189 Minutes With … Art Spiegelman

"As the latest fight over Maus erupts, its artist-creator searches for his eyeglasses."

- By Abraham Riesman

Okay, so here's the thing,” Art Spiegelman says into the phone as he paces his cavernous Soho studio, humming with anxiety. “I don’t know what happened. I’m almost positive I took them with me. I put them into a sleeve so they wouldn’t crush in my pocket. I thought I did.” On the other end of the line is his wife and collaborator of more than four decades, New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly, who is trying to help him find his glasses. He mined his past for clues: Yes, we had dined for nearly an hour at his beloved Fanelli’s, a 175-year-old pub around the corner—but we had already looked there. Then he’d returned to the studio: Nothing there, either. Yes, he says, he checked his coat pockets already. Could she check her office? “Try by where our coats are,” he suggests. This has been happening to him since the beginning of the pandemic: glasses, pens, notebooks, e-cigarettes vanish, and he’s useless until he finds or reluctantly replaces the lost item. When he loses something, “everything just tightens,” he says. Losing his glasses is especially difficult because of the amblyopia he’s had since childhood. “I attribute my abilities as a cartoonist in part to the glasses thing—I was terrible at baseball, obviously,” he says.