Best Comics Gallery

Art history is crammed with gaudy graphics—watercolor calamities from World War II vet H.C. Westermann, say, or Georg Grosz's sardonic drawings of Weimar-era burghers consorting with syphilitic whores. On the Upper East Side, one gallery cannily leavens these and other museum-grade heavyweights into shows that also include contemporary comics masters such as Charles Burns and Chris Ware. Exhibitions at the Adam Baumgold Gallery have revealed that Ware's astonishingly complex panel layouts and immaculately inked figures are poignantly underpinned by searching blue-pencil scrawls. The rich brushwork on Burns's original boards shimmers like Brylcreem, appropriate for an artist whose characters combine '50s noir with '70s ennui in dystopias that hover just north of tomorrow. And if current comics maestros—even those who conceptually eschew superheroes—don't scratch your collecting jones, Baumgold offers stacks of graphic marvels from the nimble nibs of artists as disparate as Saul Steinberg and Terry Winters. 60 East 66th Street, 212-861-7338, adambaumgoldgallery.com (10065)

Source: The Village Voice

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