The New York art scene absorbed an improbable jolt of Canadian culture yesterday with the opening of The Heart of a Woman: Harlequin Cover Art 1949-2009, an exhibition of vintage and modern illustrations originally commissioned as covers for Harlequin romance novels.
Fabio never looked so good as he does here, as a bare-chested ship's captain rendered hyper-realistically in luscious oil paint. Nor has his image ever been subjected to such sophisticated critical scrutiny as Harlequin has arranged for his SoHo debut.
The covers are cheesy but are not kitsch, according to the show's Toronto-based curator, Elizabeth Semmelhack. Instead, they are an intriguing barometer of social change in the tumultuous second half of the 20th century.
“They are so ripe, so revealing of issues of gender construction in popular culture,” she said. “And some of the covers are truly outstanding artworks in and of themselves.”
The Toronto-based publisher's claim to a piece of the avant-garde action coincides with its emergence this season as a corporate hero of global repute, piling up profits as recession-battered readers return to the inexpensive escapism Harlequin has learned to manufacture and sell like widgets over the decades.
Even as its parent company, Torstar Corp., has laid off staff and has reported sharp declines in newspaper and digital revenue during the first quarter of 2009 – down $27-million compared to the first three months of 2008 – Harlequin revenues increased to $124.5-million from $109.7-million over the same period. With Torstar's share in CTVglobemedia helping to drag it down further, the company is becoming ever more dependent on the insatiable demands of lusty women around the globe.
So why not celebrate? The exhibition, made up of more than 100 covers, is “very Canadian,” Semmelhack says.
The Canadian content comes from dozens of sometimes anonymous, often pseudonymous commercial artists who skillfully depicted the evolving aspirations of modern women over the course of two revolutions – sexual and feminist. Divorced from the narratives they were commissioned to illustrate, the covers now tell their own gripping tale.
The trajectory of the graphic narrative is as predictable as any novel: It begins half a century ago with pert nurses eyeing steady-looking, salt-and-pepper doctors, billows into consummated passion during the shoulder-pad era and ultimately degenerates into the plain old cheesecake we see today.
“The age of the ideal man shifts. He goes from an older established professional to a buff young body – and it's really only the body that shows,” Semmelhack says. Fabio comes and then goes, replaced by truncated male body parts bulging into the frame.
“The fantasy is no longer, ‘I'll be taken care of,'” Semmelhack says. “It moves on to, ‘I'll enjoy this.'” The curator defends the soft porn of current practice as “less cloying” than equivalent material directed at men, but she clearly prefers the older, less explicit and more suggestive work of such forgotten masters as Toronto's Norm Eastman. “They created images of real psychological complexity,” she says, noting the subtle techniques they used to attract viewers – clerks hurrying home past newsstands, harried housewives at checkouts – to their exacting compositions.
The show focuses on six artists whose work defined the classic Harlequin style, according to Semmelhack. In addition to Eastman, they include Jack Harman, who went on to a distinguished career as a sculptor specializing in public art, Paul Anna Soik, Bern Smith, Will Davies and Max Ginsberg. The value of the work is unknown, the curator says. “But it will be worth a lot more after this exhibition.”
Semmelhack was initially worried about a decline in quality with the passing of the old masters. While they created original work in gouache paints on paper, in the late 1980s Harlequin began hiring artists to paint in oil over pre-staged photographs. The results surprised her.
“The most painterly period in Harlequin cover art dates to when photos begin to be painted over,” she says. Traditional techniques and academic training shine through the clichés and constraints to create beauty.
In this way, the curator says, the unknown hacks hired by Harlequin are closer to Michelangelo than most modern artists. “We've become so used to thinking art is about personal expression,” she says. “But it's really about meeting the needs of clients.”
In that respect, the covers of the best-selling titles in the history of paperback fiction are undeniable masterpieces.
The Heart of a Woman: Harlequin Cover Art 1949-2009 opened yesterday at the Openhouse Gallery, 201 Mulberry St., New York, and runs till June 12. A touring schedule is under preparation.
John Barber is the new publishing reporter for The Globe and Mail.
