Observations On A Theory of Political Caricature
Observations On A Theory of Political Caricature
Observations On A Theory of Political Caricature
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1 Butterfield, loc. cit. Boss Tweed was, of course, in his own crude way only expressing a
general truth which, centuries before, had been given a more dignified formulation by Pope
Gregory the Great in a letter to Bishop Serenus of Massilia, who had opposed the ecclesiastical
use of pictures: 'Quod legentibus scriptura, hoc idiotis praestat pictura cernentibus, ut hi qui
letteras nesciunt, saltem in parietibus videndo legant, quae legere in codicibus non valent'.
2 Cf. the way in which during World War I Le Rire Rouge reproduced German cartoons
from Simplicissimus,FliegendeBldtter, etc. which showed the French in an unfavourable light
as evidence of the malice and misguided stupidity of the Germans. In much the same way, as
late as 1918, the German censors helped the learned Dr. Ferdinand Avenarius to 'turn the
trick' on Allied cartoonists by allowing him to publish in his Das Bild als Narr (Munich, 1918)
some 300 anti-German and anti-Imperial cartoons which are often of positively hair-raising
ferocity.
3 Thus in spite of Boss Tweed's unsolicited testimonial to the power of Nast's pictures, the
'Ring' offered the New York Times five million dollars in return for its silence compared to
the half a million offered to Nast (Butterfield, loc. cit.).
artistic amusement in which doubtless there was scope for malice, but in
which the latter was certainly not the dominant element. Indeed,
subsequently it became fashionable for enterprising caricaturists to be
commissioned as 'portrait-ists',and it is via the young dandies who during
their grand tour in Italy paid the English artist, Thomas Patch, to caricature
them that the technique was imported into England,' where, as we have
seen, it was misapplied in order to enliven the satirical political print with
negative insights into the personal characteristics of political opponents.
In view of the original purpose of caricature,it is perhaps a little remark-
able-if historically understandable-that so many writers on the subject
are at pains to emphasize its negative and aggressive aspects. Not all
authorities go quite so far as the contributor to the Athenaeumof October
1831, who described the caricaturistas 'a man who closes his heart against
the sensibilities of human nature ... who insults inferiority of mind and
exposes defects of body ... who aggravates what is already hideous and
blackens what before was sufficientlydark',2 but a surprising number do,
to a greater or lesser degree, tend to plough with the same calf. Victor
Alba,3 for instance, tells us that the cartoonist's aim is to 'provoke in the
spectator a sentiment hostile to the thing ridiculed', while in Streicher's
view (p. 431) 'caricature is definitely negative. It laughs the actor out of
court . . .' and is a vehicle for 'ridicule and denigration'. Similarly, Ernst
Kris4 sees aggression as the hall-mark of all caricature, the latter being
an instrument for the 'annihilation tendencies' of the artist, a means of
'threatening, superseding and dismissing' the individuality of the victim.
Kris is so convinced of the aggressive nature of caricaturethat he accounts
for its historically late development in terms of its affinities with black
magic: as in the case of homoeopathic magic, image and object become
virtually interchangeable,the one substituting for the other, and only when
mankind had evolved sufficientlyto differentiateclearly between them was
caricature possible (cf. Streicher's assertion [p. 434] that 'caricature was
not involved in ritual and possessed no cult value'). I have elsewhere
suggested that, while Kris's assertion of the association of object and image
is incontrovertible, it does not of itself explain why caricature should be
'discovered' precisely at the beginning of the seventeenth century: if the
Church, for at least two hundred years before then, did not scruple to hang
offenders in effigy, the faithful are barely likely to have reacted with
primeval superstitious dread to the exaggeration of the shape of a man's
nose! It seems to me far more meaningful to see caricature, as suggested
I G. Paston, Social Caricaturein the Eighteenth Century(London, 1905), p. 59.
2 Quoted by Draper Hill, op. cit., p. 6.
3 'The Mexican Revolution and the Cartoon', ComparativeStudies in Society and History,
IX, 2 (1967), 121.
4 E. Kris, 'The Psychology of Caricature',Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York,
1952), pp. 175, 179, 200.
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P1. 9. Sir David Low, Evening Standard, July 15th, 1936 (By kind
permission of the Trustees of Sir David Low).