Exhibit

Cartoonist's art imitates life

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/MELISSA SUE GERRITS - 01/16/2015 - Items from the Charles M. Schultz museum in Santa Rosa, California, form the exhibits "Pigskin in Peanuts" and "Heartbreak in Peanuts" at the Clinton Presidential Center January 16, 2015. The exhibit will be open till April 5, 2015.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/MELISSA SUE GERRITS - 01/16/2015 - Items from the Charles M. Schultz museum in Santa Rosa, California, form the exhibits "Pigskin in Peanuts" and "Heartbreak in Peanuts" at the Clinton Presidential Center January 16, 2015. The exhibit will be open till April 5, 2015.

Exhibit

“Pigskin Peanuts” and “Heartbreak in Peanuts,” two exhibits from the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Through April 5, Clinton Presidential Center, Little Rock

Admission: $7, $5, $3 depending on age, free for children 5 and younger

(501) 374-4242

clintonfoundation.o…

Charlie Brown is destined never to win at football, let alone score a kiss from the Little Red-Haired Girl.

Far from failure, these two themes from the late Charles Schulz's comic strip, Peanuts, resonate in a pair of exhibits at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock. "Pigskin Peanuts" and "Heartbreak in Peanuts," from the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, Calif., will be on display through April 5.

Each show features about 40 comic strips reproduced at the size Schulz drew them, big enough to extend across his well-worn drawing board. They show the marks of the artist's trade that newspaper readers never saw: pencil notes, tape blemishes, creases through the middle.

Schulz folded the strips in half in order to fit six at a time in the same envelope, exhibit curator Corry Kanzenberg explains. Comic-strip originals that would come to be valued at thousands of dollars, he trusted the post office to carry by the bundle from his home in California to his newspaper syndicate in New York.

"He only lost one package," Kanzenberg says. The rest appeared from 1950 to 2000, in 2,600 newspapers including the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

The phrase, "happiness is a warm puppy" came from Peanuts. But the strip often dealt in frustration and sadness, as typified by Charlie Brown's nearly annual attempt to kick the football that fussbudget Lucy held for him.

Every time, she pulled the ball away at the last moment. Charlie flew into the air with a cry of, "AAUGH!" He landed, "WHUMP!" (Or sometimes, "WHAM!" in shaky letters.) Schulz played out this scenario 36 times over the years, each time facing himself with the increasing challenge of how to make it different.

Charlie's attempt, in a Sunday strip from 1965, finds him smack-flat on his back. "November will be fine," he assures himself, "in the year 2000."

Schulz died on Feb. 12, 2000, the day before the last Peanuts Sunday page ran. "Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy," he wrote, "how can I ever forget them."

The timeless characters he created never went away. Charlie's football miseries entered the realm of metaphor, the exhibit points out.

Charlie personifies renewed hope in spite of repeated failure. If he seems to have whiffed the football countless more times than the record shows, maybe it's because he stands for everybody else who also bobbled the ball -- that is, for everybody else.

As for love, "Heartbreak in Peanuts" quotes the cartoonist himself: "The strip is filled with little unrequited love affairs."

Take heart

Charlie pines for the Little Red-Haired Girl. Every Valentine's Day, he watches the mailbox for a card that never comes. Lucy dotes on piano-playing Schroeder, who cares only for Mozart.

Charlie's little sister, Sally, calls Linus with his security blanket "my sweet babboo." Linus responds in defiantly big lettering: "I am not your sweet babboo!"

But then Snoopy gets a hug from his bird friend, Woodstock, and as a little bird could have told him: "Gee! ... somebody cares."

Schulz knew from childhood that he wanted to be a cartoonist. At the height of success, he still answered to his childhood nickname, Sparky -- from the name of comic strip character Barney Google's horse, Sparkplug.

The barber's son from Minnesota wound up world-famous. Near his studio in Santa Rosa, he built an ice-skating arena, Snoopy's Home Ice. He loved to ice skate, and the Peanuts gang went skating, too. The strip took delight in the name of the rink's ice-resurfacing machine, Zamboni.

"He said, 'Everything I am is in the strip,'" Karen Johnson recounts as executive director of the Schulz Museum and Research Center. Johnson spoke at the twin exhibits' opening Jan. 16.

In life, he posed for smiling photos at his drawing table. More lately have come accounts of Schulz as a troubled and depressive personality. The demands of producing a daily comic strip meant "he had to be alone," biographer David Michaelis writes in Schulz and Peanuts (Harper, 2008). "All his life he felt alone."

He drew on real life for the despair that went into Peanuts. The Little Red-Haired Girl was a real crush, and she really did reject him. But how miserable was he, really?

"He was a man of many moods," Johnson says, having known Schulz. Modesty prevented him from ever calling himself an artist, "but he was an artist, and he had an artistic temperament." Compared to moody artists in general, he was about normal, she says -- maybe even a sweet babboo.

And Peanuts (although he famously hated the name the syndicate attached to his strip) brought smiles and lightened troubles around the world.

Charlie Brown went from rainy baseball season to rainy football season -- those panels that Schulz drew in a soggy downpour of vertical pen lines. Charlie plays on, even though it would be easy to say the game makes no sense.

Told to kick the football, Sally refuses: "What did it ever do to me?"

Charlie never loses faith in the mailbox, and this Valentine's Day might finally pay off for him. The "Heartbreak in Peanuts" exhibit includes a real mailbox. People are invited to write a note to Charlie, and how could it be anything but affectionate?

The Clinton Center is a perfect venue for these two collections, Johnson says. Bill Clinton and Charles Schulz together: "Each influenced the world in his own particular way."

Style on 01/27/2015

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