CO-MIX. Art Spiegelman
A Retrospective of Comics, Drawings, and Scraps

In Jan­uary 2012 the cele­brat­ed car­toon­ist, artist, and Pul­itz­er Prize win­n­er Art Spiegel­man re­ceived a presti­gious award for his life’s work: the Grand Prix of the ci­ty of An­goulême, France—famed as the “c­i­ty of comics” on ac­count of its Fes­ti­val in­ter­na­tio­n­al de la bande dess­inée. To mark this award for Spie­gle­man’s life work, the first ma­jor ret­ro­spec­tive to en­com­pass his en­tire oeu­vre has been or­ganized in Eu­rope.

Tak­ing cen­ter stage will be of course Maus, the now le­g­endary com­ic-strip nov­el re­count­ing how Spiegel­man’s Pol­ish Jew­ish par­ents sur­vived the Ausch­witz and Dachau con­cen­tra­tion camps un­der dra­mat­ic cir­cum­s­tances. In Maus Spiegel­man ac­quaint­ed young peo­ple with the mass-mur­der of the Jews by ad­dress­ing his au­di­ence in the medi­um that had taught him so much in his own youth—the com­ic strip. The book achieved suc­cess world­wide and now ranks as a mod­ern clas­sic. Spiegel­man was lat­er ac­claimed for his graph­ic nov­el In the Sha­d­ow of No Tow­ers (2002), first pub­lished in Ger­many, which tells of his ex­pe­ri­ences dur­ing and af­ter the 9/11 ter­rorist at­tacks.

Along with the com­plete Maus, the ex­hi­bi­tion fea­tures Spiegel­man’s ini­tial works for the bub­ble-gum in­dus­try, sketch­es and fin­ished spreads, and il­lus­tra­tions and cov­er draw­ings for The New York­er with over 300 works. The ex­hi­bi­tion will al­so show the film por­trait Art Spiegel­man. Traits de Mé­moire by Clara Ku­per­berg und Joëlle Oost­er­linck (ARTE France/Wi­chi­ta Films 2009). In Ger­many the ex­hi­bi­tion will be shown sole­ly at the Mu­se­um Lud­wig, Cologne, with over 300 works, af­ter first be­ing host­ed in An­goulême and at the Cen­tre Pompi­dou, Paris.

In June 2012 Spiegel­man be­came the re­cipi­ent of the distin­guished Siegfried Unseld Prize, which has been award­ed to writ­ers and scho­lars bien­nial­ly since 2004 by the Siegfried Unseld Foun­da­tion. The Ex­hi­bi­tion will be ac­com­panied by Me­ta­maus, an ex­ten­sive vol­ume of in­ter­views and ad­di­tio­n­al ma­te­rial trac­ing the ge­n­e­sis of the mod­ern clas­sic Maus (pub­lished in Ger­man by S. Fisch­er Ver­lag) as well as by the ca­t­a­logue CO-MIX (pub­lished in En­glish and French by Flam­mari­on). Con­cur­rent­ly, the Stadt­mu­se­um, Cologne, will pre­sent the ex­hi­bi­tion Elf­tausend Jungfrauen. Ralf König: Das Ur­su­la-Pro­jekt. (Oc­to­ber 13, 2012–Fe­bruary 9, 2013).

Ex­hi­bi­tion Cu­ra­tor: Bo­do von De­witz