Continuing his new column over at Wizard, Sean Collins sits down with alt-cartoonist Nick Bertozzi to talk about his new books, The Salon and Houdini:
There are several really memorable sequences in which Picasso and Braque are swapping ideas and talking things through, and you show what they’re drawing or painting to show one another what they’re thinking.
BERTOZZI: Yeah. If anything, I always felt like the dumbest guy in art history class, the guy who was always trying to play catch-up, going “Well, I don’t understand. Why is this art movement so important?” And then you get this sense in art history class that these art movements…God reaches down from the sky and opens Picasso’s head and puts in this golden nugget of genius and closes the head back up, and then Picasso runs around and he’s a genius. No, it’s that he’s a hard worker, his father was an art teacher and he has a lot of talent. He has a very high level of artistic intelligence, but he’s also very lucky. He was surrounded by good patrons, like Gertrude Stein, and he had the luck and the fortune to run into Georges Braque at the exact right time. That’s what an art movement is made of. I really wanted to dissect that, show that that’s more the truth of things. People just stumble into greatness as much as they seek it out.
Among the revelations is that he’s working on a book for First Second with one of the writers of “The Colbert Report.”
