Hieronymous Bosch - Comics Grinder (2024)

Guy Colwell, Delights: A Story of Hieronymous Bosch. Seattle: Fantagraphcs. 162pp, hardcover, $29.95. (release date: 13 August 2024).

Guest Review by Paul Buhle

Not all readers of comic art will recall the occasional evocation of a young Robert Crumb, in the later 1960s and shortly after, to the fifteenth century Dutch artist Hieronymous Bosch. That Bosch saw and drew the dark prospects of the human fall from innocent beginnings, as depicted in his singularly famous altar triptych, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” prompted religious-minded viewers and several centuries of art critics to treat the painter as warning against sins and sinners.

Quite the opposite or nearly the opposite, as now understood. One of a family of artists, his work made possible by the support of a wealthy wife older than himself, Bosch sought to depict human innocence within nature turned by society—arguably class society with its exploitation and corruption—into an unholy, totally destructive mess. In the left-most panel of the famous triptych, the beautiful, young humans are conversing with animals, equally unashamed of their own nakedness. Increasingly, as our eyes move rightward, horrors appear. The last panel has a character sh*tting out gold coins. Socialists would call this final depiction Class Society, and they would not be wrong.

Not all comic fans will remember artist Guy Colwell vividly or perhaps at all. But he is sui generis, mistaken often to be a Black artist, and for good reasons. Busted on drug charges in the Bay Area of the 1960s, he spent years with black prisoners affably, listening and learning. His Inner City Romance (initial book publication, 1978) explored the lives of erstwhile prisoners and their girlfriends, graphically and sympathetically, with all the tragedy and occasional exuberantly happy moments intact. Nothing else like it could be seen for decades during which Colwell, who never made a living from comics, looked in other directions.

Millions of art lovers have traveled to European museums to see Bosch paintings (and not only the famed triptych), and many have been lucky enough to capture traveling shows. None could have come into visual contact with anything like Colwell’s Bosch.

Why would that be? The painter’s life remains largely obscure. His membership in the small but intense, devotional Brotherhood of Our Lady must help to explain something. His relationship with other artists or trends of the time, even within the village where he lived and worked, will likely never be known. We do know that the Radical Reformation, its origins in the Wat Tyler Revolt of the English 1280s, continued taking shape across the following centuries, shaking large parts of society. Peasants’ and craftsmen’s uprisings in Central Europe, influenced by millenarian visions of a perfected social order, pointed to the future. These uprisings, crushed with great violence by the authorities, anticipated modern class struggle—as Bosch’s work anticipated Surrealist art. Did such social and class struggles play a role in his visions?

Late in the book, the artist briefly suggests another possible explanation. “New ideas” are coming from Italy, that is to say the Renaissance, starting to reveal different ways of seeing art and the uses of the body in art. Indeed, another long-held rumor has Bosch influenced by an Italian mystic who traveled to Holland from Italy.

In either case, the power of the Church is weakening, as Bosch’s defenders reference in the comic. They no longer hold absolute power over art. This explanation is as good, and as limited in explaining what is really going on in Bosch’s fantastic visions.

Colwell has taken yet a third and more direct path, a narrative that drives the comic forward. He suggests the obvious, that an artist who needs funds to survive can sometimes find a patron—in that long-gone era most likely a royal patron. How would that painter work, and struggle within himself, to satisfy the client? In this version, Bosch’s wealthy wife evidently cannot support the household herself.

Colwell, himself the craftsman, makes the painter a deeply religious figure, fretful about the art of nudes ordered— along with generous payment for following directions. The narrative plays to Colwell’s strengths, as readers of his 1970s comic art will remember. The nudes, male and female, are wonderfully drawn, unashamed and a thousand miles from anything like p*rnography. They radiate the innocence of anart work that is not quite innocent. They obviously enjoy looking and touching, something that comes through so clearly and scandalously in the triptych.

The protest of the presumably respectable townspeople whom he characterizes is one more bit of Colwell’s history-imagined world. He is correct, as scholars of medieval Germany have explored and explained at length, that ordinary and most highly-placed people of the time and place thought in such religious terms, could not actually think outside of them. Radicals likewise saw their lives and their work in equally religious and often millenarian terms. Driven to their death by the rising classes of merchants, assaulted in sermons and pamphlets, they were depicted as immoralists seeking to overthrow all religion and virtue—agents of Satan himself.

In Colwell’s imaginative re-creation, the monsters come to Bosch as he doubts himself, especially when he is beyond his studio and his comforting wife. They lunge at him and leer at him, but we discover in the final pages that they may be showing him the limits of his time and place, hinting at the strange things somewhere beyond.

I do not think it is likely that, as the book suggests, the artist is even thinking about a possible secular age ahead. This seems too much. But he has, like the most sensitive of art historians, accurately pointed to the appreciation of Bosch’s work after centuries of Christian-based misrepresentation.

No one else in comic art, perhaps, would undertake such a project. Colwell is to be congratulated for his beautiful, meaningful work.

Paul Buhle