Picasso’s Comics: How Cubism Was Influenced by an American Comic Strip

Picasso's revolutionary Cubism is considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century, earning him the moniker "father of modern art." Its impact was so immense that it helped inspire a host of other art movements around the world, like Futurism, Suprematism, Dadaism, Constructivism, Vorticism, De Stijl and Art Deco.

But Picasso was also an avid fan of American comic strips, particularly The Katzenjammer Kids, and that influence is evident. If Cubism was the opening shot of modern art, comics gave it some of the "bang!"

April 8 marked the 50th anniversary of Picasso's death, commemorated with the Picasso Celebration 1973–2023, a series of museum exhibits around the world organized by his grandson and the Musée National Picasso-Paris. In the US, the Guggenheim Museum in New York is featuring Young Picasso in Paris, showing May 12–August 7.

Several of these exhibits reference or examine influences on Picasso's work, though none seem to include comics.

Picasso was a fan of, and influenced by, The Katzenjammer Kids.

Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain in 1881. By age 23 he moved to Paris, then the art capital of Europe, where he found success fairly quickly. Over the course of his career, which lasted until age 91, he created over 20,000 pieces of art in a wide range of media and styles, including paintings, sculptures, collages, ceramics and even theater sets and costumes.

Picasso pioneered Cubism along with painter Georges Braque, the term coming from its depiction of figures and places in geometric forms. It was meant to be derogatory; art critics, as well as Henri Matisse himself, scoffed at the "painting made of small cubes."

But it was groundbreaking (today we’d call it "disruptive"), and it changed art forever. Since the Renaissance and through the mid-19th century, visual art in the Western tradition aspired to capture the world objectively and realistically. But Cubism aimed to convey the personal nature of experience, in all its complexity and incongruity, marking a transition from reflection to expression, from showing the world to commenting on it.

By reducing complex organic forms like the human figure to simple symmetrical shapes and by abandoning the one-point perspective in favor of multiple viewpoints shown simultaneously, Cubism was able to depict different aspects of a subject, literal and figurative, and from different points in space and time. Instead of the viewer moving around the subject, the painting did it for them. It allowed the artist to portray the subject in greater context and for a truer representation of its nature than merely a literal depiction.

"I paint forms as I think them, not as I see them," Picasso once said, explaining in a nutshell the radical shift he brought about in Western art.

For more than a century, countless books, articles, papers and documentaries have explored the intellectual origins of Cubism. Picasso was famously eclectic in his interests, and his listed influences, confirmed or presumed, include ancient Iberian sculptures, African masks, other art movements of the period like Surrealism and Post-Impressionism, the philosophy of Henri Bergson and William James (anything can inspire art, not just other art) and the dehumanizing horrors of the Spanish Civil War and both world wars. But, while well documented, few have bothered (or dared) to mention comics.

Picasso's first Cubist masterpiece (though, like all art, this is highly debated) is 1906's Portrait of Gertrude Stein. Her face isn't real; it's orthogonal and masklike, but it's still unmistakably her. It's a heightened distortion, a serious caricature meant not to exaggerate or lampoon but to express. It's Stein not as she looked, but as he saw her.

Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stein (via pablopicasso.org)

Picasso and Stein were both part of the Paris modern movement at the turn of the 19th century, and though they came from very different backgrounds—he was a rugged Spaniard and a notorious womanizer, she was a Jewish-American wealthy heiress and an openly lesbian feminist—they formed a close friendship. They shared a modernist sensibility, and Stein was a pioneer of Literary Cubism, which revolutionized writing in its own right with multiple perspectives, intersecting narratives and stream of consciousness.

It was Stein who introduced Picasso to American comics, through the imported newspapers she read. He liked Little Jimmy and Little Nemo, though his favorite was Rudolph Dirks’ The Katzenjammer Kids. He became enough of a fan that, when he spent the summer of 1906 in Spain, he had the comics sent to him.

He wasn't a stranger to comic strips and cartoons. He’d grown up reading them in Spanish magazines like Blanco y Negro (Black & White), and like many artistic children, practiced copying their styles. He also cut out and collected them, indicating not just a fan's passion but an artist's interest.

Unlike the comic books that would come later (the comic book medium was invented in 1934), newspaper and magazine cartoons—both caricatures and comic strips—were held in high regard. "They were a big, big deal," Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer explained in an interview. "Back then… comic strips were a major part of American entertainment, along with movies and network radio."

Cartooning had long been respected in France, dating back to its role in the French Revolution (in the 1960s, comics came to be known there as bande dessinée, the "ninth art," counted alongside painting, sculpture, etc.), and Spanish and French cartoonists were part of the same intellectual and art circles as Picasso.

He even created comics himself. In 1894, at the age of 13, he made small illustrated magazines. He went on to draw cartoons for several periodicals and art journals, and in 1903 sketched the farcical The Pure and Simple History of Max Jacob—a cartoon, but rather than a single panel, a full-page series of panels consisting of drawings and accompanying captions which formed a single narrative, with progression in time and space between them. A comic.

Picasso's The Pure and Simple History of Max Jacob (via pablopicasso.org)

A year later he created a series of six color sketches, Picasso and Sebastià Junyer i Vidal, chronicling his travels from Barcelona to Paris. Again, he depicted action, change in location and time, and used captions to tell one story, forming a comic strip. (A much more famous work, the 1937 series of engravings Franco's Dream and Lie, is also arguably a comic, with its nine-panel, two-page composition, incorporation of text, and fantasmagoria, but it's more a series of vignettes with a shared theme than a cohesive narrative.)

American comic strips, however, were something else. They weren't just incisive political cartoons or amusing parodies. They were irreverent, transgressive and experimental, upending conventions both artistic and social. And The Katzenjammer Kids spoke to Picasso in particular.

In her 1933 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein recounts cheering Picasso up with a package of newspapers: "He opened them up, they were the Sunday supplement of American papers, they were the Katzenjammer kids. Oh oui, Oh oui, he said, his face full of satisfaction, merci thanks Gertrude."

On another occasion, during one of Picasso's many breakups with longtime lover and muse Fernande Olivier (his 1909 sculpture of her, Head of a Woman (Fernande), is a great example of Cubism's multidimensionality even in a three-dimensional medium), Stein visited her after seeing Picasso.

"Fernande asked Miss Stein if she had any of the comic supplements of the American papers left. Gertrude Stein replied that she had just left them with Pablo. Fernande roused like a lioness defending her cubs. That is a brutality that I will never forgive him, she said… [Stein] said to me, it is to be hoped that they will be together again before the next comic supplements of the Katzenjammer kids come out."

The Katzenjammer Kids was created in 1897 by Rudolph Dirks, about mischievous twins Hans and Fritz Katzenjammer, forbearers of characters like Dennis the Menace and Bart Simpson. (It, in turn, started out as a swipe of the famous 1865 German illustrated book Max and Moritz by Wilhelm Busch.)

The strip was published in the Sunday funnies supplement of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, where 19-year-old Dirks was a staff artist. It gained immediate and immense popularity, and when Dirks left following a dispute with Hearst in 1913, it continued to be drawn by Harold Knerr until 1949, followed by Joe Musial and others. The Katzenjammer Kids remained in distribution by King Features Syndicate until 2015, lasting 118 years across three centuries, making it the longest-running comic in history. It continues to be published online, drawn by Hy Eisman since 1986.

The strip revolutionized the comic artform, originating many of today's familiar tropes. It was the first to tell one story across several consecutive panels, to feature a permanent cast of characters, to consistently use word balloons, to use stars around a character's head to indicate pain or wooziness and log sawing to indicate snoring, and to use a grawlix (aka obscenicon), the string of typographical symbols replacing expletives (like "$#!*").

The Katzenjammer Kids was equally groundbreaking in its content, which was considered outrageous for the time, from the delinquency of its child characters to the portrayal of poor German immigrants in New York to its use of accented dialogue and ethnic puns ("Katzenjammer" is German-American slang for hangover).

The Katzenjammer Kids by Rudolph Dirks

These evocative, plasticized, fantastical, dynamic depictions of form and motion became the hallmark of Cubism. Cubism is a cartoon, just with gravitas. It's a free flow of perception, a stream of consciousness in visual form, credited to Picasso but owing to Dirks and other comics pioneers, and continuing with later masters like Jack Kirby and Bill Sienkiewicz.

The geometricizing of people, animals, scenery and other natural forms from regular shapes is also something Cubism got from comics. It's the same mastery of line, each carefully chosen, minimal, exaggerated, making the subject less depictive but more expressive, less real but more relatable (as Scott McCloud points out in Understanding Comics, a person's portrait is only of them, but a smiley face is anyone).

The Gertrude Stein of her portrait would fit right in with the Katzenjammers, with her oversized spherical body and almost two-dimensional face, its minimal features made of a triangle nose and rhombus eyes. Even her skin color looks unnatural and flat, like a four-color print.

By the time Picasso painted Girl before a Mirror in 1932, he’d evolved his use of geometric shapes, flat bright colors and sense of movement in space and time. It's essentially a comic book panel, esthetically and as a visual story.

The effect of comic panels is exactly what Cubism sought to emulate. Whether reading a comic book page or newspaper strip, the experience isn't parceled into isolated moments and objects; it's continuous, each panel leading into the next. But the panels are, factually, separate, even bordered from each other. What creates the narrative is gestalt, meaning what our mind puts together, what it imagines happening in the gutters between, forming a whole and creating the illusion of movement and time in a static medium. It's why comics are called sequential art. Cubism uses multiple perspectives and facets to achieve the same goal.

Picasso's Girl before a Mirror (via pablopicasso.org)

Cubism also shares the same spirit as the various visual devices comics use, like Dirks’ stars orbiting a bonked head, as simple as they are. They’re visual metaphors, conveying not what's there but how something sounds or feels. And they’re hyperbolic (snoring is rarely as loud as sawing logs), not just conveying meaning but adding another layer of it, a commentary, like absurdity or horror.

Picasso's use of captions in his sketches and cartoons, and later on his inclusion of newspaper clippings, ads and other forms of text in his collages, like 1913's Still Life with the Advertisement, was highly subversive for art standards of the time, which strictly separated word and image. But it was part and parcel of comics, like word balloons and sound effects. And like comics, Cubism used words not just as language but as graphics, as part of the art.

By introducing bits of mass culture into his collages, which were seen as high art, Picasso also blurred the line between the two. Together with Cubism's compositions, gaudy colors and emphasis of flatness, he prefigured Pop Art painters like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, who were famously fascinated by the very same traits in comic books.

Though not yet widely known or acknowledged, the influence of comics on Cubism is gradually being recognized, a century after the fact. The Musée National Picasso-Paris held an exhibit in 2020–2021 titled Picasso and the Comics, the first to showcase his related work and inspirations.

Given how influential comics were on Picasso, and that Cubism transformed how we see and express the world and ushered in modern art, it's clear that it all owes something to American comics.

Picasso recognized the brilliance of roughhewn, deceptively simplistic, explosively dynamic comic art. "It took me four years to paint like Raphael," he's quoted to have said, "but a lifetime to paint like a child."

Roy Schwartz is a pop culture historian and critic. His work has appeared in CNN.com, New York Daily News, The Forward, Literary Hub, and Philosophy Now, among others. His latest book is the Diagram Prize-winning Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @RealRoySchwartz and at royschwartz.com.