Media Appearances

               After the release of Maus I, Art Spiegelman became a sort of unlikely celebrity. As Spiegelman confessed to reporter Rachel Cooke in an interview with The Observer “I was unsure how to proceed. Could I follow it up with Maus II? The fact that so much terror and sadness and death was such a success sort of gave me the bends.”[1]

                As he ventured out into the public forum, there were large “Shouting matches with the audience” where he was unable to say anything about Israel. The people were just crazy in a way. The fallout clearly hit a political nerve with several people, many being moved to discuss unresolved disputes between Israel and its highly volatile neighborhood.  These highly serious and culturally motivated dialogues held so passionately with many Jews did not come so easily to Spiegelman. He was Jewish really only in origin. He was, in his own words a “rootless cosmopolitan”. He felt no real tie to these issues. He molded his own microcosm with the soup of cultures that metropolitan New York would have to offer. He was quite light hearted and generally unmotivated to pursue the passions and tensions that came so easily to “Jews that embraced the parts of Jewishness that were embraceable.”[2]

                Recently in 2012, the Highschool that he attended as a youth installed a glass paneled mural of Spiegelman’s. This is specifically at the High School of Art and Design building in Manhattan, from which he graduated.

Art and his wife, Francoise.

by Manu Gopinath

---

[1] Cooke, Rachel. "Art Spiegelman: 'Auschwitz Became for Us a Safe Place'" The Observer. Guardian News and Media Limited, 23 Oct. 2011. Web. 17 Oct. 2012. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/23/art-spiegelman-maus-25th-anniversary>.

[2] Cooke, Rachel. "Art Spiegelman: 'Auschwitz Became for Us a Safe Place'" The Observer. Guardian News and Media Limited, 23 Oct. 2011. Web. 17 Oct. 2012. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/23/art-spiegelman-maus-25th-anniversary>.