Si Lewen's Parade: An Artist's Odyssey

by Si Lewen, Art Spiegelman (Introduction)

Overview

Si Lewen’s Parade is a timeless story told in a language that knows no country—a wordless epic that, despite its muteness, is more powerful than the written or the spoken word. First published in 1957, The Parade is a lost classic, newly discovered, remastered, and presented by Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Maus. Reproduced in a unique two-sided accordion-fold format with an extensive overview of the artist’s career on the verso, The Parade is a celebration of art and the story of recurring war as Si Lewen experienced it over the past 90 years, watching the joyful parades that marked the end of World War I lead into the death marches of World War II and the Korean War. As The Parade unfolds, the reader is taken on an unforgettable journey of sequential images.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781419721618
Publisher:	ABRAMS
Publication date:	10/04/2016
Pages:	148
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 11.20(h) x 1.40(d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Si Lewen was born in Lublin, Poland, on November 8, 1918. During World War II he served in the US Army as one of the Ritchie Boys (German-speaking Special Ops) from the invasion of Normandy to the liberation of Buchenwald. He resumed his career as a painter after the war. Lewen lives in Gwynedd, Pennsylvania. Si Lewen passed away at the Foulkways retirement home in Gwynedd, Pennsylvania, on July 25, 2016. A few days before his death, Art Spiegelman presented him with a finished copy of Si Lewen’s Parade: An Artist’s Odyssey. Lewen’s daughter Nina Kardon said, “Seeing the book brought him not only happiness, but a sense of closure to his life.” The Whitney Museum of American Art acquired several pieces of his art from Si Lewen's Parade in 2017. Art Spiegelman is an American comics writer, artist, and editor best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel memoir, Maus.

Editorial Reviews

It's only fitting that Si Lewen should open The Parade with an image of children: four of them, sketched in what looks like charcoal, rushing excitedly in from the left side of the frame. Who loves a parade more than children? -- although for Lewen, this is little more than irony. What interests him, after all, are crowds and power, like Elias Canetti but without the text. "A few people may have been standing together -- five, ten or twelve, not more; nothing has been announced, nothing is expected," Canetti wrote in 1960, less than a decade after Lewen completed The Parade. "Suddenly everywhere is black with people and more come streaming from all sides as though streets had only one direction. Most of them do not know what has happened and, if questioned, have no answer; but they hurry to be there where most other people are. There is a determination in their movement which is quite different from the expression of ordinary curiosity. It seems as though the movement of some of them transmits itself to the others. But that is not all; they have a goal which is there before they can find words for it."

The Parade offers a vivid dramatization of Canetti's thesis: "an impassioned narrative suite of drawings," observes Art Spiegelman in his introduction, " . . . about the recurring drumbeat of war that lures every generation into devastation." If Spiegelman's comment suggests that The Parade can be read as a graphic novel, this both is and isn't accurate. Certainly, Lewen comes out of a narrative tradition; born in 1918 in Russia but raised in Germany -- he fled to New York, with his family, after Hitler came to power -- he fell under the influence of "the wordless woodcut novels of Frans Masereel" after receiving the Flemish artist's 1919 book Passionate Journey as a thirteenth birthday gift. The Parade, however, grows equally out of Lewen's experience as an American soldier during the Second World War. In Germany, he arrived at Buchenwald not long after it was liberated, and what he saw there shattered him. "I knew that I was finished as a soldier," he would later write, "seeing the world for what, I thought, it was: a slaughterhouse, a bordello, and an insane asylum, run by butchers, pimps, and madmen. And Man? A festering, putrid, slimy excretion polluting the face of the Earth. A hospital ship brought me back to America, and half a year later I was discharged -- 'as good as new,' one of the doctors said. I was not so sure." It was out of this sense of despair, this collapse of narrative, that he began to fashion, at the outset of the 1950s, the sequence of black-and-white drawings (fifty-five of them) that comprise his masterwork.

Lewen exhibited The Parade in 1953 at a New York gallery and published it as a limited-edition monograph in 1957. Although praised by Albert Einstein ("Our time needs you and your work!" he enthused), the project remained essentially unknown. Even Spiegelman, who has long devoted himself to reclamation efforts -- he curated the Library of America's 2010 reissue of six woodcut novels by Lynd Ward -- did not know of Lewen until he stumbled across him while "poking around obscure corners of the Internet." In early 2013, he elaborates, "I contacted what I assumed would be Si Lewen's estate . . . I was soon corresponding with Si himself." With Lewen as active participant (he died in July of this year, at the age of ninety-seven), Spiegelman put together a new and authoritative edition of The Parade, featuring eight additional images and a host of supporting materials: a contextualizing essay, interviews, pages from Lewen's unpublished autobiography, and a broad selection of his other visual work. The result is an astonishing hybrid that speaks to hope and simultaneously refutes it.

The book unfurls like an accordion -- fan-folded, as if it held a mural on both sides – in a form known as a Leporello. If this occasionally renders our experience of The Parade a bit unwieldy, that's part of the intention, to disturb our sensibilities, our expectations, to wake us up in the most literal sense. In that, it is reminiscent of Joe Sacco's The Great War, another wordless document that unfolds as one extended image, in which the horrors of combat resonate with the relentless drama of a tapestry.

The tapestry analogy does not entirely hold for The Parade; Lewen's work is too propulsive, too much a function of time. Our journey through it, in other words, is not static; it represents not a single moment but a succession of moments that together add up to a history. From those eager children, Lewen quickly takes us into chaos: first, an image of people watching at three windows, followed by a growing mass of movement in the street. A crowd watches, cheering, skeletal in presentation, like survivors of a concentration camp. A trumpet is thrust aloft, while in the background arms extend upward to the sky. Then, the deluge -- soldiers in profile, helmets, standards, all with bones showing through their bodies, a reminder of their mortality, yes, but also more macabre in intent. Indeed, as The Parade progresses, one of the impressions with which it leaves us is that, for Lewen, we are all dead, or at least condemned already, that the pageant (if we can use that word) he is portraying is inevitable and never- ending, that it is not a matter of will but of capitulation, that it is what will happen to every one of us.

Lewen animates this point by rendering The Parade as cyclical. Three times, four times, the pattern starts anew. Always, it builds to a crescendo of violence, soldiers moving in geometric lines so tightly articulated that individuality is eclipsed. Afterward, a surrender of white flags, and we are back to a small group of children again. As the cataclysms repeat, the art at times loses definition; by the middle of the sequence, combat is portrayed as a series of flashing blurs. Chaos, catastrophe, sharp lines in white piercing a background of black and gray in which we can sense that there are faces, although they're willfully obscured. My favorite set of images comes about two-thirds of the way through The Parade, as four people, two adults and two children, rush beneath an umbrella along a city street. There is an explosion, a thick asterisk amid a sea of Jackson Pollock–like inkblots, which in the next frame turn to a rain of dark black streaks like blood. From out of the darkness arises a human figure, arms raised in aggression or supplication, it's not clear. And then, what we already understand is the inevitable outcome: bodiless heads hanging from a wire, a row of feet, side-by-side on a slab.

What's astonishing is the extent to which this tells a story, a story that confronts us as we really are. But then, that's the whole idea of The Parade, which refracts Lewen's moment of reckoning at Buchenwald into a set of images so stark and vital they transcend their inspiration to frame a universal lament. In such a landscape, what does language have to offer but a way of obscuring what we see? It's no coincidence that the only word to appear in The Parade is "Victory," on a banner in one of the last drawings: an image that is not just bitter but also bleak. What can victory mean when it comes with a cacophony of coffins and prisoners peering out behind barbed wire? Such a question remains, sadly, as relevant to us as it did to Lewen, mapping the parameters of this fallen world.

David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he spent ten years as book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times.

Reviewer: David L. Ulin

The Barnes & Noble Review

"The Parade is a powerfully moving free-jazz dirge of a book that depicts mankind’s recurring war fever. It remains sadly urgent and relevant today."

from his introduction Art Spiegelman

"An eloquent and vigorous protest against war’s horror and futility."

The New York Times

"Nothing can equal the psychological effect of real art . . .Our time needs you and your work!"

Albert Einstein

A compelling testament to Lewen’s gifts for stirring our souls with the silent grace of painted panel after panel after panel. As narrative, it is music by which to mourn Man’s fate.

The Washington Post

"An eloquent and vigorous protest against war’s horror and futility."

The New York Times

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