SWARTE - Lot 110

SWARTE JOOST SWARTE ◊ Original cover from The New Yorker, May 14, 2018. Signed. India ink and colored inks on paper 28.88 × 36 cm (11.348 × 14.17 in.) If you're looking for the origins of Swarte's Ligne claire, it's not just Hergé and Jacobs that you need to explore, but also George McManus and Bringing up Father, for both line and color, with his sometimes absurd gags, just as constitutive of his style. But where Hergé and McManus respect perspective, in a perfectly academic approach to vanishing lines, Swarte uses the process of architectural plans: cavalier perspective. Add to this the visual paradoxes of Dutch illustrator and engraver M. C. Escher (1898-1972), and you have the recipe of the master of the Dutch Ligne claire.