David Mark Kunzle

Art historian and artist, curator and collector, gymnast and racketman, actor and activist David Kunzle, 87, died of cardiac amyloidosis at home in Los Angeles on New Year's Day 2024, with his wife Marjoyrie at his bedside.

Third and last child of Edward and Aline Kunzle, David Mark Kunzle was born in 1936 in Birmingham, England, amid the charm of the cakes and chocolates of the family firm, its confectionary and cafes well-known in the Midlands and beyond. He was educated at West House and Oundle schools, at Caius College Cambridge (B.A., M.A.,1954-57, French and German Languages and Literature), the University of Zurich, and the Courtauld Institute at the University of London, where he earned a Ph.D. (1964) in art history. At the Courtauld, it was Ernst Gombrich who guided him toward a dissertation on "The Narrative Broadsheet and Graphic Picture Story from the Beginnings of Printing to 1825," which study lay the groundwork for David's seminal three-volume history of the comic strip (1973-2021).

In all, he would write, edit, and/or translate 24 volumes, publish 150 art-historical essays, and curate a dozen exhibitions that drew upon his fluency in Latin, German, Dutch, Schweizerdeutsch, French, Italian, and Spanish. His work reflected throughout what he called a "soft Marxism" that powered his concern with artists and workers at the forefront of resistance and revolution--political and aesthetic, formal and popular, industrial and sexual. His oeuvre ranged over five centuries across Latin America, Europe, and East Asia and with surprising ease among diverse genres: early modern Dutch and Flemish painting, 19th-century Swiss, French, German, English, and North American graphics, Victorian and Edwardian clothing and fetishism, 20th-century protest posters, Nicaraguan murals, Vietnamese lacquered panels, Chinese Maoist comics, Disney animated ducks, and images in multiple media of Che Guevara as global figure of a revolutionary Jesus.

But one of his earliest pieces was "The Prestige of Apparatus Gymnastics," published just after he was crowned the British Universities Combined Events Olympic Gymnastics Champion for 1961, a feat repeated the next year. Through to the age of fifty, he forsook neither this prestige nor his agility on the pommel horse and the rings, performing with other gymnasts from UCLA and USC as the "Vaulting Confraternitie of Sainte Barbara" at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Agoura each May/June, 1969-84. This baroque vaulting and tumbling act was based on what he called an "imaginative reconstruction from the three surviving 17th-century vaulting manuals" as well as the faithful reconstruction of a sturdy Late Renaissance pommel horse, on which he gave a capstone performance in honor of Marjoyrie at their wedding in 1987.

For both David and Marjoyrie it was a second marriage. David had married Regine, a writer, translator, and dancer, in 1959 when he was a member of the British Universities gymnastics team headed to the First International Student Gymnastics Championship in Moscow. Back in London pursuing his doctorate, he was appointed lecturer in art history at the National Gallery, 1962-64. With Ph.D. in hand, he and Regine went to Canada, where he taught for a year at the University of Toronto, then on to an appointment at the University of California Santa Barbara (1965-73). He and Regine parted ways in 1970. In 1973, as the first volume of his history of the comic strip appeared in print (The Early Comic Strip), he was fired by UCSB for publicly protesting the war in Vietnam. Supported by the American Federation of Teachers, he sued for wrongful dismissal.

At loose ends while the court case dragged on, he found part-time positions at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles and California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. At Cal Arts he met another teacher, the poet and activist Deena Metzger, who became his partner in art and life for the next five years. She and David, independently, had been collecting American protest posters, some of which, as she writes, "they curated for exhibitions in museums in Santiago, Chile, in 1972 when Salvador Allende was President and in 1973 in Cuba, as it happened, coincident with the brutal coup by Pinochet against the democratically-elected Chilean government. While in Chile, they had befriended Walter Locke, whose smuggled footage, created with Charles Horman regarding the Allende years and the circumstances leading to the 1973 coup, would become the foundation for a documentary film Chile: With Poems and Guns by the Lucha Film Cooperative that included Locke and Metzger and others. In 1972 they met the Chilean writer, Ariel Dorfman, one of Allende's advisors. On a later trip to Paris in 1975, they connected with Dorfman now in exile, whose work with Armand Mattelart, Para leer al Pato Donald, was dumped into the sea by the Chilean navy during the coup. David would soon translate this as How to Read Donald Duck," initiating a decades-long dispute with the folks over at Disney concerning copyright, animated capitalism, and imperialist ideology.

David and Deena parted ways in 1977. That same year, he won his case against UCSB, but instead of resuming his position at Santa Barbara, he found one at UCLA, whose art history department had quietly been attracting a contingent of Marxist scholars, among them O.K. Werckmeister and Albert Boime, who welcomed him to their ranks. David had found his home, and academic tenure, for the next thirty-two years, teaching primarily 19th-century art history and a two-part course on "Responses to Imperialism"--in the United States during the Vietnam War, and in the contemporary Americas (Mexico, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua). He continued to collect protest posters.

By 1983 Marjoyrie had married and divorced. She had two children, Amy and Daniel, and was managing a public relations consulting business. David and Marjoyrie had first met in London in the early Sixties. When David on his annual visits to England returned again in 1983, their long friendship blossomed, and in 1984 he proposed. By 1986 Marjoyrie was living in California with David, who as usual was writing about caricature while contending with critical caricatures of his most recent book, Fashion & Fetishism: Corsets, Tight-Lacing & Other Forms of Body-Sculpture (1982). They celebrated their wedding in June 1987.

Their horizons expanded, as Marjoyrie studied and stretched for the next six years to be certified as a Sivananda Vedanta "peace ambassador" and yoga instructor, while David, proofing the pages for the second volume of his history of the comic strip (The Nineteenth Century, 1990), became intensely engaged in efforts to document if not save the 300+ social and political murals created in the years following Nicaragua's 1979 Sandinista Revolution. He was able to document 80% of the murals, most of which were destroyed once the Sandinistas were voted out in 1990. His efforts culminated in The Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua, 1979-1992 (1995), which expanded his friendships with Cuban and Central American artists even as it extended his interest in public art to include billboards and graffiti. This in turn led to a unique collection, gathered over two decades, of images of Che Guevara in the Americas and across the oceans. He curated these images for an exhibition at UCLA's Fowler Museum, Che Guevara: Icon, Myth, and Message (1997), then more fully theorized them in his Chesucristo: The Fusion in Image and Word of Che Guevara and Jesus Christ (2016).

No longer an active gymnast, David competed often and heartily at tennis and squash. His most challenging workouts, however, involved exquisite acts of coordination while balanced atop tall ladders in order to mount-in many a high corner of the house-his own intricate works of geometric art. There were, in addition, mutual forays into skydiving, hang-gliding, parasailing and, on his own and more than once, bungee-jumping. Abroad, on putative research trips, he would spend days, sometimes weeks, cycling or hiking.

Such research trips were vital to the completion of his third volume on the history of the comic strip (Rebirth of the English Comic Strip: A Kaleidoscope, 1847-1870, 2021). Other projects also demanded attention: a book on The Soldier in Netherlandish Art, 1550-1672 (2002), a book on The Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Topffer (2007), and editions with translations of the comic strips of Gustave Doré (2015, 2018), Amédée de Noé AKA Cham (2019), and Topffer (2007, 2012). In spare moments he published essays on the history of dentistry in caricature, U.S. Vietnam Era posters, the lacquer work of Vietnamese artist Tran Huu Chat, the mid-career artistry of George Cruikshank, the corset revival after World War II, Uncle Scrooge's money bin, dispossession by ducks. . . .

Let none say that he had no time for theatricality or weeding. From 2000 to 2010, he trod the boards around Los Angeles, appearing in significant roles in at least ten plays: Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare on the Green, Griffith Park); Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing (Pasadena Shakespeare Company); Educating Rita (Pierson Playhouse, Theatre Palisades); Proof; Bus Stop; The Miracle Worker; Light Up the Sky; See How They Run; One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. With Marjoyrie, year upon year, he tended plots of flowers, blackberry bushes, and vegetables at a community garden, Ocean View Farms, in Mar Vista.

To be sure, he was still teaching, with a reduced course load on emeritus status. In full academic retirement after 2009, he saw to fruition the many projects noted above and put in order substantial collections that he would donate to various institutions: 20,000 posters, to the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (Los Angeles); a similarly vast assemblage of objets d'art, paintings, graphics, and ephemera depicting Che Guevara, to the Wende Museum (Culver City); books and prints on fetishism, to the Kinsey Institute (Indiana University, Bloomington); manuscripts and drawings by Rodolphe Topffer along with rare Topffer volumes, to the Getty Library (Los Angeles); another Topffer manuscript to the Bibliotheque publique et universitaire de Geneve; a set of late medieval manuscripts on vellum, 1100-1500, to the UCLA Library; and 12 linear feet of photographs, fashion plates, prints, a complete run of Private Eye, and annotations from his sixty years of research and writing, to the Special Collections Library, UC Riverside.

He is survived by Marjoyrie, her daughter Amy, her son Daniel, and her sister Jennie; by his first wife Regine; by his companion Deena; by his nephew Adrian and niece Isabella; by many Dutch and Swiss cousins whom he visited regularly and warmly; and, Renaissance man to the last, by his faithful vaulting horse, Pegasus.

Portrait photo of David in front of painting by Sergio Michilini: Becca Wilson

Political posters were one of David's passions. Donations in memory of David may be sent to CSPG, the not-for-profit Center for the Study of Political Graphics, 3916 Sepulveda Blvd, Suite 103, Culver City CA 90230, or online through its website.