The Nancy Book [Hardcover]

Joe Brainard (Author), Ann Lauterbach (Introduction), Ron Padgett (Collaborator), Bill Berkson (Collaborator), Ted Berrigan (Collaborator), Robert Creeley (Collaborator), Frank Lima (Collaborator), Frank O'Hara (Collaborator), James Schuyler (Collaborator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2008

From 1963 to 1978 Joe Brainard (author of I Remember) created more than one hundred works of art that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into an astonishing variety of spaces, all electrified and complicated by the incongruity of her presence.

In The Nancy Book, Joe Brainard's Nancy traverses high art and low, the poetic and pornographic, the surreal and the absurd. Whether inserted into hypothetical situations, dispatched on erotic adventures, or seemingly rendered by the hands of artists as varied as Leonardo da Vinci, R. Crumb, Larry Rivers, Pablo Picasso, and Willem de Kooning, Brainard's Nancy revels in as well as transcends her two-dimensionality. A beguiling balance of mischief and innocence, irreverence and wonder, spontaneity and calculation, Brainard's Nancys accumulate into a complex work of great originality and wit, equal parts surprise and subtlety.

The Nancy Book includes 78 full page reproductions in color and b/w and features collaborations with poets Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Frank Lima, Frank O'Hara, Ron Padgett, and James Schuyler. The Nancy Book also includes a reminiscence by Ron Padgett as well as an original essay by Ann Lauterbach that locates, with poetic and critical acumen, the matrix of relationships that informed Brainard s work, illuminating the Nancy works in particular.

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

The guileless heroine of Ernie Bushmiller�s long-running comic strip �Nancy� is an unlikely icon in contemporary art, recurring in work by postmodern cartoonists like Bill Griffith and Scott McCloud, in an Andy Warhol painting, and in rock posters by Frank Kozik. But no one put her to better use than Joe Brainard, in whose irreverent, effervescent paintings, drawings, and collages (occasionally produced in collaboration with poet friends like Ron Padgett and Frank O�Hara) Nancy appears as an ashtray; a medical illustration; the subject of pieces by de Kooning, Picasso, and Leonardo; and part of Mt. Rushmore. Updating the old �Tijuana Bibles,� Brainard also gleefully depicts Nancy in flagrante delicto and tripping on hallucinogens. Brash but never bratty, fanciful without descending into preciousness, Brainard demonstrates a visual perfect-pitch equivalent to that of his miniaturist memoir-poem �I Remember.�
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From Booklist

Brainard (1942–94) arrived in New York a few years after the pop-art movement brought comics imagery onto the high-art scene. Thus, his comics-appropriation at first blush seems Johnny-come-lately. But he was using comics differently from how the famous pop artists did, not for aesthetic philosophizing but for self-exploration. Brainard was gay, and he often placed the little girl star of Ernie Bushmiller’s graphically bare-bones comic strip Nancy, an embodiment of innocence nonpareil, in graphic heterosexual situations for never-specified motives that might have included dissipating the power of what he wasn’t attracted by. He also subverted high-art seriousness and cultural solemnity with Nancy by placing her smiling-bulb face on, say, all the nudes descending a staircase in Duchamp’s cubist icon,  or in Teddy Roosevelt’s niche on Mount Rushmore. He wrote Dadaist “stories” in which he and Nancy interacted, two of which appear with the 53 Nancy artworks in an album that also attests Brainard’s wit and humility. This is hilarious, not—however personal—self-referential, stuff. --Ray Olson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Siglio Press; 1st edition (April 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 097995620X
• ISBN-13: 978-0979956201
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #609,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I remember Joe Brainard, April 28, 2010

By 

Charles O'Meara "Charles O'Meara" (guilford, CT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Nancy Book (Hardcover)

i never saw this book, but i saw a bunch of Joe's "Nancy" drawings in the old Peace Eye Booksore in the east village, which was run by Ed Sanders of the Fugs. whew, that's a long sentence eh? well, years later i attended the School of Visual Arts and Joe was one of my painting instructors. we didn't see eye to eye because he taught a figure painting class and i refused to put faces or heads on my figure studies because i said that if you put a face or head on it, it becomes a portrait, not a figure study. i liked joe. when i asked him about those Nancy cartoons in the Peace Eye he sort of shrugged and looked embarrassed and i never brought it up again. that's all i know