Art: Illustrators' skill, imagination on display

Art museums are paying more than the usual attention to illustration this season, and an exhibition called "State of the Art" at the Delaware Art Museum suggests why this might be so.

Easy to assimilate and intermittently entertaining, the show aims to bring us up to date on how this often-maligned and ignored genre has changed since the days of Howard Pyle, king of American illustrators a century ago.

"State of the Art" is also quirky and selectively personal in its point of view and its choice of contemporary examples. Essentially, it represents one man's view of how illustration has evolved from supplementing texts, usually literary, to telling its own stories and standing on its own merits.

The ringmaster is guest curator David Apatoff, a man of special talents and experience. He's a Washington lawyer whose specialty is intellectual property rights and communications-media law.

But before he earned a law degree and joined the firm of Arnold & Porter, he was a nationally syndicated cartoonist and a professional illustrator. He runs a blog devoted to illustration (http://illustrationart. blogspot.com) and has written a number of books and articles about illustrators.

Apatoff's thesis identifies eight categories of contemporary illustration, then assigns a single "master illustrator" to represent each one.

Some of these categories are traditional and familiar, such as Advertising and Magazine Illustration (Bernie Fuchs). Magazine and Commercial Illustration (Sterling Hundley) appears to be a blood relative, if not a twin. Some might not look like illustration at all.

Apatoff has invented academic labels for several species that seem like modes of cartooning - Sequential Art (the incomparable Mort Drucker), Pen-and-Ink Editorial Illustration (John Cuneo), Character Design (Peter de Sève) and Animation (Ralph Eggleston).

Illustration and Painting (Phil Hale) presents two genres intertwined like strands of DNA. Finally there is the somewhat enigmatic Conceptual Design, which, as practiced by Milton Glaser, turns out to be new-fashioned graphic design.

As you can see, there's considerable taxonomic hair-splitting going on here; however, Apatoff has persuasively proved his primary argument, that illustration has evolved beyond a support role into a broad menu of concepts and techniques.

How does one distinguish illustration from "fine art"? Is the effort even worth making? Perhaps unintentionally, "State of the Art" offers a plausible yardstick.

With the exception of Hale's paintings, the works on view here lack emotional and psychological depth or any suspicion of ambiguity, qualities we expect from high art.

The examples presented generally are skillfully composed, beautifully drawn, and chromatically vibrant - Glaser's bold color orchestrations are especially striking. Yet they are like reflections on the surface of a mirror-smooth puddle that's only 2 inches deep.

Not that this kind of skill and imagination isn't praiseworthy. These artists - notice that they're all men - are supremely talented. Drucker, whose MAD magazine parodies are cultural classics, is a comic genius. In a different way, so is Glaser.

Finally, this show is consistently accessible, as illustration needs to be, and often amusing beyond a chuckle. Hale excepted, no shadows of doubt or mystery obtrude. Skill and imagination are enough to give "State of the Art" legitimacy and merit.

Roman legacy. The large Roman mosaic on view at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology is a magnificent artifact, all the more so for having survived nearly intact for 17 centuries, and for having been separated from its site and shipped all the way to the United States from Israel.

The mosaic was discovered in the city of Lod, near Tel Aviv, in 1996, during a road-construction project. A 13-foot-square central panel and two smaller side panels have been touring internationally to raise money to build a museum in Lod, where the mosaic will be permanently displayed.

The mosaic is a floor decoration for a large room in a private villa, perhaps owned by a merchant who traded in wild animals. The motifs are all mammals, birds, and fish; unusual for a Roman piece, there aren't any human figures.

Some observers have pointed out that the mosaic is being exhibited devoid of context (although, eventually, context will be restored at its permanent home). This is a significant demerit. Certainly, the Barnes Foundation collection lost an important dimension when it moved from its original Merion site to the Parkway.

Still, even "naked," the mosaic's vivid material presence produces a visceral connection to Roman history and culture that cannot be experienced in any other way - certainly not through books, videos, or virtual images.

The craftsmanship, especially in the central panel, is breathtaking. And the imagery, which includes exotic African animals and predatory cats attacking prey, is powerfully redolent of the arena and the Roman taste for spectacle.

The spectacular mosaic reminds people swept up in the digital revolution that real objects still can be the most effective way to recreate and communicate with distant history.

215-898-4000, www.pennmuseum.org.

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