Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,’s crude, ludic doodles—a beaver, a cobra, an asterisk-anus—are famous from novels like “Breakfast of Champions,” as is the curly-haired self-portrait that doubled as his signature. But making graphic art was, for Vonnegut, a hobby that extended beyond illustrations for his fiction: he painted seascapes and landscapes on Cape Cod in the nineteen-fifties; felt-tip drawings of abstract faces on discarded pages of manuscripts; and larger, more formal color drawings that he exhibited in a one-man show in Greenwich Village in 1980. Vonnegut described his artwork as a pursuit that liberated him from the oppressive work of writing. In “Fates Worse Than Death,” he wrote, “My own means of making a living is essentially clerical, and hence tedious and constipating.… The making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to the Asian influenza.”
A new book, out next month, features a hundred and forty-five of Vonnegut’s drawings, selected by his daughter Nanette Vonnegut, a visual artist, who received two shipments of her father’s artwork in the mid-nineties, and had kept them in storage until now. Drawn with colorful markers and black pen, and influenced by the Cubists as well as by artists from Joan Miró to Alexander Calder, the pieces—which date mostly from 1985 to 1987—include self-portraits, abstract faces and nudes, geometric still-lifes, and swirling line drawings; many convey the same absurdist humor that characterized Vonnegut’s fiction. In the book's introduction, Nanette writes that she comes from a long line of “Master Grand Doodlers”—like her paternal grandfather, the Indianapolis architect Kurt Vonnegut, Sr.—who “fashioned whimsical, original objects of beauty out of thin air.” Of her favorite self-portrait of her father (the first image in the slide show above), Nanette writes, “I see hints of blueprints, tile work, leaded-glass windows, William Blake, Paul Klee, Saul Steinberg, Al Hirschfeld, Edward Gorey, my mother’s wasp waist, cats and dogs. I see my father, at age four, forty, and eighty-four, doodling his heart out.”
All images from “Kurt Vonnegut Drawings” (Monacelli Press), edited by Nanette Vonnegut, out May 13th.
