The history of caricature and the cartoon since the Renaissance has been determined, in large part, by technological innova- tions, shifts in marketing and audience composition, the impact of the political climate, and the relation between distorted imagery and the dominant aesthetic, or in more materialistic terms, the relation between caricature/cartoon and art that is more prestigious and commands the highest prices.
The impact of these factors is evident in the career and art of Honoré Daumier. Lithography, a new printing technique invented in 1798, allowed Daumier to express himself with immediacy, drawing directly on the stone rather than relying on an engraver as intermediary. The existence of publications devoted solely to caricature and the cartoon provided an out- let, and Daumier’s gifted publisher, Charles Philipon, was instrumental in developing a large urban audience for carica- ture with his journal La Caricature. Philipon was himself a car- icaturist and created the famous image of metamorphosis in which the portrait of the king is gradually transformed into a pear. As poire, the word for pear, is also French slang for fat-
head, both the publisher and his artists became the targets of
hostile governmental action, with Daumier imprisoned in 1832 for satirizing Louis-Philippe as Gargantua, a giant figure defe- cating titles and honors. For 13 years after the censorship laws of 1835 were passed and the punishment for caricaturing the king became too severe, political caricature went underground. Philipon ordered La Caricature to be liquidated but continued with a new publication, Le Charivari, in which politics ostensi- bly played no part. In actuality, the new journal satirized by indirection, with the whole society under attack, if not Louis- Philippe himself.
The relation between caricature/cartoon and the dominant art style is evident in Daumier’s lithograph Fight Between
Schools: Idealism and Realism. In this cartoon confrontation,
“Realism” is portrayed as a sturdy looking painter with a stub- born expression. He wears workman’s clothes and plain wood- en shoes and brandishes a large, utilitarian-looking paintbrush as his weapon. “Idealism,” his lanky and bespectacled oppo- nent, is naked like a Greek statue, wears a pseudoantique hel- met on his head, and uses his maulstick as a spear and his palette as a shield. Caricature and the cartoon were at odds with the academic standards that dominated in the official Salon in France, and as a countermovement they played a sig- nificant role in breaking its hold on artists. Writing as a partic- ipant in this period, Guillaume Apollinare said, “You will real- ize later that the spirit of caricature has played an important part in the development of modern art.” And in 1882, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, “Daumier may be the father of us all.”
The freedom to distort and exaggerate, to break with con- vention, were old options kept alive by the cartoonist and the caricaturist throughout the long period when the idealized art of the academy was dominant. Daumier’s lithographs demonstrated the artistic and communicative power of distor- tion and exaggeration. Furthermore, the enthusiastic response of important writers such as Charles Beaudelaire and the his- torical perspective supplied by Jules Champfleury in his vol- umes on caricature, in which he demonstrated that these less prestigious arts have a history that goes back to antiquity and illustrious forebears such as Bruegel, all served to loosen the bonds of academic art and encouraged artists to move in new directions.
Many artists benefited from this liberating influence, and Claude Monet was not alone in creating caricatures at an early stage in his career. At age 23, Swiss artist Paul Klee also profit- ed from the experience of using caricature to violate stylistic norms. Klee devoted the years 1903–1905 to executing a group of 15 prints that he referred to in his diary as “sour” or “severe.” In these prints Klee used the standard weapons of caricature—exaggeration and distortion—to attack the bour- geois sensibility and puritanical smugness he found in his hometown, Bern, and to come to terms with the “great humil- iation of the apprenticeship in Rome,” his overwhelming and troubling exposure to classical art during 11 months in Italy. Commenting on his print Virgin in a Tree, with its naked woman, her emaciation and exaggerated angles echoed in the barren, twisted tree where she is perched, Klee wrote, “the lady wants to be something special through virginity, but doesn’t cut 160 caricature / cartoon
an attractive figure—critique of bourgeois society.” Looking for “consolation” for his own inferior social position, Klee car- icatured two men, naked except for mustache and mutton- chops, exchanging low and obsequious bows in a print entitled
Two Men Meet, Each Presuming the Other to be of Higher Rank. Responding with distortion and exaggeration to his
artistic humiliation in Italy, Klee caricatured classical figures, and as one of the most innovative artists of the twentieth cen- tury, a master at integrating the visual and verbal, Klee used the license of caricature to free himself from social and artistic con- ventions. Eventually he would write, “I am my own style.”
At the same time that Klee was creating his “sour” prints, Pablo Picasso portrayed himself as a naked, hairy monkey with a brush stuck behind one ear, a pen behind the other, writing below his self-caricature, “Picasso par lui meme, 1903.” In another example, one without text or title, the narrative of the cartoon is generated by the studio situation and the cast of characters. A buxom lady painter, palette in hand, her head thrown back and her brush held meditatively to her mouth, is joined by three male visitors who peer at the abstract painting on her easel, responding with a variety of postures and expres- sions to this unrecognizable version of the voluptuous nude model lying on the couch behind them. Art and reality, differ- ent styles and their reception, the smug artist and the pompous audience, are all targeted in Picasso’s cartoon.
Although the labels caricature and cartoon clearly apply to these two examples by Picasso, they become problematic terms when applied to his portrait Dora Marr Sitting (1939). The artist is expressing his personal point of view, and the face is clearly distorted and exaggerated—Dora’s portrait differs radi- cally from her appearance in a 1936 photograph by Man Ray—but new artistic categories are available to describe the distorted and exaggerated, and in the twentieth century these characteristics are no longer the exclusive province of carica- ture and cartoon. In the modern era, deviation from perceptu- al norms has moved from the periphery to the mainstream. Cubism, Expressionism, and Dadaism invaded the traditional territory of the caricaturist and cartoonist early in the century, and in the years after 1963, pop art appropriated specific images, as in Roy Lichtenstein’s painting Whaam! (1963).
Traditionally, caricature and cartoon have served the valu- able function of keeping artistic options open, preserving dis- tortion and exaggeration as essential elements in the artistic vocabulary even when they are out of favor for “high” art, functioning as a countermovement to the dominant artistic style and keeping the words “in,” for example, when they were “out” during the dominance of abstract expressionism. Saul Steinberg did not simply integrate words and images in his car- toons, the word becomes the image in such witty examples as
WE and THEY, with WE composed of thin, anemic letters and
THEY solid and formidable in letters, big, dark, and bold. The art of social criticism is kept alive in caricature and cartoon when it is out of style artistically and under attack politically. The exaggerations and distortions of Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera or an ironic painting such as Jack Levine’s Homecoming, with its caricatures of decadent, ribbon-encrusted generals and pinched socialites, were rarities at a time when social criticism was off-limits for the fine arts
and left to the graphic artist, the newspaper, and the magazine. Caricature and cartoon tend to be identified with the topi- cal and transitory, quick to produce and reproduce, illustration anchored at the level of the particular, rather than a demanding art capable of communicating a universal and profound mean- ing. It is true that the need to compress and reduce ideas into readily grasped images makes it difficult to represent both sides of an issue or deal with complexities, but this challenge does not prevent caricature and the cartoon from communicating a philosophical position or commenting on profound human problems.
The history of caricature and the cartoon includes Bruegel’s
Thin People Eating the Fat, a striking and enduring image of a
universal relationship. Klee’s satire of two men bowing in response to social status is as acute an observation now as it was in 1903. Galileo returning to Earth and tiptoeing gingerly through the dozens of bayonets that break through the Earth’s crust is one of Daumier’s most striking inventions, and, like his
Dream of the Inventor, with the ghoulish figure of the inventor
of the needle gun grinning as he surveys with pride a field of dead stretching to the horizon, it has lost none of its power. The possibility of new wars and the invention of new weapons remains. In a cartoon by Saul Steinberg, a tiny knight in armor, lance at the ready and flag bravely waving, sits astride his gal- loping horse, flying down a steep slope (indicated with a single, well-placed and precipitous line). This gallant hero is on the verge of success, about to overtake and dispatch a miniature dragon, but behind and above him on the same steep slope, a huge dark ball created with an ominous maelstrom of criss- crossing black lines rolls relentlessly down upon him. Steinberg’s drawing uses the devices of the caricaturist and gen- erates the narrative of cartoon, but the result is a profound and disquieting comment on the hubris of mortals and the precari- ous human condition.
See also Calumny; Comic; Fools/Folly; Laughter;
Physiognomy
Selected Works of Art
Ancient and Medieval
Hieroglyph of a Lion and a Gazelle Playing a Game, tomb of
Tutankhamen, Eighteenth Dynasty, Cairo, Egyptian Museum
Alexamenos Worshipping His God, anti-Christian graffiti,
Rome
John the Grammarian, the Last Patriarch, illuminated
manuscript, Khludov Psalter, ninth century, Moscow, Russia, Historical Museum (Codex 129, fol. 51v)
King as an Ape Being Carried by Two Rabbits, manuscript
illumination, circa 1302, London, British Museum (Yates Thompson MS 8, fol. 295v)
Ape Doctor Ministering to an Owl, manuscript illumination,
early fourteenth century, Chantilly, France, Musée Condé (MS 62, fol. 36v)
Isaac of Norwich and Other Jews, Exchequer Roll, a.d. 1233,
London, The Public Record Office
Renaissance
Michelangelo, Self-Caricature Painting the Sistine Ceiling, pen and ink, 1510, Florence, Italy, Casa Buonarroti
Schön, Erhard, Martin Luther as Bagpipe Being Played by the
Devil, woodcut, 1521, London, British Museum
Bruegel, Pieter the Elder, Thin People Eating Fat, oil on wood, circa 1567, Copenhagen, Denmark,
Nationalmuseet
Carracci, Agostino, A Group of Priests, drawing, circa 1590, Windsor Castle, England
Seventeenth Century
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, Caricature of a Gentleman, pen and ink drawing, after 1632
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, Cassiano del Posso, pen and ink drawing, circa 1640, private collection
Ghezzi, Pierleone, Chevalier de Bacqueville, pen and ink drawing, 1725, private collection
Ghezzi, Pierleone, Cardinal Granacci, pen and ink drawing, after 1740, private collection
Eighteenth Century
Hogarth, William, Characters and Caricature, engraving for subscription ticket for his print series Marriage à la Mode, 1743
Rowlandson, Thomas, Vauxhall Gardens, pen and ink drawing with watercolor over pencil, 1784, London, Victoria and Albert Museum
Rowlandson, Thomas, Box Lobby Loungers, pen and ink with watercolor over pencil, 1785, Los Angeles, California, J. Paul Getty Museum
Gillray, James, An Excrescence; A Fungus; Alias a Toadstool
Upon a Dunghill (Caricature of William Pitt), etching,
1791, London, British Museum
Goya, Francisco, There They Go, Plucked; Of What Will He
Die, 1799, from Los Caprichos, Madrid, Prado Nineteenth Century
Gillray, James, Plum Pudding In Danger, etching, 1805 Cruikshank, George, Monstrosities, series of eight etchings,
circa 1816
Philipon, Charles, Louis Philippe as a Pear, from Le
Charivari, pen and ink, 1831
Daumier, Honoré, Louis Gargantua, from La Caricature, 1831, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Daumier, Honoré, The Legislative Belly, from L’Association
Mensuelle, lithograph, 1834
Daumier, Honoré, Ratapoil, bronze statuette, 1850, Buffalo, New York, Albright-Knox Gallery
Monet, Claude, Cinq Personages, pencil and gouache, circa 1858, Paris, Musée Marmottan
Monet, Claude, Caricature of Jules Didier, circa 1859, charcoal drawing, Chicago, Art Institute
Nast, Thomas, A Group of Vultures Waiting for the Storm to
“Blow Over”—“Let Us Prey,” wood engraving for Harper’s Weekly, September 23, 1871
Nast, Thomas, The Brains of the Tweed Ring, wood engraving for Harper’s Weekly, October 21, 1871
Nast, Thomas, Jewels Among Swine, wood engraving for
Harper’s Weekly, June 13, 1874
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri, Yvette Guilbert, lithograph, 1894
Twentieth Century
Picasso, Pablo, Self-Portrait as a Monkey, pen and ink drawing, 1903, Barcelona, Spain, Museo Picasso
Klee, Paul, Two Men Meet, Each Presuming the Other to be
of Higher Rank, etching, from Sour series, 1903
Grosz, George, And a Little Child Shall Lead Them, pen and ink, 1934–1935
Thurber, James, The Seal Barks, from The Thurber Carnival Levine, Jack, Homecoming, oil on canvas, 1946, Brooklyn,
New York, Brooklyn Museum
Picasso, Pablo, The Woman Painter, wash drawing, 1954, Paris, Galerie Louise Leiris
Lichtenstein, Roy, Whaam!, magna on two canvas panels, 1963, London, Tate Gallery
Hirschfeld, Al, David Merrick as Santa Claus, drawing for
Unlikely Casting series, for Playbill, pen and ink, 1964
Further Reading
Bryant, Mark and Simon Heneage, Dictionary of British
Cartoonists and Caricaturists, 1730–1980, Hants,
England: Scolar Press, 1994; Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1994
Caricature and Its Role in Graphic Satire, Exhibition
Catalog, Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University and Museum of Art and Rhode Island School of Design, 1971
Cébe, Jean Pierre, La Caricature et la Parodie dans le monde
roman antique des origines a Juvenal, Paris: E. de Boccard,
1966
Champfleury (Jules Fleury), Histoire de la caricature antique, Paris: E. Dentu, 1879
_____, Histoire de la caricature au Moyen Age et sous la
Renaissance, Paris: E. Dentu, 1875
_____, Histoire de la caricature sous le reform et la ligue, Paris: E. Dentu, 1880
_____, Le musee secret de la caricature, Paris: E. Dentu, 1888
Comini, Alexandria, “All Roads Lead (Reluctantly) to Bern: Style and Source in Paul Klee’s Early ‘Sour’ Prints,” Arts
Magazine (September 1977)
Corrigan, Kathleen Anne, Visual Polemics in the Ninth-
Century Byzantine Psalters, Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1992
Cuno, James, ed., French Caricature and the French
Revolution, 1789–1799, Chicago and Los Angeles:
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Donald, Dina, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the
Reign of George III, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale
University Press, 1996
Farwell, Beatrice, The Charged Image: French Lithographic
Caricature, 1816–1846, Santa Barbara, California: Santa
Barbara Museum of Art, 1989 162 caricature / cartoon
Feaver, William, Masters of Caricature from Hogarth and
Gillray to Scarfe and Levine, New York: Knopf, 1981;
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981
George, Mary Doroth, English Political Caricature: A
Study of Opinion and Propaganda, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1959
Ghezzi, Pier Leone, Catalogue of Drawings by Pier Leone
Ghezzi, Rome, 1674–1755, London: Sotheby Parke
Bernet, 1979
Gombrich, Ernst Hans, “The Experiment of Caricature, ”in Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of
Perception, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1972
_____, “The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and in Art,” in Art,
Perception and Reality, Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1972
_____, “The Cartoonist’s Armoury,” in Meditations on a
Hobby Horse, London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1963
Grandville (Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard), Grandville’s
Animals: The World’s Vaudeville, London: Thames and
Hudson, 1981
Grosz, George, Ecce Homo, New York: J. Brussel, 1966; London: Metheun, 1967
Hannoosh, Michele, Beaudelaire and Caricature: From the
Comic to Modernity, University Park: Pennsylvania
University Press, 1992
Hayes, John T., The Art of Thomas Rowlandson, Alexandria, Virginia: Exhibition and Publication of Arts Service International, 1990
Hill, Draper, Mr. Gillray, the Caricaturist, London and Greenwich, Connecticut: Phaidon, 1965
Hirschfeld, Al, The American Theatre as Seen by Hirschfeld, New York: G. Brazilier, 1961
Hofmann, Werner, Caricature from Leonardo to Picasso, New York: Crown, 1957
Horn, Maurice, ed., World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, New York: Gale Research, 1980
Kunzle, David, “Goethe and Caricature: From Hogarth to Topffer,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtland Institutes XLVIII (1985)
_____, History of the Comic Strip, circa 1450–1825, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973; Oxford: University of California Press, 1990
Lucie-Smith, Edward, The Art of Caricature, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981
Lynch, Bohun, A History of Caricature, London: Faber and Gwyer, 1926; Boston: Little, Brown, 1927
Nicoll, Allardyce, Masks, Mimes and Miracles: Studies in the
Popular Theatre, London: G. C. Harrap, 1931
Patten, Robert L., George Cruikshank’s Life, Times and Art, Rutgers, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995 Paulson, Ronald, Hogarth’s Graphic Works: First Complete
Edition, 2 vols., New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University
Press, 1965
Randall, Lilian M. C., Images in the Margins of Gothic
Manuscripts, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966
Rosenberg, Harold, ed., Saul Steinberg, New York: Knopf, 1978
Shikes, Ralph E. and Steven Heller, The Art of Satire: Painters
as Caricaturists and Cartoonists from Delacroix to Picasso, New York: Pratt Graphics Center and Horizon
Press, 1984
Wechsler, Judith, “The Issue of Caricature,” Art Journal 43:4 (Winter, 1983)
_____, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in
Nineteenth-Century Paris, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982; London: Thames and Hudson, 1982 Wark, Robert R., Drawings by Thomas Rowlandson in the
Huntington Collection, San Marino, California:
Huntington Library, 1975
Wilkinson, Richard H., Reading Egyptian Art: A
Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Egyptian Painting and Sculpture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1992
Victoria and Albert Museum, English Caricature, 1620 to the
Present: Caricaturists and Satirists, their Art, their Purpose and their Influence, Catalog of an exhibition, London:
Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984
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