“I didn’t kiss a girl until I was 18,” Gary Baseman blurts. It’s a sudden, disarming confession from a man who, at 44 years old, is a globally successful illustrator, painter and toy designer, with cool-cat hipster good looks, a substantial ego and an unshakable faith in his talent.
Possessed of manic energy and a nervous edge, the creator of the animated TV series and Disney feature film Teacher’s Pet is zipping around barefoot in the studio of his Hancock Park home. It is a light-filled space that opens onto a patio where two black cats are curled up, asleep. Vintage toys and mannequin heads that Baseman finds at flea markets and uses as props and muses line the shelves and tabletops.
With three Daytime Emmys on the mantelpiece of his eclectically decorated 1920s home and a recently released coffee-table book of his art, Dumb Luck (Chronicle Books, 2004), Baseman ’82 is enjoying the kind of acclaim and financial success that many of his peers might lust after. He has a closet full of Ralph Lauren and Prada that he wears to gallery openings and public appearances. He is a sought-after speaker on the subject of “pervasive art,” his nascent art movement that blends commercial and fine art. His phone rings incessantly. “My life is nuts. I’m working on 25 different things,” he says after hanging up from one call.
For all of his obvious success and occasional smugness, Baseman can at times be shockingly dismissive of his own work. He scoffs that half of what he creates is “dog feces.” In spite of his status as a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from UCLA, he has a tendency to demean his own intelligence (“It’s the cosmic joke that I don’t know anything,” he says) and can be self-conscious around well-educated people. After finishing UCLA, he was so fearful of pursuing a career in art that he took an internship in the Fairness and Political Broadcasting Branch of the Federal Communications Commission, later signing on with an ad agency. (He quit after his boss scolded him for sketching on company time.) Married for 11 years to Mel Williges, an illustrator whom he met at a Manhattan gallery opening, Baseman still remains unconvinced that he can get the girl.
“I’ve never known an artist with more confidence in the value of his own work, but I’ve never met an artist who hates himself as much as Gary Baseman,” says his close friend Barry Smolin, a high school teacher and radio host.
If Baseman’s name doesn’t immediately ring a bell, his work is instantly recognizable. He draws in a bold, 1930s–’40s cartoon style with vivid colors. His characters have light-bulb-shaped heads, pickle noses and elongated, staring eyes. They look playful and mischievous but exist in sinister and surreal environments that are full of skulls, disemboweled organs and creepy looking cerebral-cortex matter that floats like clouds. The architect of all this weirdness, writes The Simpsons creator Matt Groening, “has the magical ability to look into the minds of cute, little cartoon animals and masterfully paint their feverish, unsettled dreams.”
One of Baseman’s best-known characters is “Dumb Luck,” a goofily grinning rabbit who proudly holds his lucky rabbit’s foot in an outstretched hand. It takes the viewer a moment to look past the grin and the proffered charm to notice that the happy hare is sporting a peg leg. “Basically, my whole philosophy is dumb luck,” Baseman explains. “Be careful what your dreams are because anything that wonderful has its costs along with its rewards.”
Artists can be coy about what their work means, but Baseman has no use for being enigmatic. “I’m not creating my artwork for me to be understood when I’m dead. I want to hit that zeitgeist and make a connection with the public during my lifetime,” he says. Baseman’s art is about fear, anxiety, vulnerability and unobtainable beauty, the things that have tormented him since boyhood. “Creamy,” a flat-bottomed ice-cream cone who sits in a pool of his own melted butterfat, is unabashedly about one’s inability to control one’s desire. “Happy Idiot,” the snowman who willingly lets himself thaw for the object of his affection, a beautiful mermaid, speaks of desire and sacrifice.
“I think a certain honesty and sincerity are one of the real hallmarks of any real artist, and that’s something you immediately sense in Gary’s work,” says animation critic and historian Charles Solomon ’72, M.A. ’75, M.F.A. ’83. “That’s why his work is popular and respected. When you look at it, you realize he’s not pulling your leg.”
Still, interpretation remains the province of the beholder. One reviewer of Dumb Luck on Amazon.com called Baseman’s work simply “good, clean, stupid fun,” while another suggested it is a “Freudian-Jungian self-examination of our hidden natures … that we try not to put on display for everyone.” Publishers Weekly wrote that Baseman’s art eradicates “the boundary between sick and silly [to inhabit] a world of cute-and-cuddly depravity.”
Indeed, there is a blend of high and low art in Baseman’s work, although the artist prefers to say that it “smudges the line between genius and stupidity beyond all recognition.” His illustrations have appeared since the 1980s in publications like The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times, Rolling Stone and The Atlantic Monthly. Lately, though, the Baseman brand seems to crop up everywhere; Nike, Mercedes-Benz, Gatorade and other big corporations use Baseman art to sell their products. The visual identity for the hit board game Cranium is Baseman’s work. He is in the vanguard of a burgeoning art-toy movement, creating small, vinyl pieces that he prefers to call art sculptures. In 2002, Entertainment Weekly magazine named the artist to its pop-culture “It List.” He has had gallery shows in New York, Los Angeles, Rome and Tokyo.
Baseman made the leap from the world of illustration to television in 2000 with Teacher’s Pet, an ABC/Disney-produced cartoon about a dog who disguises himself as a boy. Though it never attracted a huge audience, the cartoon ran on Saturday mornings for three years and earned Baseman three Emmys as art director and executive producer. The professional recognition was especially sweet for Baseman, who had suffered a stinging setback in the mid-1990s when Nickelodeon declined to pick up either of two pilots into which he had poured several years’ worth of creative energy.
Discouraged but not defeated, Baseman left New York, where he had worked as an illustrator for 10 years, and moved back to Los Angeles, determined to try his luck at TV again. Last January, Disney released the feature-film version of Teacher’s Pet. Baseman again co-executive produced and art directed, handing writing duties to Cheers veterans Bill and Cheri Steinkellner. Despite rave reviews and stellar voice work by Nathan Lane, Kelsey Grammer and others, Teacher’s Pet bombed at the box office. Still rankled, Baseman blames the dismal performance on poor marketing.
There are certain similarities between Baseman’s work and that of the Pop Art movement. But the effect is completely different. Pop artists took images from advertising, the celebrity world and comics and put them on canvas as wry commentary on society and culture. Baseman, who works mostly in acrylic and oils, similarly uses images of popular culture but flips the ironic detachment on its head. Baseman incorporates the icons into his life, using them as alter egos. He paints himself as a cat, a dog or an evil mouse. “Gary Baseman is one of his paintings,” writes Rob Clayton, a fellow member of the pervasive-art movement.
Back in his studio, Baseman is growing slightly irritated. He is trying to explain why a guy who appears to have so much would adopt the persona of an abject loser, dunce and idiot. Baseman fishes inside a file cabinet for a photograph and hands it over, as if to say, “If you don’t believe me, look at this.”
Shot in 1976, it’s Baseman’s official photo from when he was on the Fairfax High School track team. Clad in running tank and shorts, he’s pale and spindly, small for his 16 years. But what you really notice is the hair — an enormous Leo Sayer-style Brillo pad that Baseman tried to pomade into submission with generally disappointing results. For Baseman, junior high and high school was one long bad-hair day.
“He’s very put together now, but back then he was a dork,” Smolin says. “This whole thing of unobtainable beauty — that was a repeating pattern in his life. He would often fall in love with girls who would have no interest in him.”
Baseman was born in 1960, the youngest of Ben and Naomi Baseman’s four children. His parents were Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust. (His father spent two-and-a-half years fighting with the Polish underground resistance in World War II.) In Los Angeles, the couple settled into the Fairfax-area fourplex where Baseman would grow up, less than a mile from where he lives today. Ben Baseman, now 88, was an electrician; Naomi, 82, was the head bakery salesperson at Canter’s deli for 35 years. Baseman says his parents instilled in him a strong work ethic and an appreciation for the American dream.
Baseman came along late in his parents’ lives. By the time he was 9, his siblings were mostly out of the house. Left to his own devices, the youngest Baseman started drawing, inspired by MAD magazine cartoonist Don Martin, as well as The Three Stooges, Warner Bros. cartoons and his beloved Marx Brothers.
“This is kind of nerdy and embarrassing to talk about,” Smolin says, “but [in junior high] we had this book, Why a Duck?, that had stills from Marx Brothers movies. There were these bubble captions, and we used to perform them out loud at lunchtime in one little corner of the school. So when the girls were off hitting on guys, we’d be performing these little scenes.”
By happy coincidence, one of the young Baseman’s classmates at Third Street Elementary School was the daughter of Bob Clampett, the animation pioneer and Warner Bros. cartoonist who brought the world Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Beanie and Cecil, Bugs Bunny and many others. When Baseman was 12, Clampett came to talk to his class. For the aspiring young cartoonist, it was a revelation to find out that a normal adult like Clampett could make a living creating the juvenile humor of which Baseman was so enamored.
Convinced that real artists are born not made, Baseman chose not to attend art school or even study art. At UCLA, he majored in communications. On campus, he became fast friends with Greg Clarke ’82, today a successful artist. Both were aspiring illustrators who did work for the Daily Bruin and ASUCLA. In 1981, the two friends discovered a book that spoke to their off-kilter sensibilities. Man Bites Man: Two Decades of Satiric Art was edited by Steve Heller, the art director for The New York Times Book Review.
Following graduation, Baseman and Clarke flew to New York to show Heller their portfolios, which Clarke concedes were “pretty bad.” Heller liked Clarke’s work well enough but had scathing criticism for Baseman’s, which he felt lacked a lyrical quality. “Gary was crushed,” Clarke says. “We left Steve’s office, and he threw his portfolio in a garbage dumpster.
“I fished it out, and it took Gary about five minutes to get over it,” Clarke continues. “We came back to L.A., and he holed himself up in his apartment for six months and worked on developing his style. Then he went back to New York to see Steve Heller.” This time, “Steve really liked his stuff. What came out of that was a New York Times Book Review cover,” Clarke says. “He was never looking for work after that.”
Baseman’s art has a subversive strain. In 2002, The New Yorker invited him to submit ideas for a cover for its Mother’s Day issue. Baseman turned in six sketches. The New Yorker used one of them, a drawing of a duckling bringing its mother breakfast in bed: two eggs, sunny-side up — in other words, Baseman says, “his two little twin brothers.” When the issue hit the newsstands, some readers disparaged it as a tasteless and ill-timed commentary on abortion. Baseman didn’t see it that way at all. “I liked the playfulness of it, the humor of it. I wasn’t trying to offend anybody.”
Baseman may have chutzpah but he doesn’t always get his way. For his first New York Times Book Review assignment, he drew a cartoony interpretation of a detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” one of his favorite paintings. The detail was a flower protruding from a man’s rear end.
“What’s that?” Heller barked. “That’s from a Bosch painting,” Baseman responded. “That’s fine art.” Heller was not impressed: “When Bosch does it, it’s fine art. When you do it, it’s a flower sticking out of a guy’s butt. Take it out.”
Typically, critics and journalists name art movements. Monet didn’t identify himself as an Impressionist; the name has its origins in a derisive comment from a French journalist. It is testament to Baseman’s marketing savvy and the tight rein he keeps over his own work that he acted preemptively to name the pervasive-art movement himself. The movement, which also embraces the work of the Los Angeles artists Mark Ryden, Tim Biskup, Rob and Christian Clayton, and Camille Rose Garcia, is beginning to get talked about in the press, but Baseman concedes it has yet to gain wide attention.
He defines pervasive art as art that has a cohesive style and message but which crosses traditional boundaries between the worlds of fine art and commerce. In Baseman’s view, art doesn’t need to hang in a gallery to be Art with a capital “a.” Baseman is as comfortable creating an oil painting for a gallery show as he is producing a TV cartoon or designing a toy that will sit on a store shelf — though he prefers that the store be Barney’s rather than Wal-Mart. “I like the idea of commerce, as long as you keep the quality high,” he says.
Not everyone in the art world agrees with Baseman’s genre-bending notion of art. A lot of what Baseman creates, says the arts writer Susan Freudenheim, a former Los Angeles Times arts editor, “is about using the art form to tell stories or to create a game or have fun, and that’s completely legitimate. It’s just not what I think of as fine art.”
Animation historian Charles Solomon, on the other hand, says artists like Baseman who make cartoons and toys as well as traditional easel paintings may not be getting a fair shake. “There’s been a tendency for a long time to treat those areas as the unloved, red-haired stepchildren,” he says. “Unfortunately, that hasn’t changed a great deal.”
“To me, that’s just a challenge,” Baseman responds. “My job is to blur the lines. Is it high? Is it low? What is it? I guess the point is that I’m not scared of getting my work out there. I like the thrill.”
For Baseman, the thrill is far from over. With most of his working life still ahead of him, the artist has big plans: more TV, film, art books, gallery shows, and also a Baseman-brand line of household products and clothing — “quality stuff, something I would like to own,” he says.
Those who know him won’t be surprised if he pulls it off. “I don’t mean this negatively, I love the guy,” says his friend Smolin, “but I think he wants everyone to know who Gary Baseman is.”
