When Hüller was approached to play Hedwig, she was initially skeptical. “I always refused to play Fascists—which, of course, especially in international productions, come your way from time to time as a German actress,” she told me over lunch at a restaurant in Leipzig, where she lives with her twelve-year-old daughter. (Hüller is not with the girl’s father.) The neighborhood was filled with galleries and restaurants, and the pavement of its main street, Karl-Heine Strasse, was studded with Stolpersteine—memorial plaques outside buildings whose former residents were murdered in the Holocaust. We sat in a pleasant outdoor area, and Hüller’s dog, a Weimaraner mix, rested beside her on a blanket that Hüller had brought from home. (The dog appears in “The Zone of Interest” as the family pet.) “I didn’t like the idea of putting on a Nazi uniform like that, or using language like that—to get close to the energy of that, or to discover there would be fun in that,” Hüller went on. “I have seen colleagues that actually have fun doing it. Maybe it’s still in their bodies from former generations. They like to change their language and speak like that”—the tone of her voice changed, her usually soft-spoken, careful speech becoming harsh and rat-a-tat. Reverting to her own voice, she asked, “Why do they do it? They could speak like a normal person.”

Hüller also disapproves of projects that use the Nazi era as a canvas upon which to paint a dramatic story that has little to do with Fascism. (Netflix’s recent soapy drama “All the Light We Cannot See” could be considered a prime example.) She was therefore attracted to the pointed absence of drama in Glazer’s screenplay: nothing much happens beyond what we know is happening offscreen, as the murderous apparatus under Höss’s command becomes ever more efficient. She told me, “Jonathan and I had a lot of conversations about the traps in this kind of story we wanted to tell—which is not really a story. There is a couple, and one wants to leave, and the other doesn’t.

This is what distinguishes miniatures: this sense that just offstage, there’s more going on if you could just get small enough to walk through that little doorway. That’s what I was looking to understand. Then Off told me something.

“I put things in drawers,” he said. “In my rooms.” Those roomboxes are behind glass. But if Off includes a table in a roombox, and that table has a drawer, well: something will be in that drawer. Pencils, a sewing kit, tools, cutlery. Nobody will ever see it. Nobody will ever know it’s there, yet putting it in there is an essential part of what Off is doing. It’s about a story. “My whole life,” he said, whether creating roomboxes or connecting with clients to sell real estate, “has been about the story.”

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Megan Marz | Longreads | October 24, 2023 | 4,164 words (15 minutes)

This spring, the literary critic Laura Miller got annoyed with Brandon Taylor’s new novel, The Late Americans. A fan of Taylor’s “brilliant” Substack and “irresistible patter” on Twitter, she found his book disappointingly lugubrious. “Brandon Taylor’s online writing is vibrant, funny, and true,” read the subhead of her review. “Why is his fiction trying so hard to be something else?” The Slate piece subjected the novel to some churlish complaints. But it was the inclusion of “online writing” that attracted minor controversy; writers and critics tweeted in response that to compare an author’s novel to his tweets was to insult the author and embarrass oneself. One respondent wrote, “this may be the worst piece of writing on a book or author I have ever read.” Another said, “it’s gauche to even mention a professional author’s twitter account in a review.”

People have been writing all kinds of things online for decades now. If you count Justin Hall’s links.net as the first blog—and many do, though Hall himself credits Ranjit Bhatnagar—the original form of popular writing on websites will turn 30 in January. Thirty years ago, I was a child; now I’m middle-aged. Writing on the internet remains young. Its literary milestones and genres are too short to ride the roller coaster of critical regard. Online literature is still usually self-published, doesn’t receive major writing prizes, and isn’t reviewed in newspapers or magazines.

The late Robert Silvers, a founding editor of The New York Review of Books, lamented this situation in 2013. “If a novel is published, we have a novel review,” he said in an interview with New York magazine. But the “millions and millions if not billions of words in tweets and blogs” were not getting the critical attention they deserved: 

[I]f one cares about language, if one cares about the sensibility in which language is expressed, and if one cares about the values that underlie our use of language . . . then these media, it would seem to me, should qualify as the subject of criticism. We seem at the edge of a vast, expanding ocean of words, an ocean growing without any critical perspective whatever being brought to bear on it. To me, as an editor, that seems an enormous absence.

Ten years later, that absence is 10 years wider. We have trend pieces about platforms used for writing; posts that aggregate other posts; news stories about things people say and do online; novels, poems, and memoirs that would not exist without having germinated on the internet. But the literary qualities of online writing remain mostly invisible to U.S. literary institutions—even as countless people read it—until the moment it becomes a book. 

And, of course, much of it never does. For 30 years, writers have been using blogs, social media, and email to do things with words that are difficult or impossible to do inside books. They have immersed us in stories still unfolding, created personas that interact with readers, woven their writing into inboxes and feeds, and used code to write at a distance. The public record of literature in the 21st century is full of gaping holes where these things should be. The missing material is right there on our screens, but it slides past with little formal acknowledgement. While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down. 

In the 1990s, the literary press became briefly excited about digital literature. Some writers were using Storyspace, a software program introduced in 1987, to compose hypertext. The ability to add links, even before the web, let them write high-concept, choose-your-own-adventure narratives. In one of the first and best known of these stories, the protagonist’s son lives or dies depending on the reader’s selections. Works like these debuted on floppy disk; you can now buy them on USB or find read-throughs on YouTube. More than the most postmodern novel could, they embodied the era’s values of fragmentation and nonlinearity. The New York Times Book Review ran a handful of articles to introduce the new concept: hypertext fiction. The most famous of these articles, published in 1992, was headlined “The End of Books.”

But books were never really threatened by hypertext fiction, which did not attract many writers, let alone readers. Self-styled “electronic literature” settled into an academic niche dominated by conceptual and technical experiments, while “an always-skeptical literary mainstream gleefully rejected the digital outright,” as the scholar Simone Murray wrote. Thanks to the Kindle and other e-readers, the book eventually became the primary unit of even fiction read digitally.

Nonfiction is another story, though—one that has not permeated the literary mainstream or the experimental “e-lit” margins, despite flowing all around both of them. The story is: around the time hypertext fiction was failing to find an audience, hypertext nonfiction was attracting thousands and then millions of people. “I’ll never forget the Monday morning in the mid-90s when I rushed in to work . . . and hurriedly pointed my browser to www.links.net to see if Justin Hall had broken up with his girlfriend over the weekend,” Rob Wittig, one of the few e-lit people to write much about Hall, remembered in 2003. 

Hall was a 19-year-old student at Swarthmore College when he started his site in 1994, soon naming it Justin’s Links from the Underground in homage to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, a book he hadn’t read. The word “blog” wouldn’t exist for another few years. At first, Hall collected links he’d found browsing the web, including links to sites about sex and drugs. In those days before search engine ubiquity, this was a popular service. But Hall was also a writer. “I just said, I have this medium, so why don’t I see what my stories look like there,” he said on a podcast in 2021. “And if people are coming for this utility of finding links that they want to traverse, well, maybe they’ll accidentally read a poem. And if they want to read a second poem, well, that’s on them.” 

Eventually Hall published thousands of pages of interlinked poems and stories, a yearslong diary cataloging his life’s events, people, and thinking in explicit detail for his thousands of readers. During the months he spent as an intern at Wired, his site often got more traffic than the magazine’s. A documentary filmed in 1996 described it as an On the Road for the ’90s. When he took a pause in 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page story, estimating that he’d amassed 4,800 pages and wondering if he’d come back. He did; his last post was in 2021.

Hall’s style is evident from what amounts to his About page: 

My mom, dad and step-father were/are lawyers, and very dedicated ones at that. Due to their work ethic, I was raised primarily by a series of nannies. When I was eight, my father, an alcoholic, killed himself; much of my early writing wrestles with this. 

It is funny, matter-of-factly intimate, and granularly self-documentary in a style that would soon spread everywhere. And while early hypertext fiction used links within closed systems, Hall used links to weave his writing into the outside world. He linked to other people’s sites in addition to his own writing on pretty much anything he mentioned. You could read his story in a straight line, but you didn’t have to. Hall is sometimes juvenile, his prose occasionally rough or purple, but that’s a fair price to pay for his co-inventing the 21st century’s most influential literary genre so far.

In November 2000, The New Yorker estimated there had been only 50 blogs on the internet as recently as spring 1999. After Blogger made it easy in summer 1999 to post without writing HTML, blogs proliferated exponentially. By 2007, when their growth started to taper, there were about 70 million. (Today, a commonly cited count is 600 million.) Like the authors of most books before them and most tweets after them, bloggers were largely uninterested in producing literature. They wrote to help themselves or others, to do journalism or scholarship, to evangelize, to get attention, to find community, to make money if they were lucky, and mostly to share their lives. But none of those motivations excludes the possibility of artmaking, and a few bloggers followed Hall in approaching their writing as art, at least implicitly.

Emily Gould was the one I read most frequently. She began posting at emilymagazine.com in 2005, when we were both just out of college. Like a lot of good blogs, hers was full of the improvisational energy that, before the internet, had been the aesthetic province of comedians and jazz musicians. Gould was documenting her life in real time—books she read, thoughts she had, food she ate, daily enthusiasms and frustrations—which meant she was writing it fast. But those of us who read it as it happened read it slowly. People like to say the internet speeds reading up, but a personal blog, read in real time, can slow a story’s pace down to the timescale of life; the thickest book in existence can be read in less calendar time. Not even the author knew when a blog would end, which is what made it feel so alive.

Gould’s eye for detail and sense of pacing contributed to this vitality. I remember learning that she was quitting her publishing job from a post in which she described the office cafeteria’s switch from “marmalade” to “orange jelly”—a semi-lighthearted complaint that doubled as an augury of corporate decline. Marmalade is real, and a beautiful word. One look at that dignified dactyl and you know you’re in for something good. Orange jelly sounds fake and embarrassing. When Gould said it was the reason she was leaving, you knew it was a joke, but there was also something to it. The actual reason was a gossip-blogging job at Gawker, which raised her profile enough that she was assigned a 2008 New York Times Magazine cover story about her life as a blogger. The story includes a moment when her boyfriend at the time demanded she take down something she’d posted about him. On the surface, the post seemed trivial. But his request “felt like being stifled in some essential way.”

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The same thing had happened to Hall. When a former girlfriend asked him to scrub her from his blog, he’d said, or so The New York Times Magazine reported in 2004, ”This is my art. I’ll remove specific things that bother you, but I can’t go through the entire Web site and remove every mention of your name.” When another girlfriend asked him not to blog about her, he agreed, but the inability to write freely led to an emotional breakdown, about which he posted a video. Gould and Hall felt deeply about what they were doing. They commanded large audiences and appeared in mainstream media, becoming national avatars for a new kind of writing. They also repeatedly referenced literary influences. But journalists categorized their efforts as sociocultural rather than aesthetic phenomena. This would happen again and again to writers who tried new things on the internet. Always a curiosity, sometimes a trend, never a work of art.

It was a practical matter, and a matter of tradition. Books are an excellent medium. Book publishers have always been a useful filter for a world in which the quantity of writing is always increasing. They still manage to publish great written art, thanks to fragile and fraying systems built by writers and editors. Doing so has given them a power around which the literary world revolves. Even the least commercial magazines do not tend to review work not currently being marketed by a publisher. And books—whether e-, audio, or print—are important to certain writers’ compensation. (Though few writers make much money publishing literature, and some writers who do make money are turning away from books.)

Then there are the inconvenient questions. While some online writers might welcome critical attention, for others it might be a nightmare with terrible consequences—broken relationships, lost jobs. How should a critic distinguish “published,” in the sense of technically visible, from “published” in the traditional sense of public? At what point in a work’s lifespan should it be written about? And what aesthetic criteria apply? Blogs are to novels as improv is to sketch or song lyrics are to poetry. They can reach and even surpass the standard set by their finer cousin, but they should not necessarily be held to it. 

A great time to answer these questions would have been when books began drawing heavily from the well of online aesthetics. Some of the most celebrated literature of the 2010s recounted daily life in granular detail; incorporated real conversations; was made of plotless fragments; or, even in fiction, used real people’s names. These books were copiously compared to one another under the banners of “autofiction” and “lyric essay.” Names like Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgård, Tao Lin, Maggie Nelson, and Claudia Rankine were difficult to escape if you were the type of person who read book reviews. Critics correctly described their books as successors of everything from Saint Augustine’s Confessions to Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. But I have yet to read a book review that acknowledges the influence of specific online work not written by the book’s own author. Blogs and social media are described en masse as a social phenomenon to which these authors responded, but rarely as a textual one to which they are indebted. 

The omission is particularly glaring given the number of literary writers whose books grew out of their own online work. While Gould’s novels are pointedly unbloggy, her short-lived e-book startup distributed several examples: Making Scenes (2001), whose author, Adrienne Eisen, claims it was the first “blog-to-book” ever; Meaty (2013), an essay collection inspired by Samantha Irby’s bitchesgottaeat.blogspot.com; and Prostitute Laundry (2015), collected from Charlotte Shane’s email newsletter about her love life and sex work. Blogs lost more in translation than a serialized novel from the 19th century: links, the comments of other people, a cadence determined by the author, a length that could always grow longer. In the words of Bhanu Kapil, whose blog “incubated” her book Ban en Banlieue (2015), “You know that putting Ban in this form is like wearing a three piece suit in the hot springs. I wish I had the courage to let the blog be my book instead.” 

That’s what the writer Megan Boyle was going to do. In 2013, she got the idea to liveblog her entire existence, “everything that I could think of on a relatively constant basis,” as she told an interviewer for The Creative Independent five years later. She began on March 17 and intended to do it forever. “That’s what began to excite me,” she said. “That I’d just do this for my whole life, and that would be the ‘art’ of it.” Timestamped passages moved back and forth between quotidian—”mail the goddamned packages”—and poetic:

4:43PM: louis called. interesting dynamic, these phone calls with louis. we sound slow and happy and surprised to hear each other’s voices. let him in. assembled table and chairs while he assembled bed. NPR was on and I felt sometimes … like i wanted to say ‘the opinions on this radio do not reflect the other person in this room.’

After five-and-a-half months, she stopped. In 2018, Tyrant Books published what she had written as a novel called Liveblog. Like any given blog, hers had been followed by real-time fans but not reviewed. The moment it became a book, however, critics suddenly were able to see and expound upon its literary qualities. It was positively reviewed in The New Yorker and Bookforum, and compared to other serious literature. But this valorization could only happen after the “art” of Boyle’s project—its ongoingness—had been stripped from it, compressed into an object that could be read in a few days or weeks.

In a rare expression of literary bullishness, the novelist Edmundo Paz Soldán had suggested at the blog’s apex in 2007 that it was “threatening to supplant the novel as the great genre in which everything can find its place.” But the blog ended up becoming one more thing that found its place in the novel, which has yet to be surpassed as a tool of literary legitimation.

Boyle was associated with “alt lit,” a group of writers in the late 2000s and 2010s who endeavored to “assimilate to literary art the mutant sensibility of a new mass medium,” as Frank Guan said of Tao Lin, the group’s figurehead. They were also some of the first, and remain some of the only, writers to position their online work as equal to books. The poet Mira Gonzalez copublished her Selected Tweets with Lin in 2015. She told The Creative Independent they had done so to show that “once you take Twitter out of the context of being reliant on this relatively new form of technology, there’s no difference between Twitter and any other kind of literature.” By Twitter, Gonzalez clarified, she meant the internet. Twitter was the stand-in closest at hand because by then, social media had overtaken blogs as the dominant form of online expression, and Twitter was popular with the verbally oriented.

While alt lit writers on Twitter mostly continued the bloggy tradition of documenting real-time experiences, other writers experimented with other genres. Patricia Lockwood did absurdist “sexts.” (“Sext: An iceberg whispers to you, ‘Just the tip.’”) Teju Cole did “small fates,” which compressed news stories into epigrammatic tweets full of ironic humor and social critique. (“In Kubwa a man armed with a toy gun stole a real Camry.”) Ranjit Bhatnagar, the blogger who inspired Justin Hall, created @pentametron, a bot that paired tweets written in iambic pentameter to create rhymed couplets. The couplets were sometimes absurd and sometimes surprisingly sensical. One random user’s “I’m kind of thirsty for a valentine” led into another’s “My volume doesn’t have a minus sign.” With recontextualization alone, they put everyday language in a higher register—suggesting, Shakespeare-style, that the line between poetry and daily speech is invisibly thin, a question of viewpoint. 

Poetry bots were one of Twitter’s most beautiful genres, bringing e-lit experimentation to the masses. But now most of them have stopped working. X, as Twitter is now known, announced earlier this year that it would restrict free access to its API, which bots need to function. The change was one of many points on the graph of X’s decline in users and cachet. But other longtime Twitter/X projects persist, like the internet-deranged persona @dril (“cops tazing wild hogs ultimate compilation”) and Melissa Broder’s serially sad girl persona @sosadtoday (“i’m alive in a dead way”). 

In a New Yorker review of Broder’s So Sad Today, a 2016 essay collection named after the Twitter account, Haley Mlotek wrote that the book’s shortcomings made her appreciate the account’s accomplishments: “It captures how so many of us communicate on social media, crafting a careful persona that hides and reveals.” And yet, even though @sosadtoday was the true literary innovation in the critic’s estimation, it was the book that occasioned a review. I’ve written literary criticism for many publications, and I rarely have trouble placing a book review I want to write. But of the dozen or so pitches I’ve sent about an online work, none have landed. And as a reader of popular literary criticism for two decades now, I’ve only ever come across a single full-length review of an online work in a nonacademic venue: Matt Pearce’s 2011 essay on Cole’s small fates for The New Inquiry. It’s a single example, one that Cole’s status as a newly acclaimed novelist probably helped make possible. But it proves that answering the questions online work raises for mainstream critics is doable, fruitful, and not all that complicated.

In 2013, Lockwood gave a lecture about Twitter at the University of Pennsylvania. Before ending with a reading of sexts, she said:

Innovative literature happens where people have room to play, and it happens where no one is watching. It happens among groups that initially aren’t taken seriously. . . . It happens in darkness. And after a while, people become aware of it. And after an even longer while, it’s called literature. That’s a good thing. That is the way of the world. Mushrooms and literature grow in the shade, but eventually must enter the cold light of day to be eaten by yuppies at $14 a pound.

Calling for tweets or blogs to get reviewed in The New Yorker or become eligible for a Pulitzer is in part to call for their yuppification, which would ruin the fun. Many of the works I’ve discussed play with, and draw aesthetic power from, their lack of professional legitimacy. Having an incentive to get reviewed or win a prize might motivate more people to start writing in certain ways, but it would also change the character of the writing. A @dril looking to get reviewed by The New Yorker would not be @dril, and so the world might be deprived of such classics as: “another day volunteering at the betsy ross museum. everyone keeps asking me if they can fuck the flag. buddy, they wont even let me fuck it.”

But metabolizing the literature of previous generations is necessary to create new literature. And writing on the internet has a way of disappearing, so that it may not be available long enough for enough people to become aware of it, let alone to call it literature. An API might become too expensive, a hosting fee might no longer seem worth it, an author might delete or lock their account after a platform empties out, as X—and social media in general—feels like it’s doing now. In 2017, the Library of Congress decided to stop archiving all public tweets and instead collect only those that are “thematic and event-based, including events such as elections, or themes of ongoing national interest, e.g. public policy.” The Wayback Machine is a good but gappy source of disappeared blogs, and it probably won’t do any better with email newsletters. 

Even if we had a perfect archive, it still wouldn’t tell the whole story. You could find a forgotten novel in a used bookstore and, with some imagination, recreate the experience of reading it around the time of its publication. But a lot of online writing has important temporal and contextual dimensions, and unless someone records the experience of reading at the time or in the context, those dimensions are lost. 

So let me tell you about some work that’s still living: there are new magazines, like the html review, which combine a traditional literary magazine format with a more computer-friendly ethos. Like Twitter bots did, they’re introducing more readers to literature written with both human and coding languages. And then, of course, there are email newsletters, which have been around for years but gathered more steam when Substack launched in 2017, giving writers a built-in way to collect payments. One Substack project that uses the form well is Samantha Irby’s “who’s on judge mathis today?” In more than 250 editions, she has twisted TV recaps into comic stories observed through a personal lens: “shearie says that one day she went over to rhian’s house and discovered a used condom.… rhian calls her ‘inspector gadget’ and i’m so sorry to side with a man but that really made me laugh! i loved that cartoon!!!!!!!!”

My favorite newsletter is Justin Wolfe’s thank you notes, which he started writing in 2015. Wolfe modeled his project on Joe Brainard’s I Remember, an experimental memoir published in 1970 in which every sentence begins with “I remember.” Wolfe chose “I’m thankful” as a refrain. “i’m thankful that even though i had built up going back to work as this horrible huge ominous thing, it’s actually been just fine and, as is almost always the case, the blurry projection i built out of anticipatory anxiety far exceeded reality,” he wrote early on, in a post I discovered in the archive and sometimes return to on Sundays. In well over a thousand editions ranging from hundreds of words to one (“pizza”), Wolfe has given a sharper angle to the practice of real-time life-writing. His constraint, even when broken, lends it more structure; his form, email, more tightly stitches the fabric of his days into the fabric of ours.

It’s still true, as the poet Mira Gonzalez said in her Creative Independent interview, that “there are people who are saying things like . . . ‘Writing on the internet doesn’t matter.’” But the internet is nevertheless, as she added, “the future of humor, of writing, of everything.” On our corporate-throttled web, this sounds like a frightening prospect. All we can do, in literature and in life, is try to make it otherwise.

Megan Marz is a writer in Chicago.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

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Gyasi Hall | Longreads | September 12, 2023 | 21 minutes (5,698 words)

The seventy-first issue of MAD Magazine, cover dated June 1962, contains a noteworthy entry in Antonio Prohías’ Spy vs. Spy, a comic strip depicting Looney Tunes-style espionage between two pointy-headed, monochromatic secret agents. This particular installment isn’t the series’ best strip: it’s not the one with the most elaborate explosions, the most clever ending, or the one that’s most exemplary of Prohías’ precise and peerless art style. But it is, for me, the most Spy vs. Spy strip ever, the one that best distills the already simplified distillate and sums up the whole enterprise.

One spy, sporting a trenchcoat, a wide-brimmed G-Man fedora, and secret service shades—a collection of clichéd noir signifiers, all in stark black—stands out in a field with a bucket of water. The moon is full and beautiful. The other spy, identical except in blinding white, peeks out from behind a tree, trying to suss out what his rival is up to. Black Spy stares at the moon through an elaborate sextant, adjusting various settings and making mental calculations, finally drawing an X on the ground with a compass before setting the bucket down. As he leaves, White Spy sneaks up to it, peers inside, trying to figure out what this could all mean. In the last panel, Black Spy has snuck back around to give White Spy a swift kick in the ass, grinning triumphantly as his enemy falls headfirst into the bucket, soaked and seeing stars. 

This is the essence of Spy vs. Spy: delightfully stupid without ever being mean, delightfully simple without ever being dumb. Prohías’ comics are as perfect an example of the medium as you’re ever likely to find—even more so, I’d argue, than other all-time strips like Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes, since its wordless pantomime operates so effortlessly using the mechanics of graphic narrative as its sole language. The above strip works so well because it forgoes high-concept gadgetry to make the petty, low-stakes reality of the spies’ eternal struggle that much clearer. It’s a perfect way to frame the proceeding complexities of the franchise as a whole.

And make no mistake: Spy vs. Spy is a franchise, a bona fide phenomenon, as ubiquitous as comic strips get without the nostalgic momentum of the above GOATs, the “who the hell thinks this is funny?” anti-spectacle of something like Dilbert, or the dearth of basic premise that makes Garfield so ripe for memery. Decades and decades of comics, sure, but also video games, segments on TV shows, T-shirts, trading cards, a board game, action figures, plush toys, Halloween masks, NASCAR promotions, fucking Mountain Dew commercials. The famous image of the spies, shaking hands while holding explosives behind their backs with the tenderness you’d afford fresh fruit, is famous for a reason.

But like the spies themselves, the image we have of something is often what gets us in trouble. As consumers and customers, we are often trained not to see art (or tools or people) as complex things with a story, or the evolving context that informs their continued existence. This not-seeing is often a foundational ingredient of success. The image—the idea of an idea—is what everyone will know, what everyone will buy. I would like to look at Spy vs. Spy in chronological order to tell you the story of a simple, stupid thing. Knowing, after all, is half the battle.

Antonio Prohías was brilliant. He was an unmatched artist whose simple style belied his immense talents, and his mastery of cartoon logic and physical comedy puts him up there as one of the greatest cartoonists ever. As already mentioned, comic readers are encouraged as consumers to ignore the writers and artists who actually make the things they love—and with comic strips specifically, you also have to contend with the bespoke illusion created by syndication. Readers who open the funny pages of their local newspaper are taught to encounter their handful of daily panels as appearing out of thin air. The presentation is, of course, the point: exhaling slightly out of your nose at whatever the family from Baby Blues is up to is designed to feel inevitable. Can you, without looking it up, name the original creators of famous but not omnipresent strips like The Family Circus, Hägar the Horrible, Dennis the Menace, or Beetle Bailey, let alone the people who work on them now? I can’t either. No one made the strips; they captured them. It’s all just reportage. 

The satirical tone of MAD Magazine helped mitigate these issues somewhat, but only because Prohías’ life story (which we’ll get to shortly) helped to sell the brand as equal parts mischievous, politically profound, and genuinely rebellious. Early Spy strips appeared with the following prelude: “Antonio Prohías is a famous Cuban artist who defied the censorship of the Castro regime with anti-communist cartoons—until he was forced to flee Havana with his life. Now, he graces the pages of MAD with his cartoon sequence of friendly rivalry called—Spy vs Spy.” While it’s cool to see that context for a strip about convoluted traps and Acme explosions, merely acknowledging something isn’t enough to legitimately combat the racism that creates America’s apathy toward all things international. Besides, these blurbs were clearly designed to gain MAD clout via association with Prohías’ politics.

In many ways, by the time he got to MAD, he had enjoyed a more successful and influential career than the vast majority of his co-workers. Despite Fulgencio Batista and his proxies’ oppressive tenures, Cuba had a robust media landscape during the mid-twentieth century, including an ecosystem of local and state newspapers and magazines. It was the perfect proving ground for a tenacious young artist to demonstrate his keen-eyed understanding of the nation’s cultural and political landscape. Prohías’ first professional publication was a cartoon in the newspaper Alerta in 1938, at just 17. Steady gigs soon followed: at one point, Prohías was working for five periodicals at once. In 1946, at 25, he became the first recipient of the Juan Gualberto Gómez gold medal and purse, a prestigious prize for Cuban journalism he would go on to win five more times. Add to that his three Ricardo de la Torriente prizes for best cartoon of the year (’48, ’49, and ’52), the Salon de Humoristico Publication first prize for best advertising cartoon (’55), and the International American Society of Journalists award for best cartoonist of the year selected from more than 20 Latin American countries (’60), and it’s clear that Prohías was nothing to fuck with long before he left Cuba. 

Some of Prohías’ pre-Spy work sits in the realm of traditional political cartoons, single-panel visual gags like a peace sign as the blade of a guillotine, but the best of his early cartoons are the ones that begin to merge his political insights with the absurd lingua franca of cartoons themselves: exaggeration, slapstick, etc. These cartoons are full-on comic strips, usually starring recurring satirical characters. One character, El Hombre Siniestro, was a sadistic villain Prohías said was “born out of the national psychosis of the Cuban people,” as he felt “an element of fatality in the air, right before and after revolution.” In my favorite strip he stars in, El Hombre Siniestro is troubled by a dream of a man stranded on a desert island, so he wakes up, chugs multiple bottles of water, and goes back to bed, smiling contentedly now that the tide has risen and the man has drowned. Another character, Tovarich, was an evil communist, an obvious stand-in for Castro. He’s a scheming government agent, an antecedent to the spies: in one strip, he gives a man a present that, when opened, releases a spring-loaded hammer and sickle that simultaneously decapitates him and stamps his foot. 

The contents of these strips, combined with the ubiquity of Prohías’ work in the late ’50s, angered many revolutionaries, including Castro himself. The Tovarich strips were “set” in Russia to maintain a level of plausible deniability—you could typically see the domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral in the corner of at least one panel per strip—but the message was obvious. At one point, while Castro was giving a speech, he whipped a crowd of his supporters into a frenzy, accusing Prohías of being a counterrevolutionary who was working for the CIA. The crowd called for his execution, chanting Paredón para Prohías! Paredón para Prohías!

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Between his tainted reputation and the regime shutting down independent news outlets, work dried up fast. Prohías was forced to take up odd jobs to supplement his cartooning, and what work he did get published was often followed by lengthy coletillas, extended addenda added by government censors that undermined his points and accused him of treason. He lived in this hostile atmosphere for a year as opportunities evaporated, colleagues turned on him, and people spat at him on the street. Because he was one of the earliest public figures to question the fervor around Castro, escape was relatively easy: In May 1960, Prohías boarded a commercial flight to New York City, his family following soon after. He worked in a clothing factory, publishing cartoons criticizing the Cuban government in a few Spanish-language American dailies. He would never return to his home country.

Looking to break into American comics proper, Prohías spent whatever down time he had studying various periodicals, even before he made his escape. He correctly assumed the work that had made him (in)famous in Cuba wouldn’t translate well in the States. U.S. comics culture was, at this point, largely defined by A) increasingly meta reinventions of DC’s golden age superheroes, and B) the academic vulgarity of underground “comix.” Both of these subgenres were radically different expressions of the same nostalgic impulse, a reexamination of what comics had meant/could mean to a generation of kids who had grown up with the lethally flawed self-importance of American exceptionalism, as well as the earliest version of what we now think of as the “comic book industry.” Both were in full swing, and while seismic shifts in each industry were still a few years away, self-reflection had begun: these people were now teenagers, college kids, young adults, people who were starting to see beyond the figures they’d grown up with and the simple messages they carried, people who were beginning to imagine what the future could look like. If Prohías was going to make it in the U.S. the way he had in Cuba, he had to find a way to use his art to speak to this phenomenon. 

Prohías saw something of a kindred spirit in MAD and its editors, the self-described “usual gang of idiots.” Their work was crude and juvenile, yes, but it was smart, too—playful, stylistically diverse, and overtly political. MAD’s publisher, William Gaines, knew a thing or two about censorship, in his own way. His company, EC Comics, had made its bones on the extreme violence and sexuality of crime and horror titles like Tales from the Crypt and Shock SuspenStories. But after the Comics Code Authority formed in 1954 to fight against the moral panic surrounding the medium, a list of rules for opt-in regulation so strict that publishers who agreed to it couldn’t even put “terror” or “horror” in the titles of their books, distributors had balked at EC’s more scandalous titles. Series were canceled; creators were let go. MAD was the last title left standing, having switched to a magazine format early on. 

While Prohías’ and Gaines’ experiences are obviously not comparable, Gaines’ sense of anti-authoritarianism went a long way in shaping MAD’s ethos—and making it attractive to Prohías. On July 12th, 1960, two months and change after he came to the U.S., Prohías visited MAD HQ on Lafayette Street. He brought his daughter Marta with him because her English was better than his. It happened to be her 14th birthday. 

The so-called “MAD-men,” in their recollections of this initial meeting, stress instant infatuation with Prohías’ work; Marta tells a slightly different story. According to her, the editors first told her father to take the strip elsewhere, since they didn’t have any openings at the moment. He explained that he had created Spy vs. Spy specifically for MAD and “would not have them published anywhere else,” theatrically beginning to tear up his handiwork in front of them. (They stopped him.) She also says that they asked him to sketch something for them in the room; apparently, it wasn’t the quality of the doodle that convinced them of his talent, but the posture of his hand, two decades of skillful practice revealed in how he held the pencil. Ultimately, Prohías and his daughter walked back out onto the New York City streets having sold three strips for $800—an amount that today would be worth a little more than 10 times that. 

Later, Nick Meglin, a former editor at MAD, would recall how Prohías had returned to the office a week later with 10 more strips. “The staff’s initial reaction was ambivalent,” Meglin said. “Didn’t this guy understand the magazine wanted only the few pages we’d bought from his first visit?” After seeing how “diabolically clever” these new installments were, he said, the editors knew they had “stumbled into an ongoing feature.” 

Stumbled indeed.

A lot of people don’t really know how to talk about comics. In their readings, content takes priority over context. Even those who understand comics as a unique literary genre see a plotless, virtually wordless screwball strip like Spy vs. Spy and see nothing but clever fireworks. It’s a mindset that’s corrosive to a comic’s integrity. Within this kind of reading, style and storyline are the only things worth taking away from any graphic narrative. 

At this point, the usual line would be something like “Spy vs. Spy is a commentary on the meaningless violence and espionage of the Cold War.” Which, like, yeah. But there’s a lot more going on than that, a lot more to the world Prohías has created, even though it’s a world where a phone receiver can be replaced with pistol so a prank call leads to an unplanned suicide. To describe the strip’s virtues in terms of narrative cohesion is to ignore any nuance stemming from the artist’s lived experience. 

To talk thoroughly about Spy vs. Spy is to interrogate the anatomy of metaphor. Posited: the power of a good metaphor doesn’t stem from the fact that the metaphorical comparison (eyes as bright as diamonds, a road that winds like a snake, whatever) creates a relationship, but how it transforms that relationship, bringing new richness to both sides of the metaphor. To borrow I.A. Richards’ terminology from The Philosophy of Rhetoric, those sides are the vehicle (the figurative comparison that’s being invoked) and the tenor (the subject that’s being described by said comparison). Ideally, the former wouldn’t merely act as a conduit for the latter. A truly dynamic metaphor becomes smarter and more interesting once you consider each arm of the connection and how they interact. This is why so many political cartoons are boring and stupid regardless of the politics behind them, why they have to label everything so you know what the hell they’re talking about. They focus so much on The Point that they don’t bother making that point in a way that’s engaging for the reader.

Prohías never lost sight of this. Spy vs. Spy is a political cartoon, but it’s not a Political Cartoon. The strip stakes its claim immediately via a single thematic masterstroke—overlaying the blind jingoism and deranged paranoia of Cold War politics onto the endlessly resilient slapstick framework of classic cartoons—and then spends the rest of its existence exploring every facet of that premise by remixing the established formula. 

Think about how many satirical pitfalls Spy vs. Spy avoids simply by the nature of its setup. The spies are obvious stand-ins, but despite the loaded nature of their black and white designations, they aren’t direct send-ups of any particular country or regime. They’re both treacherous and stupid, because the two of them being on the same level better develops the metaphor and subverts the classic Tom/Jerry, Elmer/Bugs, Coyote/Roadrunner dynamic. (Prohías and the editors went so far as to “keep score” of who won and lost in every strip so neither would ever pull ahead.) There’s no overarching plot or story, including even the most basic details of the strip’s presumed “wartime” setting, and whatever lore can be said to exist is thin and deliberately vague.

Spy vs. Spy is truly timeless in a way few things are: while the strip often obsesses over the minutiae of its goofy gadgets, the tech is appropriately farcical, never feeling bogged down in time or place. The whole thing feels as contemporary in the 2020s as it did in the 1960s. The spies can be chasing each other in embassy offices and military bases, sure, but they can also be at sea, in space, walking down the street, chilling at home, engaging in trench warfare, cozy in bed. They can be pilots and cowboys and mad scientists, can be aristocrats and jailbirds and lazy beachgoers. The strip is also a prime example of all-ages content that actually works. The appeal of these original strips isn’t based on watering itself down for the tykes or shoehorning in dirty jokes for the adults, but rather the kind of dynamic storytelling that can be appreciated in pretty much the same way by everyone, regardless of age or perspective. 

This flexibility extends beyond the surface-level setup: it’s the idea at the core of the metaphor, and thus at the core of the strip’s wacky mechanics. The typical structure of a Spy vs. Spy strip involves Spy A noticing Spy B’s plan of attack, Spy A developing a counterattack, only for Spy B to have planned for this new plan, revealing the original scheme as a ruse designed to foil Spy A’s predictable response. They aren’t just similar, alike and in constant conflict, but literally identical, twisted inversions of each other that remain one and the same. In my favorite of Prohías’ original strips, both spies decide to paint themselves the same color as their enemy in order to infiltrate the other’s operation. When they meet each other on a street corner, they’re faced only with their own unholy doppelgänger. The last panel shows the spies side by side in therapy, panicked and unsure of who they really are. 

It’s not just that their plans only make sense if each knows what the other is going to do at all times because ha ha recognizable cartoon logic—it’s that it only makes sense if each knows what the other is going to do at all times because oh shit, that’s the recognizable self-fulfilling logic of political coercion. All the elaborate Rube Goldberg-style explosions are an extension of the strip’s central conceit of war and espionage not just as inherently flawed concepts, but inherently flawed subjects of entire interconnected systems of people and places that profit (whether in money or mythmaking or both) from the petty skirmishes of fiendishly devoted underlings. Hollow victories for hollow ideologies. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the stupidity is the message. 

The spies in Spy vs. Spy are patriots without countries, cursed forever to play out the violent gestures of war without any of the context that distracts from (or justifies) the carnage. In a 2020 Instagram Story, writer Ocean Vuong highlighted two other key components of a good metaphor—namely, that the tenor and vehicle of a metaphorical comparison should have both a sensory connection and a logical/emotional connection. In this way, Spy vs. Spy shows us that war is its own perfect reflection, bombs and guns and missiles as both the tactile and logical endpoint of a country’s self-image, death as the only way to define a nation. It’s not an accident that all the TOP SECRET intel the spies try to steal from each other are blueprints for more weapons. 

You might say I’m thinking way too hard about this. Black Spy once fed gunpowder to a chicken and White Spy’s house blew up when he tried to make breakfast with the egg it laid, chill out. But it’s worth noting that Prohías’ work was always thoroughly researched despite its simplicity: in Cuba, on top of devouring newspapers and radio broadcasts everyday to stay up-to-date on current events, he maintained contacts at the American embassy who gave him info about various political dealings. He kept archives on many figures, including Castro, in order to weave what he learned into his comics. The message of his work was never just “war bad.” Sergio Aragonés, a fellow Spanish-speaking cartoonist and one of his closest friends at MAD, says that Prohías would read entire books about specific military operations to get ideas for Spy vs. Spy, refining them and refining them until they “would arrive at a sublime simplification.” Aragonés also notes that Prohías would regularly present “a half dozen” strips for “every one the editors accepted,” strips he says were “equally researched” and “equally good.” “Presenting” these strips involved Prohías drawing highly detailed 8.5-x-11-inch sketches that, barring ink, were basically finished, ensuring his ideas would come across to the editors without use of his limited English. Once he got the go-ahead, he’d redraw the entire strip in MAD’s extra large 13.5-x-18.25-inch format before inking it. Prohías’ process was thoughtful and rigorous, is what I’m saying. The simple, unpretentious presentation belied all the intricate work that went into its development. 

The central metaphor wouldn’t work if the mechanics of the comics itself weren’t up to par. Luckily, the strips are engaging as hell: frenetic yet fluid, complicated without being overly complex, punchy and relatively easy to follow while also rewarding multiple close reads. It’s amazing how much detail is in these original strips, the way lines vary in thickness to add dimension to even the simplest objects, how much the designs of the batshit weaponry are steeped in plausible engineering consistent enough to foreshadow twists for particularly keen readers. As involved as the spies’ schemes got, the strips always maintained a level of sparseness: the comics never have more than eight panels, and oftentimes the stand-alone title gags that begin the strips’ section (the so-called “Joke and Dagger Dept.”) are more complex than the strips themselves. Prohías knew exactly what to include in every panel to convey all the proper information to keep the reader on their toes. And to do this all with no dialogue, virtually no words save for the occasional label or sound effect? Unreal.

What his work reminds me of the most, weirdly enough, is certain examples of post-punk manga. Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame, Taiyō Matsumoto’s Tekkonkinkreet, even dudes like Junji Ito or Tite Kubo. Vastly different tones, cultures, and genre expectations aside, they all deal in masterful, hyper-detailed black and white art that remains next to impossible to replicate or adapt in a one-to-one capacity. This is why the various animated adaptations of Spy vs. Spy are so disappointing. The detailed staging of Prohías’ work is perfect for telling his stories in four to eight “frames,” but having to render the moments between panels only highlights how flat the rest of the short is by comparison. It might only take 30 seconds to diligently read any given strip, but seeing that same strip play out in 30 seconds of real time feels unnatural. 

Shockingly, my preferred adaptation is a Mountain Dew TV ad campaign that ran in 2004. As depressing as the whole enterprise is, the fact that the five shorts are live action, the fact that they combine 2D facial animation and practical effects, forces the creators to completely restructure the ideas behind Prohías’ strips. They shot a black and white set in color, and the spies were played by talented performers, one of which was a former Cirque du Soleil member. They move with exaggerated conspiratorial energy, speaking dubbed-in French gibberish as they navigate a vacant, not-quite-cartoon world. Throw in the clanking quasi-industrial soundtrack, the obvious soda cameos, and the fact that the editors would pull frames from the footage to lend a heightened jerkiness to the actors’ movements, and the effect is surreal and fascinating, lighthearted but also dark and vaguely sinister. It captures the spirit of Prohías’ work while also doing its own thing.

Prohías wrote and drew 241 installments of Spy vs. Spy over the span of 26 years. In 1987, with his health declining due to emphysema, he retired from the strip. His family, his children and their children, lived in Miami; he started visiting more and more often until, one day, he simply never returned to New York. Though he and the mother of his children had gotten divorced in the early ’60s, daughter Marta says that “they became good friends and it was she who cared for him the last ten years of his life.” Prohías died on February 24, 1998. 

For a decade after Prohías retired, the strip was taken up by a slew of artists and writers, most notably Don “Duck” Edwing and David Manak—a move Prohías was enthusiastic about, even initially offering feedback on the new comics. And yet, his absence is felt: this period of Spy vs. Spy is middling at best. Manak is a great artist; he would go on to do the pencils for a big chunk of Archie Comics’ Sonic The Hedgehog series in the ’90s, becoming, to a certain generation, yet another unsung comics legend. While his style was much looser and rougher than Prohías’, achieving a kind of hectic complexity that feels like a kid doodling in the compact margins of their school worksheets, Edwing’s concepts were often much more straightforward and boring than past strips. No one could ever really emulate the breezy, clever reversals that had become Prohías’ signature (though one strip involving a Bride of Frankenstein knockoff whose huge cartoon boobs turn out to be bombs is pretty inspired). 

In April 1997, Peter Kuper took over the strip to coincide with MAD’s “edgy” rebranding. He worked primarily in layered, spray-painted scenes, drawing out the blocky comics before using an X-ACTO knife to turn them into stencils. We’re back in “anything goes” territory, so the spies appear as old men and tennis players and Roman chariot racers, babies and cavemen and the subject of Hollywood movies. There’s even one strip revolving around White Spy drawing Spy vs. Spy strips. There’s some fun to be had, but Kuper’s work, visually dynamic as it is, relies on a methodical art style that doesn’t really mesh well with the strip’s fast pace. And although they’re ultimately aesthetic nitpicks, I never liked how gory the deaths are in Kuper’s comics, nor how the strips transitioned to being in color. In practice, both these moves wind up feeling antithetical to what makes Spy vs. Spy so interesting: seeing eyeballs and bloody brain matter after one of the now-Caucasian spies gets cut in half by an elevator door makes the whole thing feel wrong. 

Later, a few ill-fated spin offs in the early aughts proved that editors and audiences alike had lost track of what made Prohías’ original work so incredible, focusing instead on marketable aesthetics and surface-level narrative. There was Spy vs. Spy Jr., featured in the short-lived publication MAD Kids, a segment that failed to realize that making the spies prank-obsessed grade schoolers was pointless because Spy vs. Spy is already the kid-friendly version of itself, a convenient microcosm of the backward logic that doomed the whole magazine. There was also the Spy vs. Spy Sunday newspaper strip, the apotheosis of Edwing and Manak’s take on the property and a fitting full-circle moment for Prohías’ artistic legacy. It was decent, all things considered, though it was pulled after 39 strips; in 2002, papers got skittish about military violence in the comics section. Already enough on the front page, I suppose.

To highlight the deeper realities of Spy vs. Spy is to mourn not just Prohías’ passing, but the eventual transformation of his creations into marketable grist for the isolating machinery of branded IP. This is what mega-success often looks like within the world of comics: something reaches such a ubiquitous level of notoriety that the “graphic” and the “narrative” become all but divorced. Combine that with the usual death throes of late capitalism, along with technologically sophisticated ways of cutting the artist out of the art-making process, and it becomes obvious why American entertainment has become so steeped in comics and comic book culture while the traditional, single-issue print periodical side of the comic industry is only becoming more and more niche. If an image is the idea of an idea, then a franchise is that second idea in perpetuity, because the image is the thing you can sand down and actually sell. You can’t profit off of history unless you rewrite it. 

All of which is to say that Spy vs. Spy is only part of the larger picture. What I’m lamenting isn’t just what became of Prohías and his work, but what became of the entire ecosystem that allowed him and his work to thrive the way it once did. As much of an undeniable institution as it is, MAD hasn’t been culturally relevant since MAD TV. How many years ago was that? The magazine itself transitioned to being a subscription-based collection of reprints, a move that’s as inevitable as it is disappointing. As for Spy vs. Spy itself, what original work Kuper does no longer incorporates his signature spray-paint style, making everything feel that much more flat and obvious. In addition, many of Prohías’ strips have been reprinted in color, a move that has all the urgent necessity of reprinting Beloved in Comic Sans.

And this is all before you get to the real brass tacks: the fact that MAD was first published in 1952, over 70 years ago, and virtually everyone involved with it during the era that made it a cultural force to begin with (save for, at time of writing, Aragonés) has since passed. William Gaines is dead. Harvey Kurtzman is dead. Al Feldstein is dead. Al Jaffee is dead. Wally Wood is dead. Will Elder is Dead. Jack Davis is dead. John Severin is dead. Don Martin is dead. Frank Jacobs is dead. Mort Drucker is dead. Dave Berg is dead. Nick Meglin is dead. Duck Edwing is dead. Antonio Prohías is dead. This isn’t so much a retrospective as it is a kind of elegy. 

Though I’m too young to be part of the generation of comic readers who received MAD magazine in its heyday as a revelation, brought into the know as I was by Cartoon Network’s 2010 Robot-Chicken-but-even-more-for-kids-with-the-not-at-all-confusing-title MAD and a particularly dorky father, it can become difficult to convince myself that anyone actually cares. Most of the info that’s publicly available regarding Prohías and his work is contained in two books, Spy vs. Spy: The Complete Casebook and Spy vs. Spy 2: The Joke and Dagger Files, omnibus volumes that collect Prohías’ original run and a sizable chunk of the interstitial strips respectively. 

The comics are all well preserved, as is all the behind-the-scenes production info, but the collections themselves are startlingly haphazard. Though released some years apart, they both feel like they were thrown together in a weekend, compelled not to restore Prohías to “the folk hero status he so justly deserves,” as the first book’s intro claims, but to take advantage of the timing of the aforementioned “edgy” relaunch. It’s everywhere you look, this weird, half-assed disconnect. J.J. Abrams of all people wrote the forward for the second book, a piece that’s about the same length as his bio in which he hand-wrings about being a braggart before bragging about owning the original artwork of the first Spy vs. Spy strip. The first book doesn’t even have a table of contents, despite having several essays sprinkled throughout to break up the comics. The pieces that aren’t written by Aragonés or Prohías’ daughter contain little emotional weight. They all read like everyone was told their piece would be the introduction, so the same stories and information get shared and re-shared over and over. In the second book, Kuper seems bent on revealing how little he considers the strip’s larger concepts, like when he says that a joke idea for a strip involves Black Spy being “forced to close his military industrial complex” as if it’s a car door or a pizza place at the local mall. Outside of the comics themselves, both books feel lifeless, propped up, almost vaguely disrespectful. In the first book’s acknowledgments, editor Charles Kochman reveals that the collection’s cover was “cobbled together from bits and pieces of Prohías’ panels — a hand from one page, a bomb from another.”

The collections and their lackluster historical perspective highlight the dark irony of Prohías’ success, the way the idea of an idea can come to grow well beyond intimate, personal context in which the original work is created. A 1983 interview with Prohías in The Miami Herald contains what is probably the most well-known quote about the originals of Spy vs. Spy: “The sweetest revenge has been turning Fidel’s accusation of me as a spy into a money making venture.”

In one of Kuper’s strips, White Spy can’t sleep. He’s haunted by nightmares of Black Spy stabbing him in the back. He visits a psychiatrist, an obvious Freud stand-in, and explains everything, at which point the psychiatrist explains the various facets of his dream: the knife represents his dysfunctional parents: the door both spies come out of represents repressed sexuality: Black Spy is his inner child’s alter ego: and the city itself represents social, religious, and economic stress. White Spy is healed! Trauma fully processed, he’s giddy and vibrant as he disposes of his bombs and his guns and his grenades, Freud looking on, approval hovering on the edges of his bearded lips. White Spy shakes his hand and leaves the office, whistling and—perhaps for the first time—filled with hope. Freud then takes off his face, revealing himself to be Black Spy in disguise. He stabs White Spy in the back. 

I guess some things never change.

Gyasi Hall is a writer and critic from Columbus, Ohio. Their essays “Alas, Poor Fhoul” and “Eminem Drop-Kicked Me in This Dream I Had” were both nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and their debut poetry chapbook, Flight of the Mothman: An Autobiography, was published by The Operating System in Spring 2019. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in Guernica, Lit Hub, The Iowa Review, and The Black Warrior Review, among others. They received their MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa, and they are currently working on a book about Black people and comics.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Fact-checker: Leigh Kunkel

Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Instead of a finished mural, at the Wednesday night vigil Marquez offered up his incomplete panels to the mourners, inviting them to take paintbrushes and add their own messages of grief or love. “He really gave them a place to express their feelings,” Jackson says. “Nobody else thought about it or even tried to do it.”

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Max Olesker| Longreads | July 13, 2023 | 15 minutes (4,199 words)

When I walk into the room, it is the enormous minotaur head that first catches my eye—its vast gaping concrete mouth containing the grate of a fireplace, its wide eyes staring back at me. Above the minotaur, ancient Greek tragedians are painted on the wall—Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus. Surrounding the minotaur on one side is an array of handmade military paraphernalia: shields, tabards, helmets, and weapons. Dismembered human body parts sculpted from newspaper adorn the other, limbs, torsos, and heads all aimlessly scattered near the bay windows.

It’s a cold February morning, and I’ve come to Birkenhead, just outside Liverpool, to visit the former home of a man named Ron Gittins, a property affectionately known as Ron’s Place. Over the course of 33 years, Gittins painstakingly transformed almost every surface of this flat with a series of artworks in a variety of styles and mediums, from friezes on the walls of his living room to a Roman altar in his kitchen and enormous, ambitious fireplaces (yes, multiple). It’s a singlehanded labor of love. But, because Gittins was renting the flat—with no right to modify the property to this extent—it’s also illegal. As a result, the work was created almost entirely in secret. It was only after Gittins’death at age 79 that word gradually began to trickle out about the existence of this strange cave of wonders.

It was in Koh Samui, Thailand, that I encountered my first “outsider environment.” Away from the bustling hubbub of the beaches and tourist strips, partway up a mountain, in a secluded grove surrounded by waterfalls and greenery, lies the Secret Buddha garden. It’s full of large, intricate stone sculptures—angels, snakes, musicians, and Buddha figures—in a world sprung entirely from the imagination of a man named Nim Thongsuk. A retired durian fruit farmer, Thongsuk started his project at the age of 77, constructing a vast, complex environment that even included his own tomb. Exploring the garden, I became taken by this industrious, audacious expression of something deeply personal. 

“Outsider art,” “folk art,” and “art brut” are designations frequently applied to artists—often untrained—who work outside the classical tradition (and frequently the law). If the work is a large-scale installation, permanent or semi-permanent, it might be deemed an “outsider environment” or “visionary environment.” Outside Madrid, a former monk named Justo Gallego Martínez spent 60 years singlehandedly building his own cathedral, working on it daily until he passed away in 2021. In Westbourne Grove, London, retired postal porter and factory worker Gerry Dalton, an “Irishman and self-proclaimed gardener” according to his site’s Instagram bio, created a series of remarkable outdoor sculptures along the Grand Union Canal, in a collection he dubbed Gerry’s Pompeii. In South Africa’s Eastern Cape, Helen Martins, who lived from 1897 to 1976, created The Owl House, which features over 300 sculptures made from concrete and ground glass. And there are many, many more across the globe, each with its own infinitely rich backstory.

I am partly drawn to these works because of my parents. My mother trained in visual arts and works with community groups, teaching thousands of people her skills and techniques; whenever she sits somewhere for more than a few minutes, sketches and illustrations emerge. Every birthday card she’s ever given me has been a wondrous one-off—illustrated, painted, or screen-printed—and accompanied by a poem from my father, a writer, poet, and word-obsessive from whom I’ve inherited my own compulsions. Both my parents have amassed vast bodies of work, unseen by galleries or collectors. Perhaps they too are outsider artists. And perhaps, via her teaching, my mother has even inspired the work of other outsider artists as well. 

Upon entering Ron’s Place for the first time, I’m unprepared for the feeling of being subsumed by a man’s imagination. The flat is dusty, strange, and wonderful.  

The central corridor is painted floor-to-ceiling with ancient Egyptian iconography—profiles of Horus the falcon-headed god and Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, beneath life-size depictions of a Cleopatra-esque pharaoh and impressionistic signs and sigils. On the left is the Minotaur Room, its cavernous mouth the focal point. Next is the bathroom, entirely aquatic-themed, with manta rays, hammerhead sharks, and all manner of other painted sea life swimming across the walls. The Georgian Room is filled with portraits of naval figures and the first fireplace Gittins created (a comparatively low-key affair, with fish for feet). Across the hall is the Lion Room, which features trompe-l’oeil friezes, including an area of faux chipped stone and a cheekily smiling horse, which faces Gittins’s technical masterpiece: a vast lion fireplace, spectacularly and carefully rendered. 

Throughout the flat are half-finished sculptures of busty women, bags of papers, books, bric-a-brac, passable (from a distance) replicas of military uniforms; miscellaneous items gathered and hoarded for some future use. Whatever task Gittins’ magpie mind focused on, he seems to have worked on it feverishly and industriously. Many of the paintings are naive. The painting on the high ceiling of the Georgian Room is particularly crude—the makeshift ladder and extra-long extended paintbrush he used clearly not affording him the detail he might have wished for. But the fireplaces, particularly the lion, are astonishing. And the totality, the experience of it all, is what Ron’s Place is about. Not one painting, not the model of the weirdly muscly cherub, nor the vast pile of notes seemingly devised to help Gittins remember entire history books (“TAASB; The American Army Surrounds Boston” “HLOTB; Heavy Losses of the British”), but everything, all together—that’s what makes this special. Taken as a whole, it’s an endlessly fascinating space; a window into a man’s life, into his mind. Although the flat is cold and musty, it’s a dreamlike place where time slips away. The experience is all-encompassing and leaves me feeling disoriented. 

“It’s all quite powerful, isn’t it?” says Martin Wallace, as he shows me around the flat. Wallace, 55, is a warm, articulate Scouser and BAFTA-nominated filmmaker who frequently collaborates with Jarvis Cocker, the frontman of ’90s Britpop band Pulp. Together, they made a documentary series, Journeys Into the Outside, traveling the planet to investigate extraordinary places built by regular people. Wallace, who lives nearby, is now working on a feature-length documentary about Gittins, and in the process has become inexorably drawn into the orbit of Ron’s Place. Initially, this only involved helping cover the flat’s rent—as a trustee—after Gittins passed, and thinking of a long-term strategy to preserve the unique interior. But it’s rapidly become far more problematic. Ron’s Place is under threat: After months of stasis, the landlord and owner, Salisbury Management Services, has finally decided enough is enough. The building is to be sold at auction.

The front door flies open and Jan Williams and Chris Teasdale hurry in. They huddle with Wallace in the Egyptian corridor; urgent crisis talks begin. Jan Williams, 61, is Gittins’ niece. Together with her partner, Teasdale, 71, they work as artists under the name The Caravan Gallery. Along with Wallace, they have now dedicated themselves to preserving Gittins’ legacy. The current discussions, hushed and frantic, are about potential investors who might work with them—but they don’t sound promising. One man claiming to have the money also had quite a lot of snot on his jumper. The housing associations who expressed interest the previous summer have all gone quiet, the occasional sympathetic voice inevitably getting lost in the mundane realities of running a large business. In order to be eligible to apply for funding, the trio has created a legal entity, The Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust. But, with time now of the essence, it’s not clear how that will save the property. 

At one point, we all stand together in the Georgian Room. “What would you do?” Williams asks me. It’s hard to answer. It’s also hard to countenance the environment I am standing in being destroyed. Could an art gallery step in? Could the council? Could the Lottery? 

“Couldn’t Paul McCartney just buy it?” says Williams, exasperated. 

Ronald Geoffrey Gittins was born in 1939, the middle child between two sisters, and grew up in a small terraced house that was later destroyed as part of Liverpool’s slum clearances. His father, James, a navy man, worked on the docks, and his mother, Alice, worked in service for a wealthy family. In their small, ramshackle yard, where his father kept ducks, there was an outside toilet. Here Gittins would sequester himself away, training his voice by reciting Shakespeare, frequently Richard III’s opening monologue:

“There were theories that he was on some sort of spectrum,” says Williams. “At school, teachers didn’t know how to handle him. He was obviously really bright—but he didn’t know how to fit in.” 

“He was known as your mad uncle Ronny,” Teasdale says gently. 

After school, his employment was patchy. In the 1960s, he trained as a Methodist minister at a theological college in Derbyshire. “He became a sort of freelance preacher,” says Williams, “causing havoc and being a pain in the ass!” For a while, he became a white goods inspector, where he was known for being overly officious and invariably siding with the management, rather than the employees.

While the interior of his flat was a closely-guarded secret, Gittins himself was a well-known flamboyant local figure. He wore bright handmade suits and wigs—sometimes more than one at a time. He would take his guitar to the local bank and serenade the staff. “It’s kind of what we might call eccentricities, in a euphemistic way,” says Wallace. “Mental health problems, looking at it another way, of course.” He was sectioned on a number of occasions, following bouts of erratic behavior, and later in life shared his belief that he was a spy, intercepting articles hidden in newspaper articles. “People sort of enjoyed what he’d do, but also othered him quite a lot,” says Wallace.

But he was also clearly extremely bright and capable, fascinated with the world, and generous with his time. Christopher Lee-Power, a Liverpool-based actor, met Gittins in a chance encounter on a college bus and credits him with launching his professional career. “Ron took me under his wing and began refining my voice while teaching me drama, life skills, and art,” says Lee-Power. “We visited several art galleries, where he shared his knowledge of the great artists, and he even encouraged me to read aloud from a book to boost my confidence. As the years passed, I honed my acting skills and voice under his tutelage.”

And as an artist, Gittins wasn’t totally untrained—he took an art foundation at the Laird College of Art and at one point set up a logo business called Minstrel Enterprises, naming the company after a Bible quote in which King Solomon summons a musician to play. 

What’s more, Ron’s Place wasn’t the first home in which Gittins expressed his art; he had transformed properties twice before. He did it in his parents’ rented home:
pictures of pompeii help put ron to sleep reads the headline on a mid-’70s article in The Liverpool Echo, alongside a photo of a 35-year-old mustachioed Gittins sitting in his childhood bedroom and gesturing proudly at the space he has transformed. Later, he secretly recreated the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling on the ceiling of his rented room. But it wasn’t until 1986 that he found his true muse—the little flat where he would live for the rest of his life—and begin his greatest creative endeavor.

In the days after I return to London, Williams, Teasdale, and Wallace continue to tirelessly publicize their cause. A GoFundMe is set up, and donations trickle in. The public is enthusiastic, but the pledges are generally on the order of £10 and £20, and their target—£350,000—seems futile. 

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The precarity associated with Ron’s Place is not uncommon when it comes to outsider environments, which are often created without any long-term planning. This has led to some mixed legacies. After Justo Gallego Martínez’s death, Spanish officials deemed his junk cathedral unsanitary and refused to honor his wish of being buried in the crypt; the cathedral itself faced the prospect of demolition before eventually being preserved by a charity. Gerry’s Pompeii, though “saved” after a mass crowdfunding push, had a number of its artifacts removed by a relative, only surviving in a diminished, depleted form. But Helen Martins’ Owl House was declared a “provisional National Monument” in 1989, keeping her glass (and concrete) menagerie safe.

Discussions around the fate of these environments invariably prompt questions. What is art? What is valuable? But part of the joy and power of environments like these is that they are generally, almost obstinately, uncommodifiable. In this, they feel like the polar opposite of NFTs—they are not joyless, arid things, designed solely for the marketplace; they are not scalable. Instead, they speak to something inner. This is My World reads the sign that Helen Martins placed on the grounds of Owl House. “I will not be ignored” was Ron Gittins’ passionate mantra, often repeated to his brother-in-law Henry. 

But the defiantly impractical nature of visionary environments certainly doesn’t make them any easier to preserve or protect. “If Ron had made prints or T-shirts, everyone would want one,” says Wallace. “But what do you do with a minotaur fireplace?”

What do you do with a minotaur fireplace?

As the auction to sell the flat approaches, the atmosphere in Gittin’s camp oscillates between panicky, resigned, and frustrated. Appeals to the press are made: Articles appear in The Guardian and local papers; Williams speaks on BBC Radio 4.

Serious buyers begin to emerge but with no plans to preserve the unique ground floor space. Sensing a bargain, a builder draws up plans to gut the building and remodel it as a home for his family. The unthinkable—the destruction of Ron’s Place—now seems the most likely outcome.

In a last-ditch effort to keep bidders at bay, the team submits a listing to Historic England, infuriating the landlord and property manager. “The owners were absolutely furious, and said we’d stabbed them in the back after everything they’d done,” says Williams, “Which is a bit luxurious because we’d been paying the rent and we kept our side of the bargain.”

In life, Gittin’s relationship with his landlords was equally contentious. “He didn’t have water for many years because of a dispute,” says Wallace. “Originally his rent included water. Then the landlord was bought out by another landlord, and the second landlord said, ‘I’m not paying your fucking water rates.’ And Ron said, ‘Oh, yes, you are. And let’s go to court about it because it’s in my contract.’ Eventually, it was found against Ron—but he disputed that. So he’d walk miles for a standing tap.” 

With his penchant for high-handed letter writing, Gittins escalated things to the inevitable level. “Dear Mr. Gittins,” reads a letter dated January 16, 1996, “Thank you for your recent letter to the Prime Minister about your liability for paying water charges to North West Water. Your letter has been passed to his Department for reply.” When Gittins eventually did get water access, he would leave his water on constantly. “I don’t know whether he was trying to retrospectively get his money’s worth,” says Wallace, “or whether it was just so cold that he didn’t want the taps to freeze.”

The Gittins of my imagination reminds me a little of Johnny Rooster Byron, the central figure in Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem. A local drug dealer, retired stuntman, and teller of tall tales, Byron is a self-created creature of fantasy. He is set against his nemesis, the local council—a bureaucratic, clipboard-toting symbol of mundanity. He’s a romantic, creating art from the mythic history that surrounds him and the detritus of his life. Byron is a deeply flawed figure, but his impassioned fist-waving at authority has a certain power to it, a certain magic. He rails against the quotidian bean counters until the last, but you feel the walls closing in, and sense his world can’t last forever.

Yet, bizarrely, despite his outsider status, Gittins wasn’t just anti-authority; he clearly identified with the establishment. His journey through life was shaped by a testy, complicated relationship with the powers that be: part fascination, part frustration. An ardent monarchist and an enthusiastic Thatcherite, in 1973 he even ran unsuccessfully for Conservative councilor in Bevington. He became almost a tribute to authority, from his preoccupation with spycraft and military history to dabbling with organized religion and his prodigious, litigious, letter-writing. (He tended to begin his letters with the words “Without prejudice,” a phrase Williams feels reflects his positive outlook on the world, but Wallace suspects to be more a highfalutin means of being able to sound off with impunity.) 

And, though Gittins created all of his work outside of institutions, that wasn’t entirely by choice: In 1998 he submitted a piece of work to the Royal Academy. When I visit the flat, I see the piece—a bust of Alexander the Great, created in newspaper and glue. It wasn’t accepted. But he never seemed fazed by rejection, Williams explaining that he’d invariably see it as their loss, shrug, and continue work on his latest project. Perhaps he didn’t require the approval of the establishment because, in his own flat, he was the establishment. Gittins had created a visionary environment: A place where he rubbed shoulders with kings and commanders and beautiful women, where he dressed in the smartest of uniforms and corresponded with the highest offices in the land, and they with him.

In February, a final burst of creativity sets in at the flat. Local music students come to play there and Wallace films them. Andy McCluskey, the lead singer of the band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, drops by. Paul Griffiths, the Birkenhead Poet, performs spoken word. But it’s a last hurrah; at 4.30 p.m. on February 28, the day before the auction, their license runs out. The keys to Ron’s Place are handed back. 

The next morning, however, Williams receives an email: “Just heard [the flat] is up for auction today. I would like to loan you the money needed.”

Tamsin Wimhurst is a 57-year-old history and heritage professional from Cambridge with a passion for rescuing unusual properties. In 2014, she and her husband, Mike, became the saviors of David Parr House, a Cambridge terraced house filled with beautifully preserved, intricately patterned interiors from the Arts & Crafts movement. Wimhurst was sat at breakfast flicking through a day-old Guardian when she read about Ron’s Place being put up for auction later that day. She sprang into action. “I rang my husband who was away to say we had to save this place, and made contact with Ron’s Place whilst also trying to catch a train to London,” says Wimhurst, “but I had to act quickly, as the auction was at midday.” 

The morning of the auction becomes a whirlwind. Gittins’ camp had the assurance of funds from Wimhurst, but, with mere hours to the auction, no actual money had changed hands. The Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust they’d set up doesn’t even have a bank account yet. With the clock ticking, Martin Wallace takes a giant plunge. He offers to use his own credit card to secure the deposit. 

“It was all, you know, completely risky,” says Williams. “We were all in our van driving over to Ron’s, and Martin was saying ‘Should I? I’m gonna do it now. Are you okay with that?’” 

He places the bid.

Gittins seemingly never stopped having grand plans. When his parents needed a wall outside their house, he volunteered, promptly beginning a hugely ambitious Roman wall, the construction of which rendered the garden completely unusable for 12 months. Towards the end of his mother’s life, Gittins would wheel her out of her nursing home and take her to spend the night in his flat. His siblings were horrified, but Gittins didn’t seem to care—and, by all accounts, Alice seemed delighted. But it was worrying, wearying behavior.  

His family became frustrated. His sister Pat was able to retain an affection for her brother, but Pat’s husband, Henry, eventually washed his hands of Ron—and still can’t bring himself to talk about him. “Henry hasn’t got any interest—very little interest,” says Pat. “He [Ron] really had a detrimental effect on our family life, many times.”

The last time Pat saw Ron, there was none of the fire and brimstone of his more combative moments. They shared an avocado sandwich, and Ron ate a kiwi fruit. “We just chatted generally about different things,” says Pat, “nothing of any great significance. Before he left, he said, ’Can I say a little prayer with you?’ I said ‘fine.’ And he sounded quite reasonable and rational.”

But years of living in an unheated flat eventually took their toll: Gittins became ill. A local friend tried to put him in contact with social services and Age Concern, but Ron played down his illness and pretended he could look after himself, only allowing a head teacher from a local school to check in on him and deliver essentials. By this point, he had begun sleeping on the floor behind his front door, as though guarding the flat. It was here, on September 2, 2019, that Ron Gittins’ body was found—and the fight for the legacy of his extraordinary home began.

As the auction plays out, the atmosphere in the van is unbearably tense. But there is only one counteroffer—likely the landlord attempting to boost the bidding price—otherwise, the team’s listing of the property with Historic England works in warding off other bidders. At 12.40 p.m., a notification pings up on Williams’ phone. Their bid has won. 

Euphoric, they pull up to Ron’s Place. Outside, sitting in his car, is the property manager who had recently berated them for the Historic England registration. They knock on his window; when he rolls it down to tell them that the house has been sold, they say “We know—we’ve just bought it!” The issue was always knowing what to do with a space that wilfully ignored the rules of the world, and instead, chaotically, gleefully, created its own. The property management company was never some vindictive captain of industry; it just hadn’t signed up for a Roman altar to be created in one of its buildings. The bland, indifferent machinery of business was simply seeking to tame something strange and wild—to turn it into another cell on a spreadsheet. Or, as Williams put it: “The notion of a developer gutting the amazing art environment created by Ron Gittins over 33 years is like deciding to gut a pyramid to create a new branch of Primark.”

Tamsin Wimhurst proved to be true to her word, providing funds from the Muller-Wimhurst Trust to ensure the ongoing survival of Ron’s Place (and Wallace’s credit rating). The home had found a benefactor who sees value in the chaos. “It is unique and quirky, with the passion of one man’s life laid bare on the walls of his home. It immediately gets your mind whirring—how, why, who, what, when?” says Wimhurst. “I just thought, ‘How could it not be saved?’”

Jarvis Cocker succinctly summed up Ron’s Place in his statement to the press: “With environments like these, you get a complete work of art that somebody is living in and that they’ve established the rules. It’s like a personal universe.” Adding, with beautiful understatement, “Everybody decorates their house in some way, Ron has just gone that extra mile.”

On March 29, the day after the sale finally goes through, I speak to Williams. She is elated: “Miracles do happen!”

There’s more work to be done. Having fought tooth and nail to preserve the dilapidated house that contains Ron’s Place, Williams, Teasdale, and Wallace are now faced with the challenge of what to do with it. 

Further fundraising is beginning, with the aim of renovating the property and making it safe to welcome the public. But there’s now the sense of being at the start of a new chapter, rather than the closing of an old one. 

“Ron’s Place will thrive as it has a group of passionate people behind it who have worked so hard to conserve it,” says Wimhurst. “I don’t mind what it becomes—that is for Ron’s Place to decide—but I know that the community, wellbeing, and creativity for all will be at the heart of it.” 

“We want to make the house really beautiful, just make it a really fantastic place,” says Williams. Their Community Land Trust now has ambitions beyond Ron’s Place, too—to take on other old buildings and transform them into creative spaces. 

I ask Williams what Gittins would have thought of the drama surrounding his old flat.“Oh, he’d have been absolutely over the moon,” she says. “He always said, ‘I will not be ignored.’ So it’s like he’s getting all the attention you could ever have wished for, even after he’s gone.”

And so, against the odds, the minotaur continues to roar. Ron’s Place—with all its grandiosity, impossible aspirations, outsized ambition, surprising accomplishments, exasperating complications, contradictions, and surprises—lives on. And so does Ron.

Ron’s place is being renovated before a grand reopening. In the meantime, you can tour Ron’s place online or find more information here.

Max Olesker is a London-based writer-performer, comedian, and Associate Editor at Esquire Magazine UK. His feature writing has also appeared in The Observer, Times, Telegraph, and Esquire’s many international editions, and he is the co-creator of the ITV sitcom Deep Heat. His radio sitcom, The Casebook of Max & Ivan, is available on BBC Sounds.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copy editor: Peter Rubin

After having two boys, my mother says she prayed to God every night for a girl to be all hers, but she got me instead: a daughter, yes, but when I wasn’t climbing trees or sticking my nose in a book, I was with my father. We’d spend summer weekends hopping around the Smithsonian museums and artists’ studios in downtown D.C., and winter days building snow cities rather than snowmen. We made stop-motion movies with modeling clay, collaborated on murals using rolls of butcher paper spread the length of the garage floor, and sat on the covered porch during thunderstorms and drew the lightning bolts as they flashed. Dad taught high school during the day, and at night he’d hole up in his makeshift studio in the basement, sandwiched between the washing machine and sports equipment, painting to Miles or Coltrane. I’d be right there crouched on the floor, tinkering with pastels, pencils, paint—anything but coloring books, forbidden in our house, as they “stifled the imagination.” Every once in a while he’d ask me what color to use where, or for my interpretations of a theme he was exploring. It was the safest place in the whole world.

There used to be a bookcase, half obscured by a large tropical plant, in the lobby. Looking at it evokes a haptic experience for me. On each shelf is a table setting: one all in blue, another in red, and so on. I remember my curious, child fingers nudging the objects in confusion, mistaking them for a glued-down Fisher-Price tea set. My hands came away coated with tacky dust and grime.

The potter had been bought and sold by a series of owners by then. He’d lost a leg, but his gifted hands won him local renown: His expert work with clay ensured he would be kept in the district known for its stoneware, even as his family was torn from him at auction.

Using a sharpened tool, he etched into the jar’s shoulder: “I wonder where is all my relation/Friendship to all—and every nation.” The potter then added his enslaver’s initials, the date, and, finally, his own name: “Dave.”

In that simple act, the man, long known as Dave the Potter, and later David Drake, was not only wondering about his lost family: He was committing an extraordinary act of defiance in pre-Civil War South Carolina, indelibly asserting his existence in an age that sought to obliterate the humanity of Black people.

But let us find the trouble now. All through Vermeer’s oeuvre are objects like those in “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” that remind us the world is large. This was the world that was emerging after the protracted struggle by the Netherlands for independence from Spanish rule. During the 80-Years war and in its immediate aftermath, the Dutch established trading posts in Asia, Africa and in the Americas. An efflorescence of capitalism at home and overseas followed, and with it the beginnings of a colonial empire. Their own experience of subjugation did nothing to temper their desire to subjugate others. The Dutch East India Company dominated maritime routes and its shareholders raked in profits. The Dutch West India Company, meanwhile, was a significant force in the trade in enslaved people. Ordinary Dutch citizens grew wealthy from these criminal enterprises. With a renewed sense of who they were in the world, they filled their homes with rare objects and far-fetched finery. You could have luxurious things, and you could also have them depicted in paintings. The paintings were helpful reminders that you were mortal, yes, but also that you were rich.

In his perceptive book “Vermeer’s Hat” (2008), the historian Timothy Brook draws out some of the global provenances of the things we see in Vermeer’s paintings. He suggests, for instance, that the silver on the table in the “Woman Holding a Balance” could have had its origin in the notorious Potosí silver mine, a hellish place run on the labor of enslaved people in what was then Peru and is now Bolivia. The felt lining the hat of the soldier in “Officer and Laughing Girl” almost certainly came from beaver pelts sourced by French adventurers from the violent trade networks of 17th-century Canada. Brook traces a connection between this lighthearted genre scene and the bitter history of the “starvation winter of 1649-50,” when European greed for pelts led to expulsions, wars and the mass deaths of Huron Indian children.