Jerry Survives

As an artist in the second half of the twentieth century, Jerry Moriarty did everything you weren’t supposed to do: he painted people, he painted places, and, perhaps worst of all, he told stories with pictures. It’s important to note how not-accepted this was between the 1950s and 1970s, in the messy aftermath of abstract expressionism, when many artists had disowned figuration and family in favor of non-objective paint-spattered flats. But Jerry drew pictures of America as Americans remembered it, if not even still lived it: childhood, parents, home. Like many of his peers, he spent much of his career alone in a small Manhattan studio but, upon retirement, he moved back to his childhood home.Like many people, I was first introduced to Jerry’s work in the pages of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s RAW magazine via his strip Jack Survives, in which the eponymous character, both Jerry’s dad yet also not his dad, passed quick, quiet moments of the everyday. Jerry’s bold, solid, black-and-white strips seemed to have been pencilled by Ernie Bushmiller and inked by Edward Hopper, proffering a loud-but-soft view of middle-class midcentury America. Like so much in RAW, it felt strange,...