Lucas Cranach the Elder, “The Birth and Origin of the Pope” (1545) (illustration credit fm4.1)
Especially since such authorities as David Carrier, the distinguished philosopher and art historian, have observed that the proper study of caricature “has barely begun,” it deserves close scrutiny. Caricature—the term derives from the Italian caricare, meaning “to load,” as in a vessel or a weapon—seems to set off more alarms than any other form of cartoon; as we have seen, the very idea of caricaturing Muhammad set off worldwide protests among people who never even saw the Danish art that allegedly caused the provocation. So what’s with political caricature? The New York Times Op-Ed page bans it. The Bible, as we know, proscribes graven images (which can be said to be a form of caricature). Honoré Daumier and countless others went to prison for it. Although it was not technically part of the charge, I would argue that Julius Streicher, Gauleiter of Franconia, executor of racist policies, and the owner-editor of Der Stürmer, which weekly featured vicious anti-Semitic caricatures on its front pages, was hanged at Nuremberg mainly for publishing them.
I have already mentioned that the experts can’t agree on when political cartoons and caricature began. Regardless of caricature’s paternity, it is generally agreed that in the sixteenth century Italian caricaturist Annibale Carracci was referring to Leonardo’s grotesques when he wrote:
Is not the caricaturist’s task exactly the same as the classical artist’s? Both see the lasting truth beneath the surface of mere outward appearance. Both try to help nature accomplish its plan. The one may strive to visualize the perfect form and to realize it in his work, the other to grasp perfect deformity, and thus reveal the very essence of a personality. A good caricature, like every work of art, is more true to life than reality itself.
The perfect deformity—that’s a high ambition, which we shall return to. But here let me say that, personally, I like anthropologist David Thorn’s idea that the man responsible for the birth of political cartoons and caricature is, of all people, Martin Luther.
Lucas Cranach the Elder, “The Birth and Origin of the Pope” (1545) (illustration credit fm4.1)
In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther, who was engaged in bitter theological debate with Pope Leo, believed he could get the support of the peasant masses for the reforms he wanted the church to adopt. He was aware that the majority of the peasant masses could not read, so he sent forth his message via one-page posters and illustrated booklets. Listen now to David Thorn: “In these prints [Luther] showed the depictions of biblical scenes that everyone could immediately recognize, and next to it he would print the same pictures but with caricatures of members of the Catholic Church in the positions of the antagonist. This was the birth of the political cartoon”—and it soon was imitated throughout Europe.
Hans Holbein the Younger himself created a woodcut depicting Martin Luther as “the German Hercules,” in which Luther beats such scholastics as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas into submission with a nail-studded club.
Luther commissioned such artists as Lucas Cranach the Elder to make woodcuts in support of the Reformation, among them “The Birth and Origin of the Pope” (one of a series entitled The True Depiction of the Papacy), which depicts Satan excreting the Pontiff. (He also commissioned Cranach to provide cartoon illustrations for his German translation of the New Testament, which became a best seller, a major event in the history of the Reformation.)
Caricature developed throughout Europe in different ways. Art historian Diana Donald assures us that the golden age of caricature occurred in Georgian England, from 1759 through 1838, when artists added visual metaphor, personification, and allegory. The critic Judith Wechsler writes about another “golden age” occurring in nineteenth-century France, where scores of caricature journals codified the “Parisian’s characteristic preoccupation with visible bodily cues to class, profession, character and circumstances,” culminating in the high art of Honoré Daumier. (Both of these were undoubtedly golden ages for caricature, but they make me wonder, What were or are the golden ages for caricature in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East?) Where caricature helped Martin Luther communicate with the illiterate, in England and France it helped create a popular and political urban culture.
Since different countries and cultures gave birth to different styles, and each treated caricaturists in its own way—again, rather than pretending to provide the unprovidable: a comprehensive, definitive history of caricature—here are some country-by-country snapshots of what has been going on:
Napoleon is reported to have said that the English caricaturist James Gillray “did more than all the armies of Europe to bring me down.”
James Gillray, “Maniac Ravings, or Little Boney in a Strong Fit” (1803) (illustration credit fm4.2)
Michael Foot, the British Labour party politician, observed that David Low “changed the atmosphere in the way people saw Hitler.” And of course the British tradition of hospitality to irreverent commentary—Lord Byron is reputed to have said, “Ridicule is the only weapon the English climate cannot rust”—gave the caricature one of its premier venues in Punch, featuring John Leech, John Tenniel, Max Beerbohm, and a galaxy of others. Even so, as recently as 1981 Great Britain threw the Holocaust-denying cartoonist Robert Edwards into prison for his visual crimes (see this page).
France was a different story entirely. As Robert Justin Goldstein reminds us, the French interior minister informed his prefects on September 8, 1829, that “engravings or lithographs act immediately upon the imagination of the people, like a book which is read with the speed of light; if it wounds modesty or public decency the damage is rapid and irremediable.” In 1835, King Louis Philippe reestablished censorship (it had been repealed after the revolution) explicitly to limit caricature. Louis Philippe was, famously, the king who had Daumier put behind bars for his version of Charles Philipon’s brilliant pear-shaped caricature “La Poire.” When asked, “Why penalize caricature rather than print?” the king explained: “A pamphlet is no more than a violation of opinion; a caricature amounts to an act of violence.” French legislator Joseph Jacquinot-Pampelune argued that visual impression should be held to a higher standard than written impression because “caricature drawings offer a means of scandal that is very easy to abuse and against which [postpublication] pressure can only be of little help. As soon as they are exhibited in public they are instantly viewed by thousands of spectators and the scandal has taken place before the magistrate has time to suppress it.” All of which led Le Grelot, the caricature journal, to pose (in 1878) the question “By what right can one prevent the crayon from saying what the pen is allowed to?”
Although Benjamin Franklin published the first cartoon in America, for me and most observers, the American cartoon didn’t really come into its own until 1871, when Thomas Nast’s caricatures brought down Boss Tweed, the infamously corrupt head of Tammany Hall, the seat of New York’s Democratic Party political machine (see this page). President Abraham Lincoln called him “my number-one recruiting sergeant” for his Civil War cartoons, and it was, incidentally, Nast who gave the Democrats their symbolic donkey, the Republicans their elephant, Tammany its tiger, and Boss Tweed the fat, grubby image that came to symbolize the most corrupt politician in the country. Tweed escaped from jail and fled to Spain, where he was found working as a seaman on a Spanish merchant vessel. On the run, he was reportedly apprehended by a Spanish customs official who, though he spoke no English, recognized him from Nast’s drawings.
Many students of the genre would argue that in the twentieth century no cartoonist exercised greater influence than Louis Raemaekers. During World War I his caricatures of Kaiser Wilhelm as Satan and of Germans as barbarians led the German government to offer a 12,000-guilder reward for his capture, dead or alive. According to the English critic H. Perry Robinson, a German newspaper, summarizing the terms of the peace Germany would exact after it won the war, declared that indemnity would be demanded for every one of Raemaekers’s cartoons.
Louis Raemaekers, “The German Tango” (1918) (illustration credit fm4.4)
Pre–World War II Germany had its own golden age of caricature anchored by the satirical journal Simplicissimus. Ralph Steadman, a student of the form, said that “cartoonists and painters like George Grosz, Otto Dix, John Heartfield, and Max Beckmann were forced to migrate or face extermination. The power to expose and lay bare famous lies and potent immoralities made their flight imperative.” Lest you think that Steadman exaggerates the power of cartoons and caricatures, he continues to claim to believe that “to this day, the cartoon remains a poor man’s art, a dogsbody seen as a space-filler; a last-minute scribble that, in its humblest form, jockeys for a place somewhere between the crossword puzzle and the small ads.”
I have omitted a whole range of caricatures that, far from causing distress, rallied the troops and were an incalculable influence for the good. Caricature, which is, after all, both a cartoon and an image, is an image with a difference. And the difference has to do with its doubleness. It is both recognizable and a distortion, sometimes grotesquely so, simultaneously like and unlike its subject, and the unlike part can involve either idealization or deformation, if not defamation, debunking, and downgrading.
In 1938 E. H. Gombrich and Ernst Kris co-authored an article in the British Journal of Medical Psychology in which they went farther than Carracci and observed, “If the portrait painter’s task was to record the character, the essence of a man in the heroic sense, the caricaturist had an opposing goal. He did not seek the perfect form, but the perfect deformity … to penetrate through the outward appearance to the inner being in all its ugliness.”
Herblock, “Here He Comes Now” (1954) (illustration credit fm4.5)
Perhaps this is why at their most memorable, cartoons and caricatures can cross class and cultural boundaries and transcend history in the sense that although they may instantaneously wound, they live on beyond their moment of inception. Therein lies the paradox: Cartoon language, wrote Art Spiegelman, uses “the discredited pseudo-scientific principles of physiognomy” to create indelible degradations. Think, for example, of Herblock’s Richard Nixon. Who will ever forget that gifted American artist’s renditions of the ski-nosed schemer with frail, hunched shoulders, angry jowls, and five o’clock shadow? My favorite is pictured here.
And then again, perhaps I am being unfair to cartoonists in other times and places, who lacked Nixon as a subject. After all, Doug Marlette, the American newspaper Newsday’s incomparable cartoonist, once observed, “Nixon was to cartooning what Marilyn Monroe was to sex. Nixon looked like his policies. His nose told you he was going to invade Cambodia.”
Sometimes the response to a caricature is laughter. As Arthur Koestler has written, this can come from an effect “which is at the same time visually plausible and biologically impossible.” And sometimes the response is nothing less than moral outrage. If the distortion involves exaggerating a racial or religious stereotype, or violating a religious injunction—caricaturist, beware! As Gombrich pithily put it, the caricaturist is in the business of “mythologizing the world by physiognomizing it.” Translation: “By linking the mythical with the real, the caricaturist creates that fusion, that amalgam, that seems so convincing to the emotional mind.” Example: you can call a cabinet minister a parasite; but to make the charge visually, as in James Gillray’s famous print of Prime Minister William Pitt as a toadstool growing on the crown, is something else again.
James Gillray, “A Toadstool Upon a Dunghill” (1791) (illustration credit fm4.6)
Unfairness, by the way, is the point—there really is no such thing as a balanced or objective caricature. Kiku Adatto has written that what portrait photography is really about is “the ability to interpret the meaning of the person captured in the frame.” But, as I have already discussed, since caricatures by definition deal in distortion, they can be more troubling in a different way than photographs, which, she notes, can “frame you for a crime you did not commit.”
I have always believed that another reason the victims of cartoons and caricatures (or those who identify with them) overreact is frustration over the fact that if you don’t like something that is written about you, you can always send a letter to the editor, even if only in your head. The wounding caricature does not easily lend itself to such a remedy. And because an image is more “public” than words—it can be seen simultaneously by any number of viewers—it can be more humiliating. The caricature brands its subject and floats into the public sphere, and its target may feel unfairly victimized and impotent to do anything about it. The only way really to answer a cartoon is with another cartoon, and there is, for all practical purposes, no such thing as a cartoon to the editor.
Cartoons may be our totems, carrying messages that once launched into the world are uncontrollable and speak for themselves; when, in addition, they are caricatures, they may function (here comes that peak-shift effect again) as superstimuli. Ask your local neuroaesthetician about it.
And then there are those caricatures that go over the line, which I will call, for lack of a better term, hate caricatures. All caricatures, as David Levine noted, are based to some degree on stereotypes. The New Yorker’s Bob Mankoff says it slightly differently: “All cartoons are based on types.” Der Stürmer’s vicious, ugly, and anti-Semitic portraits of Jews are obviously hate caricatures, but there is a less obvious version as well. Steve Heller gives an illustrated hour-long lecture on racist images. During it, he shows an unending parade of negative images of African-Americans, among them cannibals, mammies, minstrels, criminals, Sambos, pickaninnies, miscegenators, the fat-lipped and kinky-haired, chimpanzees, servants, vagrants—collectively a searing statement of how cartoonists over the years have portrayed black Americans: individually, many of them harmless, but collectively, the visual equivalent of “nigger,” “Jap,” or “kike.”
When it comes to minorities, the disadvantaged, and the dispossessed, I am at something of a loss in defining the line between the stereotype and the hate cartoon, though having grown up during World War II reading comics that invariably showed Japanese with leering slanted eyes, fangs for teeth, and bright yellow skin, as the late Associate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said of pornography, “I know it when I see it.”
Steve Platt, then editor of the New Statesman, once wrote about a cartoonist who portrayed the late publishing magnate Robert Maxwell in bed with a pig receiving payoffs from Israel. He had a large Jewish nose and rolls of fat, looking like the classic cartoon Jew. “But why not?” he asked, “and how else does a cartoonist portray Jews other than as Jewish?” The British cartoonist Martin Rowson once was asked by his editors at the Independent to draw a caricature of a corrupt British television personality five times because the nose was too big. He finally satisfied the Independent by drawing the man with no nose at all.
As Platt observed, “Perhaps it is unfortunate that from the politically correct caricaturist’s point of view, Charles de Gaulle was not Jewish. For the caricaturist the man was his nose. There was no other way of representing him. That is the nature of caricature—to take a distinctive feature and exaggerate it—literally to overload it.”
• • •
Enough theorizing. Why not ask some caricaturists what they think?
I once was critical of an advocacy journalist who had gotten some trivial facts wrong in a supportive and friendly article about Monocle. I wanted to send a letter to the editor, not exactly complaining, but setting the record straight. His editor declined to run it. The writer in question distorts, his boss conceded, “but he distorts in the direction of truth.” He was right. The surrealist artist Steve Brodner’s caricatures distort in the direction of surrealism, but his mind makes a beeline for truth and sanity. He points out that most of the cartoons that have enraged and made news in recent years have been misunderstood; for example, the Obama fist bump depicted on the cover of The New Yorker. Brodner says that for the most part, “it was not The New Yorker’s constituency who misunderstood, but rather TV interviewers who never read the magazine.” He also says the Danish Muhammads were misinterpreted, as have been the works of Robert Grossman and Edward Sorel. I think he’s hit on an important truth here. Because cartoons speak in image language rather than words, they are especially vulnerable to misinterpretation.
I would add, however, that it’s important to keep in mind (as was the case with Barry Blitt’s Obamas) that an artist’s intention is one thing and the message transmitted by a cartoon, which once released functions as a totem beyond control, is another.
One of the things Brodner demands from his visual-arts students is “clarity.” For a prime example of the damage a misinterpreted cartoon can cause, consider Philip Zec’s, published by Britain’s Daily Mirror in 1942, which depicted a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a life raft. It ended up being debated in Parliament and almost resulted in the paper’s being shut down, all because Winston Churchill and others misinterpreted the meaning of the caption in relation to the image. A colleague had persuaded Zec to change his caption from “Petrol is dearer now” (meant to underscore how critical oil was to the war effort) to “The price of petrol has been increased by one penny!—Official” (which Churchill and others mistakenly read as an accusation that the government was colluding with war profiteers). So here was a case where words intended to clarify may have contributed to an ersatz interpretation of the image.
While we’re on the subject of the age-old competition between words and images, let’s not forget Plato, who thought the artist was an imitator and therefore not to be trusted. Art historian Werner Hofmann deduces from Plato’s dismissal of images as having nothing to do with truth and veracity that “consequently verbal precision is superior to visual allusions.” He goes on to note that Pope Gregory the Great “tried to make use of the sensuous appeal of the image but not without first asserting its inferiority. ‘Pictures are the books of the illiterate,’ he said.”
His theory: art (read caricature and poetry) allowed the primitive to prevail over the rational, which he considered the higher aspect of being human. (One could argue that stereotypes are an example of the dangers Plato had in mind.)
When I visited with Ralph Steadman, who personally is as manic as his caricatures are otherworldly, at his home in Kent, England, about an hour away from the British Cartoon Archive in Canterbury, I asked him why he thought caricatures had such power. He cited Nietzsche as his authority and then said something that on its face seemed to be ducking the question, but on reflection said it all. “The only thing of value is the thing you cannot say. That’s where drawing is so important. You can do with drawing what you can’t put into words.” When I thoughtlessly asked him to say a little more—i.e., to elaborate in words—he reminded me of what I had told him about Levine’s Kissinger drawing. “It was powerful,” he said, “because it was a drawing … but to just describe it in words is too crude. When people say that something is unspeakable, that’s what they’re getting at.”
A paradox (at least on the surface): many “victims” of the caricaturist’s art line up to buy the originals to hang them on their walls, presumably to show off their thick skin, but in so doing to try to reappropriate the offensive material. Although it is difficult to imagine politicians lining up to buy the originals of Steadman’s unflattering unlikenesses, it has been known to happen. But in 1988 he took the ultimate step to make sure it would never happen again (or at least for a year), issuing a manifesto urging other artists to follow his example. He explained to me as he has to others, in conversation and in writing, that “I urged all cartoonists in the world to stop drawing. I considered that if all cartoonists did that, even for one year, politicians as we know them would change. If we denied them the benefit of our attention, insight, and wit, they would suffer withdrawal symptoms of such withering magnitude that the effect on their egos could only be guessed at. Not even a tyrant can survive the whiplash of indifference.” When I saw him in his studio in May of 2011, twenty-three years after he issued his manifesto, he seemed to be drawing only birds. A few months later, though, he broke his rule, and drew three political cartoons for the New Statesman, which included one of his nemesis Margaret Thatcher.
“You have a remarkable opportunity to get through to people in a direct way,” Steve Bell, the English cartoonist, told me. “They read it in a second.” Whereas Steadman said you showed what you couldn’t ever say, Bell spoke in body metaphors about the pleasure he took “in getting under people’s skin” or “up their nose,” and he reveled in what he called an “unfair process” because “there’s no comeback.”
A few weeks earlier Bell had told a newspaper interviewer that cartooning was “blazingly important because everything about politics screams imagery at you. We live in a mega-visual universe where thousands of things are pouring out of the screen at us every day, so you have to process it. You have to stop and have one still image. People think, ‘Ah, it’s old-fashioned’ but it’s not. You can actually say a lot of things in a single picture, making people stop and look. What’s wrong with that? I think drawing is a way of inquiring about the world and it mystifies me why it should have gone out of fashion, and why it should be considered somehow inferior, because there is definitely a hierarchy between high art and low art. Certainly comic art is at the bottom.”
Since, unfortunately, the cartoonist I most wanted to talk with, David Low, who had, as it were, gotten to Der Führer, is dead, I contacted his biographer, Colin Seymour Ure. Ure believes that “the dangerousness of a cartoon stems partly from the fact that its meaning depends largely on the reader.” This, he told an audience on the occasion of delivering the Hocken Lecture at the University of Otago, New Zealand, in 1996, “is due chiefly to the use of graphic images instead of words. The artist is dependent on the reader making the correct connection. Moreover the point of the cartoon may be oblique, implicit, indirect, or ironic. This gives the cartoonist deniability. ‘I never meant that and it’s not my fault if readers interpret it that way.’ ”
When I talked with the British cartoonist, broadcaster, and theologian Ted Harrison, we quickly discovered an unexpected bond: the poet W. H. Auden. As an undergraduate at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania I had written an article for the college paper, The Phoenix, on Auden, who had taught at Swarthmore during World War II. In the course of researching the story, I fell victim to his idiosyncratic charm. (His final exam in his English composition course was to “write the events of the day backwards.” He would proudly tell visitors to his flat that his bed had “originally belonged to Ehrlich, the inventor of the syphilis cure.”) Harrison recalled persuading Auden to sit for a caricature portrait. (“He sat wearing slippers and a sloppy jumper and wreathed in cigarette smoke. He was grumpy and taciturn.”) The Times Literary Supplement printed it, Harrison’s first in a national publication.
Harrison, who had become fascinated with the political cartoonist’s art as a student at the then brand-new University of Kent, where he studied and tried to emulate the work of Low and Victor Weisz (the German-English cartoonist better known as Vicky), combined a professorial perspective with a working cartoonist’s knowledge of the trade. He lost his first job doing weekly sketches for the Kentish Gazette. “When I drew a certain councilor,” said Harrison, “with a cigarette in one hand and a G and T in the other, she took offense, and as she was a friend of the proprietor, I was sacked.”
Harrison has a tripartite theory of caricature: “There are three things all caricaturists look for: the subject’s DNA (essential bone structures), the subject’s acquired characteristics (obesity, etc.) and the subject’s vanities (Hitler’s mustache would be an example).”
Knowledgeable about the grammar and symbolism of caricature, he made the interesting point that when it comes to satirical portraits of an era, cartoons in particular and images in general tell the story better than the written word because written styles are ever evolving, whereas symbols seem more durable. “I can’t think of much satirical eighteenth-century political writing that I’ve ever read, yet if someone drew like [the eighteenth-century English caricaturist Thomas] Rowlandson, he’d get a job today.”
Harrison’s point has resonance. I take it as a given that cartoons and caricature can, under certain circumstances, live on. See for example David Levine’s depiction of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, showing his appendectomy scar in the shape of Vietnam, which has already found its way into the history books even as Daumier’s and Philipon’s contemporaries would forever be unable to think of Louis Philippe without thinking of “La Poire.” Says Steve Heller of Levine’s LBJ, a great caricature “has to be surprising and that was amazing, the timing right, the image perfect, as great as any Daumier, a piece of history.”
David Levine, Lyndon Baines Johnson (1966) (illustration credit fm4.8)
And to mention only drawings reprinted herein, Brits won’t soon forget Vicky’s Supermac or Steve Bell’s John Major with his Airtex underpants over a dark blue business suit, even as Americans won’t forget Herblock’s Nixon with his five o’clock shadow and all the rest.
Regarding the Content Theory of cartoon impact, put together Steve Brodner’s observation that much of the recent hullabaloo about cartoons stems from misunderstood meanings with the conclusion of the renowned creator of Maus, Art Spiegelman, that it is usually not the cartoon but the “reverberation in people’s heads” that we are talking about, and we inch closer to an understanding. But since content alone doesn’t account for the political and social impact of cartoons, it’s important to keep in mind that, as every schoolchild is taught, form and content are all too often intertwined. Whether or not art historians, aestheticians, and critics take this into account, down through the ages and right up through today, tyrants, bigots, political bosses, and religious fundamentalists, human rights, gay rights, and feminist activists, judges, and just plain citizens seem to intuitively understand it.
The best way to make this point about form and content being interconnected may be via the art of Saul Steinberg, because as Gombrich once wrote, “One of the problems in writing about Steinberg’s wit is precisely the fact that his drawings make the point so much better than words ever could.”
Those familiar with The Masses, the groundbreaking Socialist magazine of the early twentieth century, remember that contributor Art Young was tried for treason for his anti–World War I cartoons. Over the years I have seen the powerful cartoons of Masses artists like Young and Robert Minor, but it wasn’t until the spring of 2011, when I visited the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University, where I had the opportunity to thumb through entire issues of The Masses, that I understood for the first time how images dominated the reading experience. It was as if the words “illustrated” the art, which outranked them. I have mentioned Hitler’s reaction to Low, and let’s not forget that George Grosz was tried for blasphemy, slander, and obscenity without printing a word, before he left Germany; and let’s not forget that it was a cartoonist’s victim who best understood the damage that a cartoonist’s armory can inflict. In Boss Tweed’s much-quoted words about Thomas Nast’s caricatures of him: “Stop them damned pictures! I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles. My constituents can’t read. But they can’t help seeing those damned pictures.”
Saul Steinberg, untitled, The New Yorker (1963) (illustration credit fm4.9)
With respect to the Image Theory of cartoons—the (possibly magic) power of the image—take Steve Bell’s thought that “there’s no comeback.” It confirms me in my belief that since most of us lack the capacity to answer a cartoon with a counter-cartoon, the cartoon target’s frustration and sense of impotence may be what leads to implosion (especially if the cartoonist has focused on one of what Ted Harrison has termed his subjects’ vanities).
Regarding the cartoon as stimulus, though it’s true that Freudians and neuroscientists differ among themselves about what happens when our brains are exposed to certain cartoons, a growing group of scientists seem eager to reconcile neuroscience and psychiatry into a unified theory. The findings and speculations of men like V. S. Ramachandran and Semir Zeki suggest that neuroaestheticians, despite their nonaesthetic appellation, may have something to teach us after all.
Despite the neuroskepticism I share with Alva Noë, we already know from these two men and others that exaggeration and distortion, particularly of a face, provokes a stronger response in the viewer than a photo would. “The laws of aesthetics may have been hardwired into the visual areas of our brain,” reasons Ramachandran. What’s more, he adds, the caricaturist’s pared-down style, the lines that conjure only the essential, add power to the image. “This is why an outline drawing or sketch is more effective as ‘art’ than a full color photograph.” As many have said, sometimes less is more. By reducing people to their essence, artists can force us to focus on what we might otherwise miss. So perhaps the distortions and the leanness with which most caricatures are rendered combine to form a kind of hyper-charged, streamlined delivery vehicle for the ideas, arguments, narratives, and associations they contain.
• • •
In early November, 2008, I went to see my friend John Leonard, the former editor of The New York Times Book Review, known for having read everything (yes, everything). I asked for his recommended reading list with regard to political cartoons. “I would read Arthur Koestler,” he told me. “I used to think his ideas about humor were too pat and pompous, but I’ve been rereading him, and I think he was onto something.” John, alas, died a few days later, before I could ask him which ideas of Koestler’s, in which of his umpteen books, he was talking about.
Then, a couple of years later, I was talking with my Columbia Journalism School colleague, the Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer Jonathan Weiner, and I asked him the same question. He advised that I read a writer named Mark J. Turner. Turner, he explained, thinks that the brain works in metaphors, and applies his theory to literature, but maybe it could apply as well to cartoons, which are, after all, metaphors.
Lo and behold, in The Way We Think, by Turner and the scholar Gilles Fauconnier, the authors cite the idea Koestler first suggested in his 1964 book The Act of Creation. He called it “bisociation of matrices.” Turner and Fauconnier developed it much further, into a set of algorithms and more, and this time called it “conceptual blending.”
They describe what they call a subconscious, cognitive process unique to the human brain wherein two ideas unlike one another are made to blend together (think “this surgeon is a butcher”) forming what they call an emergent structure containing associations mapped onto one another. To oversimplify a little, what I take from this is that if the brain thinks in metaphors, and since cartoons are, in effect, metaphors, maybe the brain has a special place for them. Maybe it converts them into those superstimuli that neuroscientists like to talk about. (See a Stürmer caricature of Jews as vermin enough times and one’s mind may start to link them subconsciously.)
Fips, Der Stürmer, “Das Ungeziefer” (The Vermin) (1944) (illustration credit fm4.10)
Can it be that taken together, neuroaesthetics and conceptual blending will suggest a way of understanding how the brain processes caricature and why it can cause such highly charged emotional responses? That, like the sharpest knife, the condensed exaggeration of caricature carves its way into your brain and yields a conceptual blend that, unlike text, which must be studied, arrives with the speed of light?
But suppose Noë is right and all these neuros (both the scientists and the aestheticians) are wrong. Suppose all the talk about the right and left hemispheres of the brain, System 1 and System 2, peak-shift effect and conceptual blending, is merely our translation into twenty-first-century-ese of the idea that images are alive, that pictures have powers beyond our understanding. Science still has much to teach us about how images work, and not just neuroscience. Remember, it was Charles Darwin who said, “There is something distinctive about responses to danger. They are instinctual responses toward self-preservation.”
All of which is consistent with the idea that caricatures are in a class by themselves in their potential for engaging and occasionally outraging the emotional mind. What can be more dangerous to one’s sense of self than caricature’s implicit claim that, in the guise of jokey exaggeration, the grotesque distortion in fact reveals the truth about one’s miserable character?
The sentimental idea that outward appearance reflects inner character may indeed be discredited pseudoscience. But the more subversive idea that the masters of the universe of lines—the great cartoonists—by tinkering with physiognomy, can get at, expose, and portray the sometimes ugly truth beneath the surface of those lines, seems not only possible, but plausible. If the subjects of a cartoon (or those who identify with them) worry that the grotesquely deformed self may signify the real self, the true self, the soul beneath the surface, no wonder they react so emotionally to the bad news about their inner core.
So was the golden age of caricature in the England of Hogarth, Gillray, Rowlandson, and Cruikshank, all of whom went about their business in full and splashy colors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Or was it in the France of Daumier and the caricature journals? Or was it decades later in the pre-television U.S., when Boss Tweed foresaw that Nast’s black-and-white caricatures with their universal accessibility would cause his downfall in a way that words could never do? Or was it during Watergate, when cartoonists, including Herblock, did so much to bring down President Nixon and his gang?1 Or given the World Wide Web and the new “apps” that seem to surface daily, is the golden age yet to come? History suggests that a new golden age is always on the horizon, so it’s fitting that a historian—Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—wrote in his introduction to Watergate Without Words that caricatures “catch the spirit of the age and then leave their own imprint on it—they create political heroes and villains in their own image; they teach historians their trade.”
The ultimate faith of democracy is that through free and unfettered rational discourse good ideas will drive bad ideas out of circulation. But the ultimate fact about art is that one image may indeed be worth more than ten thousand words. That means we would do well to pay attention to images in general, and caricatures in particular, built as they are on stereotypes, which have the power to distort and degrade, and may involve archetypes, which touch on the deepest questions of identity—personal, political, and cultural. Like it or not, cartoons and caricatures are here to stay. Rather than dating them, the World Wide Web and digital media appear to extend their reach.
• • •
At the outset I identified two pillars of faith: one, free-speech values über alles; the other, the idea that parody, cartoons, and caricatures are a form of satire, and as such deserve to be protected along with speech itself. My belief in the power and importance of visual language is, if anything, deeper and stronger than when I began, although I understand that often words and images together are what cartoons are all about.
In the case of Hustler Magazine Inc. v. Falwell (1988) the U.S. Supreme Court reassuringly reaffirmed that parody and caricature are and ought to be protected by the First Amendment, even when they are in execrable taste. Jerry Falwell, the Baptist minister, sued the raunchy adult magazine for featuring him in a parody of a Campari ad, in which Falwell recounts his first sexual encounter (with his mother) while the two of them were “drunk off our God-fearing asses.”
The concept of parody and the American tradition of editorial cartooning featured prominently in the Court’s decision:
The appeal of the political cartoon or caricature is often based on exploitation of unfortunate physical traits or politically embarrassing events—an exploitation often calculated to injure the feelings of the subject of the portrayal. The art of the cartoonist is often not reasoned or evenhanded, but slashing and one-sided.… Several famous examples of this type of intentionally injurious speech were drawn by Thomas Nast, probably the greatest American cartoonist to date, who was associated for many years during the post–Civil War era with Harper’s Weekly. In the pages of that publication Nast conducted a graphic vendetta against William M. “Boss” Tweed and his corrupt associates in New York City’s “Tweed Ring.” … Despite their sometimes caustic nature, from the early cartoon portraying George Washington as an ass down to the present day, graphic depictions and satirical cartoons have played a prominent role in public and political debate.… Lincoln’s tall, gangling posture, Teddy Roosevelt’s glasses and teeth, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s jutting jaw and cigarette holder have been memorialized by political cartoons with an effect that could not have been obtained by the photographer or the portrait artist. From the viewpoint of history it is clear that our political discourse would have been considerably poorer without them.
At a minimum, visual language deserves the same protection as verbal language. But suppose, as we have seen on more than one occasion, visual language carries more emotional power than (mere?) words. What does that say about my belief in Habermas’s ideal of a public sphere where democracy depends on continuous conversation, argumentation, and debate, all calculated to inspire, protect, and promote Enlightenment values?
And suppose that cartoons and especially caricatures are indeed image facts that contain arguments and become totems that cannot always be controlled once released? If so, what follows?
Let us assume that the public sphere is indeed governed by what Habermas has called the power of the better argument. I have always imagined that argument to take place in the land of words. But if cartoons, which live in the land of images, are a medium that speaks to the emotions in a polity based on sweet reason, must I now revise or replace that presumption? I’m not sure I know the answer, but I find the beginning of wisdom in the words of a couple of Habermas’s fellow philosophers.
Ronald Dworkin, a fierce free-speech proponent and a philosopher who teaches at Oxford and New York University, seems to have a feeling for visual language. When the Danes did their Muhammads, Dworkin wrote eloquently in The New York Review of Books on the right to ridicule:
Ridicule is a distinct kind of expression: its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended. That is why cartoons and other forms of ridicule have for centuries, even when illegal, been among the most important weapons of both noble and wicked political movements.
It’s not merely that ridicule by caricature is almost by definition the sort of symbolic expression that the framers wanted to protect, but that its form is connected to its power. Or, to put it another way, caricatures have totemic power.
Arthur Danto, of Columbia University, a philosopher reflecting on his lifetime’s immersion in the arts, made a related point about caricature in one of his Nation columns (on Philip Guston’s Nixon):
Caricature has at times succeeded in putting certain public figures in a light so unflattering that their power has been damaged and even destroyed. It became almost impossible for the French to take Louis Philippe seriously once they saw him through Daumier’s drawings as having the form of a pear—the term connotes stupidity. Thomas Nast found such damaging ways of drawing Boss Tweed and his corrupt Tammany cohort that they were graphically and then politically discredited.
Danto adds: “The powers that images can release are unpredictable, which is why censorship exists.”2 I would add to “unpredictable” “uncontrollable.”
Together, these philosophers implicitly make the case for why images (especially when they involve satire and caricature) can speak as loud as, if not louder than, words. Images and words don’t speak the same language. That doesn’t mean they can’t relate to, learn from, collaborate, communicate, and, yes, argue with each other. It falls to us, along with critics, scholars, philosophers, neuroscientists, neuroaestheticians, and whomever, to come up with the rules of engagement. And given all of the questions I have left hanging along the way, I don’t underestimate the difficulty of the task. Art Spiegelman, for one, observes that whatever neuroscience says about the brain, “you know that visual grammar doesn’t function the way verbal grammar does. Verbal grammar has all those semicolons and punctuation marks, all calculated to add nuanced qualifications, which are designed to make for a more civilized discourse, whereas the image has none of that.”
I have not begun to explore such related issues as the role of art in politics, and politics in art. Caricatures are indeed weapons in the cartoonist’s armory, a part of the assault of laughter. But as Mark Twain himself observed, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” I know mine are not original questions. They go back to Aristotle and before. I have also not dealt here with the power of comic strips, animation, television, moving pictures, new visual technologies, and the latest apps. But if one picture is worth ten thousand words, and a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, then consider these words that step, and think about it as you ponder the cartoons on the pages that follow.
• • •
Because this will be an unguided tour, I have prepared a short inventory of propositions that will remind you of what has gone before, but that you might also want to test against the political cartoons and caricatures that you see. I hope that as you wander through the upcoming gallery (which means traveling across the seas and back in time) you will keep in mind the many unanswered questions already raised. And as you do, know that your mind may or may not be operating on more than one track: the logical and the psychological, the literal and the symbolic, the verbal and the visual among them.
PROPOSITION NUMBER ONE: The political cartoon, with or without words, is an argument.
PROPOSITION NUMBER TWO: When that cartoon is a caricature, once released, it can become a totem and as such is uncontrollable.
PROPOSITION NUMBER THREE: The political cartoon, as a form of expression, deserves (as it already has in the U.S.) constitutional protection.
PROPOSITION NUMBER FOUR: Images (especially when they are cartoons) are second-class citizens in the land of words, and that ought not to be the case.
PROPOSITION NUMBER FIVE: The curators of our culture have yet to devise ground rules for adjudicating disputes between words and images.
PROPOSITION NUMBER SIX: Images can speak louder than words, and one caricature may indeed be worth more than ten thousand words.
PROPOSITION NUMBER SEVEN: The term “illustrator” needs to be reexamined. Images convey ideas on their own and don’t merely “illustrate” words.
PROPOSITION NUMBER EIGHT: Physiognomy may indeed be a discredited pseudoscience, but don’t forget Ernst Gombrich’s insight that the caricaturist is in the business of “mythologizing the world by physiognomizing it.”
PROPOSITION NUMBER NINE: The so-called primitives who thought images were in some sense alive and had magical powers may have been right.
PROPOSITION NUMBER TEN: Neuroscientists and neuroaestheticians who tell us that the emotional power of art can be explained by the structure of the brain are winning the argument, but have yet to prove their case.
Because these propositions are set forth only in words, I am beginning to feel discomfort, and will stop here, but I invite amendments—visual, semantic, or otherwise.
1 See Watergate Without Words by Jean-Claude Suares, Jr., whose cover showed Nixon with his hand up the Statue of Liberty’s dress.
2 The New York Times reported in 2011 that Floyd Abrams, arguably America’s leading free speech lawyer, had persuaded a federal judge to rule that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could not require tobacco companies to put new graphic-warning labels on cigarette packages. The images on the labels would have included a corpse and a man breathing smoke out of a tracheotomy hole in his neck. The Times reported: “The judge ruled that the labels were not factual and required the companies to use cigarette packages as billboards for what he described as the government’s ‘obvious anti-smoking agenda.’ ”
Abrams, who praised the ruling, saying the companies had objected to what he called “grotesque” images, was representing Lorillard Tobacco of Greensboro, North Carolina. Five tobacco companies had brought suit, objecting to the use of graphic warnings as an unconstitutional infringement on free speech. The judge agreed with them on the grounds that “it is abundantly clear from viewing these images that the emotional response they were crafted to induce is calculated to provoke the viewer to quit, or never to start, smoking, an objective wholly apart from disseminating purely factual and uncontroversial information.”
