For the Love of Peanuts

As a child I would visit my grandfather at work; I would walk through the office filled with toys, books, and blankets. The colorfulness, which vibrated as I entered the building, diluted into deep, rich tones of navy and wood as I moved into the back room. I bounded across the carpet and stood by his side, watching his hand glide across the paper, leaving a trail of ink from beneath his grip. As he both rigidly and gracefully tossed his hand around the paper, a familiar image began to appear: Linus’s profile. It blew my mind that my grandpa could so accurately draw this character.

Once, at the ice arena he built across from the studio, I asked if I could buy a hot chocolate, and my mom told me to put it on our family’s tab. I stood at the counter, barely able to see over it, and with my voice wavering with complete uncertainty, I told them my mom was Judy. They looked at me blankly, and I ran back to my mom in utter confusion and embarrassment. I eventually learned that hot chocolates went on the “Schulz” tab. However, it wasn’t until my grandfather passed away that the magnitude of his life and accomplishments hit me. At the time, I had no idea why so many strangers had shown up to his memorial. I had no idea so many people were reading the same drawings he made that I, too, was reading. The impact of his career came to me in waves, and still, I am reaching new levels of comprehension. My thesis as an undergraduate appropriated text from the strip, and in graduate school I began to read more about what he was saying with the strips, rather than what he had the characters say. Every studio visit I had with visiting artists, professors, or peers seemed to begin with each person’s personal experience with Peanuts. And though I am so proud to be related to such a passionate, decent, and exceptional artist, he will always first be my grandfather, who liked to draw.

Art inherently possesses the ability to communicate and removes the hostility that can be found in the limitations of language. Revolutions gain momentum through artists and their capacity to critique the current landscape, baked into the camouflage or boldness of their medium. From the beginning, Peanuts tackled controversial issues under the guise of childhood innocence. From civil rights, feminism, and religion to psychiatry, philosophy, and depression, Schulz, known to his family and friends as “Sparky,” used the characters to negotiate these issues into the mainstream discourse. The universally relatable and minimalist quality of the strip allowed room for the complexity of the content. This wasn’t an accident, but a strategic decision that evolved during the early years of the strip.

Abstract expressionist Jay Meuser said, “It is far better to capture the glorious spirit of the sea than to paint all of its tiny ripples.” Schulz began to distill the strip, sacrificing his technical expertise in perspective for an intimate bond between his characters and the readers. He said, “As the strip grew, it took on a slight degree of sophistication, although I have never claimed to be the least sophisticated myself. But it also took on a quality that I think is even more important, and that is one which I can only describe as abstraction… Snoopy’s doghouse could function only if it were drawn from a direct side view. Snoopy himself had become a character so unlike a dog, he could no longer inhabit a real doghouse.”

Sparky often talked about Picasso and his great sense of design, though his own use of abstraction created a new language within cartooning. Picasso said, “A face has two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. You can put them where you want.” As long as Sparky could capture the essence of a dog, a bird, a kid, the visual gaps that lie between those marks opened up the panel for the viewer to insert themselves. The features of each character shifted with the direction of their gaze, and the sight of both eyes placed on the side of one’s head was no longer jarring.

Sparky made endless references to artists, writers, and musicians in the strip: Vincent van Gogh, Thomas Eakins, Rod McKuen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Gay, Leo Tolstoy, Ludwig van Beethoven, Andrew Wyeth; but in a lot of ways I believe his subtlety was overlooked. In a drawing titled “Things I’ve Had to Learn Over and Over,” we see Sally standing in front of a messy closet under a pull-string lightbulb. This hanging bulb is a recurring image in mid-century abstract expressionist Philip Guston’s cartoonish paintings of the 1960s, taken from his childhood experience in which he would hide in the closet, reading and drawing under the single bulb.

With Sparky’s title in mind, Guston wrote, “I knew that I would need to test painting all over again in order to appease my desires for the clear and sharper enigma of solid forms in an imagined space, a world of tangible things, images, subjects, stories, like the way art always was.”

Sparky and Guston shared in common a fascination with the comic strip Krazy Kat. Sparky said in an interview, “I just wanted to draw a comic strip that was regarded as highly as Krazy Kat. Krazy Kat is regarded as probably the greatest strip that was ever drawn. And I just want to contribute something that would be that good.”

For generations Peanuts has narrated our life, voiced our insecurities, and revealed what true happiness is. The strip had a unique ability to speak to a universal and ageless audience, something that makes it still relevant for today’s young readers. The Peanuts Global Artist Collective has been given the exciting responsibility to interpret his characters through the lens of their individual practices. There has always been a reciprocal relationship between Peanuts and fine art, and to expand that conversation into public spaces brings the conversation back to the foundation of the original medium: accessibility. Charles M. Schulz said, “Not many cartoons live into the next generation, and that probably is the best definition of art, isn’t it? Does it speak to succeeding generations? Real art, real music, real literature speaks to succeeding generations. And not many comic strips do that.” It is undeniable by his own definition to argue that Peanuts is real art, and Sparky, my grandfather, was a true artist.

LINDSEY A. SCHULZ, 2019