Bull

Norton Simon Museum

There’s a beautiful Picasso lithograph of a bull, and it starts off as this beautifully rendered, three-dimensional bull and he just takes stuff away from it. There’s several in the series, but by the end of it, it’s just four or five lines that really evokes “BULL.” There’s something artistically sophisticated about it that also suits me as a person. I had such an early love for the Charles Schultz comics, and those TV specials. It sounds kind of embarrassing to say, but those Halloween and Christmas specials were really important in terms of giving me the artistic bug. There was an under-indication on the surface but then a quite capacious moral world behind it that really intrigued me.

so says George Saunders in Vulture.  Happened to see some of these at the Norton Simon Museum one day this fall:

first

third

sixth

ninth

I dunno, third is pretty good.  Also not bad:

In his biography Chuck AmuckChuck Jones claims that he made this cartoon after producer Eddie Selzer burst into Jones’ workspace one day and announced, for no readily apparent reason, that bullfights were not funny, and they were not to make a cartoon about them. Since Selzer had, in Jones’ opinion, consistently proven himself to be wrong about absolutely everything (having once barred Jones from doing any cartoons featuring Pepé Le Pew, on the grounds that he perceived them as not being funny, which led to Jones and Maltese to do For Scent-imental Reasons, which won an Oscar, which Selzer accepted), the only possible option was to make the cartoon.

Discussion Question: is George Saunders influenced at all by Bugs Bunny?