during the first half of the 1960s.

88

89

Right: All-American sports such as

automobile racing and football proved a veritable obsession throughout Peellaert's 1960s work, as evidenced by these early gouache paintings foreshadowing the slabs of solid colors and the forced perspectives of the Jodelle style. Peellaert would use football as a recurring motif in almost all of his major works from the period, even devoting a complete comic to the sport with The Game, published in 1968.
BELOW: This work, a mural created by

Peellaert for the corporate headquarters of a Belgian insurance company, displays intricate ornamental patterns reminiscent of the graphic style developed by the American illustrator Milton Glaser around the same time. This ethereal, dreamlike depiction of a football team also incorporates abstract decorative elements recalling the technique utilized in the murals of Gustav Klimt.

90