Another Parodist

The current New Yorker has a review of an art parodist I had never heard of, but it definitely intrigues me. Here's what it says:

The guileless heroine of Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running comic strip “Nancy” is an unlikely icon in contemporary art, recurring in work by postmodern cartoonists like Bill Griffith and Scott McCloud, in an Andy Warhol painting, and in rock posters by Frank Kozik. But no one put her to better use than Joe Brainard, in whose irreverent, effervescent paintings, drawings, and collages (occasionally produced in collaboration with poet friends like Ron Padgett and Frank O’Hara) Nancy appears as an ashtray; a medical illustration; the subject of pieces by de Kooning, Picasso, and Leonardo; and part of Mt. Rushmore.

The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard (1942-1994) is in just out in a new edition. The Mona Lisa Nancy is in the collage. I always read Nancy in the St.Louis Post Dispatch when I was a kid -- I think I even remember my mother reading it to me before I went to school and learned to read to myself. She would have been shocked at some of the images...