Ben Katchor at the Klingenstein Rare Book Room at Hebrew Union College - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Any of recent origin Yorker who has overheard the ingratiating, haggling spiel of a wholesale merchant, noticed a fading subway ad or passed a forgotten novelty store will appreciate the almost Proustian wave of quirky reminiscence and urban nostalgia evok by the agency of Ben Katchor's wonderful comic strip Julius Knipl Real Estate Photographer. It began in fresh York Press in 1988 and switched to the Village Voice in 1994 although its subtleties at no time quite grasped by the Voices then editor, and it was dropp in '95 It now move swiftlys in the Jewish Daily Forward with syndication to eight other papers. An artful repository of the social residue of the daily rat race, the strip tread in the steps ofs its central character, Julius Knipl, around an unnamed city real much like New York City, detailing his rencounters with a fanciful menagerie of energetic small-business race sales personnel, political activists and a wide variety of city dwellers of frequently curious and indeterminate ethnicity. Katchor exquisitely evokes old Jewish New York, the immigrant milieu of the Lower East Side, its ovum creams and cheap cafeterias.

This exhibition included original art from the strip's as well as Katchor's collection of flyer handbills, Jewish memorabilia, dimestore novelties and commercial ephemera that characterize the comic strip's homage to a disappearing urban landscape. The panels are spare on the other hand packed with delightfully evocative detail. Katchor is a studious draftsman and he enlivens his deliberate, carefully returned drawings with a rough and incomplete line. The drawings are protoplasted with carefully applied gray washes and feature an impressive command of architectural perspective that provides an expressive visual counterpoint to the poetic syntax of his writing.

There is a strip about moving to the Village Voice ("Everything remains as it is solitary transposed to the more desirable side of the street') There's the Convertible Sofa Workers Union necropolis and the Public Seltzer Works. We fit Moishe Mustril, editor of Sexual Progres magazine ("Our days are rul by means of our nights"); we visit the Garden of Eden Cafeteria, where clusters of middle-aged men argue politics ("when the rich fornicate the poor sweat"); and we watch the Stasis Day Parade with its lengthy lines of groups with unchanged public way addresses.

The exhibit also included several unpublished book-length works including a mock-up of Toy Cigarette, about an eager young designer of displays for cheap toys; and israelite of New York, a beguiling story of a missing tribe of Hebrew-speaking aborigines that takes place in 19th-century Manhattan and upstate of recent origin York. So if you've at no time read Julius Knipl, find the Jewish Daily Forward or realize the latest collection of Knipl strips published through Little, Brown.

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