Jonathan Sale on comic art
Cartoons and Caricatures Bevis Hillier (Studio Vista/Dutton Pictureback 75p)
Bevis Hillier is reasoned and fairly academic in his approach and presentation. He is not pedantic. but he prefers the better class of cartoon. He is not interested in in- fantile strips purely because they were once popular with illiterates in the Bronx. He shows us the work of German neo-classical painters slumming, that is, producing caricatures. His comments are temperate; Low's style, for example, 'which combined crudeness with accuracy, has been overpraised in England because of the natural affection for an artist who led anti- Hitler propaganda.' He writes well too. The book is short and brisk, and does not pretend to be a comprehensive study.
If it is academic respectability you seek, you can hallow cartoons with antiquity by tracing their ancestors back to Stone Age paintings in murky caves. Mr Hillier does not strain as hard as this. His earliest reproductions go back only to the sixth cen- tury BC, and he starts his selection proper with an AD 1233 design that attacks some Jews in Norwich. Two cartoons from the early sixteenth century show that cartooning was getting very workmanlike. There's a drunkard with so vast a belly that he has to carry the gross lump of flesh around on a wheelbarrow. The second design shows Martin Luther as the devil's bagpipes; Satan is blowing into his ear and fingering the stops in his pipelike nose. These two ideas would be effective today, although the actual targets would be different. Gerald Scarfe may borrow them, if he likes.
There are stylistic connections, too. A
1795 sketch by a German painter named Ehrensvard reminded me of a tidy John Glashan (one of several important con- temporary cartoonists omitted from the book). The cross-hatching and shading of Tenniel (Alice in Wonderland) was fashion- able until Max Beerbohm's large, simple designs; David Levine now takes us back to Tenniel's techniques. Thomas Gillray cari- catured Pitt, and George Cruikshank sat- irised Napoleon; both statesmen end up looking pretty much the same.
Although the distinction between cartoons and caricatures is implied in the title of the book, it is not discussed. Sometimes Mr Hillier uses both words as if they were synonymous, sometimes as if they were ' different. For the record, a caricature is an exaggerated portrait; a cartoon was originally the preliminary design for a pain- ting, and now denotes a satirical represen- tation—including a caricature. The author explains that the modern meaning began when John Leech, Punch's first cartoonist, seeing the cartoons (i.e designs) of frescoes for the new Houses of Parliament, parodied them in six 'cartoons'. He does not say if this new term led to a change in the way car- toonists thought about their work. If he had to make the distinction between caricature and cartoon, he Might profitably have ex- amined the parasitic nature of the caricature, which is lost without a strong original, and other types of cartoon which create their own fantasy world without outside links: One German satirical magazine, got so much mileage out of clobbering Napoleon tit that when he was dethroned, it had to close down. In contrast, the tense microcosm of 'Peanuts' is oblivious of any political re- shufflings.,
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