Once is not customary, let’s start with the conclusion: Two naked girls de Luz is a totally mastered book, of acute intelligence, a very great comic strip. Luz – unfortunately for him and for his friends murdered in the massacre of Charlie-Hebdo – knows the price of men’s gaze on images. Well, in this book, it’s a picture that looks at history.
Let’s talk painting…
This image is a painting, which actually exists, painted in 1919 by the German artist Otto Mueller. The title tells you what it represents, Two naked girlsbut we will never see them. Because we are the painting, we are in their place, and we watch history in progress: in the 1920s and 1930s, in Germany, with the rise of Nazism, the dispossession of the Jews and the detour through the sinister exhibition, wanted by Hitler on degenerate art.
The painting looks at those who admire it, buy it, steal it, criticize it, carry it around. He sees other paintings going up in smoke in the pyres that the new order lights to impose its views. Ill, the painter Otto Mueller died in 1930. A survivor of these atrocious times, the painting will later show the crowds wandering through galleries and museums, unconscious of the weight of the past.
Bordering on caricature, Luz’s drawing captures the truth of the faces, the disgust of the executioners, the humanity of the victims. Great art!
Two naked girlspublished by Albin Michel
Another era, another painter…
Ten years ago, Julie Birmant and Clément Oubrerie completed the fourth album of their evocation of Picasso, soberly titled Pablobig public and critical success. The duo is now tackling this other monument of painting that is Salvador Dali. After the childhood and adolescence of a troubled boy, this work centers on the figure of Gala, Paul Eluard’s wife, whom she will leave to share Dali’s amorous and creative madness.
Back and forth between Paris and Cadaquès, the fishing village of the Costa Brava where the surrealist adept at critical paranoia spent most of his life, the staging of this chapter draws with jubilation from the maddening corpus of dreamlike images of the Catalan master.
Dali, volume 2, published by Dargaud.
