The route of ´The sitting woman´. The cartoons of Copi between Paris and Buenos Aires

Abstract

During the 1960’ –those years marked by the growth of cultural industry and political radicalization in diverse points of the world– the cultural field was shaped by the tensions between ‘Art’ and ‘minor culture’ or between visual production and political commitment. In this context, the multiple activity of Copi makes him a key case since it fluently traveled trough narrative writing, dramaturgy and graphic humor. Living in Paris since 1962, Copi created for the newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur the character that made this argentine artist famous in France, La Femme Assise (The sitting woman). Conceived for the massive audience of the modernized press of the 1960’, his strips questioned –with corrosive nonsense– middle sectors in expansion at both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. This paper tackles precisely with this sort of geographic and linguistic swinging mediated by Copi’s foreignness. This without eluding nor the graphic humor’s specificities, nor larger cultural phenomenon of the 1960’s like the internationalization of the urban culture and the fading of the borders of the artistic fields.