Though no longer a weekly cartoonist, Feiffer still wields his political pen by Mary Voelz Chandler
"I see my work as a way of explaining what's going on to myself," Jules Feiffer says. "It's not a polemic or a lecture or to score points on readers. I just wanted to figure the ... thing out. I never believed the official explanation."
Jules Feiffer gave up a weekly cartoon strip years ago. But this longtime observer of the country's political and mental health is still busy making images that combine his darkly funny take on modern life with a languid style that suggests as much as it says.
"I try to figure out a way to comment when the mood moves me," Feiffer said in a recent call from New York, where he's working on a somewhat-autobiographical musical for Disney and on memoirs to be published in 2009. "I see my work as a way of explaining what's going on to myself. It's not a polemic or a lecture or to score points on readers. I just wanted to figure the . . . thing out. I never believed the official explanation."
What's moving him now - no surprise - is the current political campaign, and so two new images of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama are featured in a show of several types of Feiffer work at Michele Mosko Fine Art.
One portrays a couple of dancing Obama supporters singing of their desperation for an Obama win despite shifts in his positions. The other shows Obama dribbling a basketball that looks strangely like the face of Republican presidential nominee John McCain.
"It's not how I view him," Feiffer said of Obama and that hopeful couple. "It's how I see liberal voters view him. It's not reflective except indirectly."
And his personal view? "He's a work in progress, the most interesting work in progress we've had on the political scene since JFK. He's extraordinarily smart."
Along with vintage Feiffer political images - think Nixon - and commentary on relationships and social issues, the exhibition also includes illustrations from his children's books.
Those proved a lure away from the weekly strips.
"How do you write kids books if you don't hang around with your kids?" Feiffer and his wife, Jenny, a writer and performer, have two daughters, Halley, 23, and Julie, 13, and a daughter, Kate, from his first marriage.
He's won an Oscar for a short-subject cartoon, written novels, done screenplays for the movies Little Murders and Carnal Knowledge, and his cartoons and other imagery have been published extensively.
Feiffer also was a delegate to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, an event he remembers well for being "very exciting and quite a display of what one saw this country turning into."
He was in the lobby of the Hyatt Hotel "drinking a martini with Studs Terkel when the cops knocked kids through the windows," he said. "I felt helpless."
When told of an organization named the Re-create 68 Alliance, Feiffer said: "I refuse to believe it's going to repeat itself. Chicago was about the frustration of not having an outlet. Hubert Humphrey was a hawk on the war, and he was going to be the nominee. . . . It gave them no choice."
Besides, "you can't have another Chicago if the police don't behave as the police did there," he said. "If protesters were dealt with with a degree of openness and tolerance, Chicago wouldn't have happened."
Chandlerm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2677
Jules Feiffer
* What: political cartoons, illustrations, drawings and prints
* Where and when: Michele Mosko Fine Art, 136 W. 12th Ave., through Nov. 1
* Meet Feiffer: Reception with the artist, 5 to 8 p.m. Sept. 19
Michele Mosko Fine Art exhibits prints by international artists John Baldessari, Louise Bourgeois, Enrique Chagoya, Christo, Helen Frankenthaler, Howard Hodgkin, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, Sol LeWitt, Robert Motherwell, Wayne Thiebaud, Betty Woodman, Huang Yan, and others. Featuring photography by Jill Greenberg, Bob Kolbrener, and Amalie R. Rothschild.
