The Picasso of the Comic Strip

No one calls Winsor McCay an early twentieth-century modernist or links him with the Armory Show. After all, he was a newspaper cartoonist and illustrator for vaudeville and variety shows. He was, by all contemporary accounts, a wonderfully accurate draftsman and something of a phenomenon in the speed with which he created a finished product. Known in his day for the flourishes of his strips, McCay was inspired by fin de siecle Art Nouveau.

Yet McCay shared with the early twentieth-century modernists a cultural orientation. Instead of one way of seeing things, which was the typical impulse in the nineteenth century, the modernists and McCay often embraced many ways as valid and saw truths as multiple. More: http://armory.nyhistory.org/the-picasso-of-the-comic-strip/