European Biographical Graphic Novels about Canonical Painters: An Analysis of Form and Function in the Context of Art Museums

In the 1940s, the very first comics about the lives and works of well-known visual artists appeared in US-American educational youth magazines, representing the birth of the comics genre of the artist’s biography and inaugurating its first publishing boom. The start of the twenty-first century signalled the genre’s second publishing boom. As part of a third, overlapping boom, graphic novels about canonical painters have become important tools in art museums' exhibitions, outreach, and education programmes, informing their public relations and marketing campaigns, promoting their collections, and (supposedly) attracting new and younger audiences.

Little attention has been given to these three publishing booms, and no one has investigated the stakeholders and their agendas, including the political, economic, and artistic processes involved in producing such graphic novels.

This thesis fills the gap by examining the booms’ connection to art-historical traditions regarding the artist’s biography and monograph, and considering how these comics function for different stakeholders, particularly in the context of European art museums, which co-commissioned, co-funded, co-edited and co-published them. The analysis of six graphic novels about the artists Paul Klee, Jacques-Louis David, Salvador Dalí, Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt von Rijn and Jan van Scorel defines the publications’ status between serious artists’ biographies, comic books, history books and merchandise products.

The PhD employs semi-structured interviews and questionnaires, extensive archival research, along with close reading, and textual and visual analysis. It combines several interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches from different fields, most importantly art history and comic studies, but reaching out to theories of museology (in particular curatorial and educational programmes as well as the role of the museum shops and its products), (trans)national identity-making, branding, marketing and public relations, and culturaleconomic policies (connecting to notions of soft power and cultural capital).