David Levine, “Screwing the World” (1984) (illustration credit itr.1)
In something like thirty years at The Nation,1 first as the magazine’s editor, then as owner and publisher, only once did the staff march on my office with a petition demanding that we not publish something. That something was a cartoon, a caricature.
At the time (February 1984) I thought that the staff’s anger had to do primarily with the fact that they thought the cartoon in question was politically incorrect (or in the argot of the day un-PC). No matter that the caricaturist was the late David Levine, perhaps America’s, if not the world’s, leading practitioner. And no matter that his caricature was a powerful work of art. Indeed, that was the problem.
It all started with a phone call from David, known to me as a former contributor to Monocle, “a leisurely quarterly of political satire” (which meant it came out twice a year) I had founded as a student at Yale Law School in the late 1950s. By now he was known to his fellow artists as one of the great (if unfashionable) realist painters. He was known to the media and intellectual communities as the genius responsible for the artfully witty but wicked crosshatched pen-and-ink caricatures that had helped define the look of the prestigious New York Review of Books since its founding in 1963.
David called because he had done a caricature of Henry Kissinger on assignment for the Review,2 which his editor felt was “too strong.” The magazine said it would publish the drawing “later.” David was not so sure about that, and anyway, wanted to publish it right away. The cartoon, he told me, showed Kissinger in bed on top and the world in the form of a naked woman underneath him. She had a globe where her head should have been, and Kissinger was “screwing her” under an American-flag blanket. Were we interested? “David,” I said, “it will get me in all sorts of trouble with my staff, but send it over.” “Why will it get you in trouble with your staff?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I know it will.”
The cartoon arrived an hour later. It was, as expected, a magnificent caricature. But the look on Kissinger’s face, mingling ecstasy and evil from behind thick black horn-rimmed glasses, made it somehow more than just a caricature; it seemed to capture Kissinger’s complicated soul. I called David and with enthusiasm told him we would publish his drawing. Two hours later, the petition landed on my desk, signed by twenty-five people in an office that I had thought employed only twenty-three. Many of the signatures were followed by little comments. “Sexist!” one had written. “Why isn’t he doing it to a Third World male?” asked another.
David Levine, “Screwing the World” (1984) (illustration credit itr.1)
I called an office-wide meeting. At the outset, I told everyone that it was important to keep three things in mind: First, although I took the staff concern seriously, there would be no vote at the end, because you can’t, or at least shouldn’t, decide a question of aesthetics by majority vote. (Lucky for me, no one asked, “Why not?”) Second, this work had been offered to us on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, so while anyone was free to say whatever he or she pleased, suggestions to change the drawing would have no operative effect. Third, because I had already told Levine that we intended to use his drawing, although the magazine could always change its mind, I thought that a decision not to use it would have about it the whiff of censorship, fairly or not.
The most articulate staff objection to Levine’s drawing was that The Nation was supposed to fight against stereotypes, and this cartoon reinforced the stereotype that sex was dirty and something that an active male on top does to a passive woman on bottom. My favorite moment came when our then-columnist Christopher Hitchens said he thought that the cartoon was not about an act of sex, but about an act of rape, Kissinger ravaging the world. “But if you look at the woman’s hand,” replied the young woman who had made the point about stereotypes, “it seems to be gripping the mattress in what could be the grip of passion.” The white-suited, suave, British-born Christopher, who in those days enjoyed playing the office roué, leaned over and, gripping the young woman’s hand, said, “Trust me, my dear, it’s not the grip of passion.” The discussion, sometimes tense, lasted for a couple of hours, and at my suggestion we invited Levine to join the conversation a few days later, when it was resumed.
David pointed out that as a caricaturist he dealt in stereotypes—which poses a problem when one is rendering, for example, members of a minority race. How do you make a comment on racism without falling into its trap? Nevertheless, it’s the cartoonist’s job to play off of stereotypes that a majority of readers and viewers will recognize. David being David, he also said all the wrong things. When asked why the man had to be on top, for example, he replied (in a room that included people of various sexual preferences), “I’m just showing what normal people do.”
After he had spent two hours on the griddle, having been shown not a jot of deference, I asked him whether he was sorry he came. Levine said he had been doing this work for twenty-five years and had never had such a serious discussion of it, and for that he was grateful. He had gotten some new insights into the problematics of cartooning. But he added, “If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t change a line. I think it’s one of the strongest pieces I’ve ever done.”3
My thought at the time was that beyond the political objections, the staff’s emotional reaction (which I saw as overreaction) was probably a delayed protest over my general failure to consult as much as I might have, or my generational insensitivity to matters of sexual politics. Looking back, I can see that in underestimating the power of Levine’s über-un-PC image to provoke, I may have internalized the views of the many art critics, art historians, and artists who themselves have, over the years, dismissed cartoons and caricatures as fundamentally “not serious,” “inconsequential,” “irrelevant,” “marginal,” “harmless,” “frivolous,” “a benign—even childish—indulgence,” “immoral,” and “silly.”
“Caricature had been considered a dangerous infraction against the canons of beauty, at least since the eighteenth century. Diderot had spoken out against it, as had Goethe,” wrote Aimée Brown Price, associate professor of art history at Queens College, in 1983. Even Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, the distinguished art historian, author of the justly praised celebratory study The Cartoonist’s Armory (1963), tells us that early in the last century, cartoons were merely tolerated as “the pardonable license of the low medium of illustration.” And since caricature is but one form of illustration, consider what it means that Ralph Steadman, among our most brilliant contemporary caricaturists, says with characteristic self-deprecation that it is “a low art. Shoulder to shoulder with a work of fine art, it is nothing but a cheap joke, a space filler, propaganda.”
But it was not until 2005, when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten famously published a dozen cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, that I thought to focus on the power of cartoons as cartoons. After all, from Asia to Europe hundreds of thousands of Muslims took to the streets to protest. Embassies were shut down. Ambassadors were recalled. In Pakistan, protesters burned Danish flags. Worldwide, more than a hundred people were killed, another five hundred injured. Danish goods were boycotted. The cartoonists were forced to go into hiding, with million-dollar price tags put on their heads. And most of these protesters never even saw the caricatures in question. It was the very idea that Muhammad had been caricatured that caused the outrage. What, I asked myself, was going on here?
Suffice it to say that the emotional response of millions of Muslims the world over to the Danish Muhammads, in retrospect, made me suspect that The Nation staff’s reaction to Levine’s Kissinger cartoon had as much to do with the medium as it did with the message it contained.4 It seemed to me that the complex and fascinating issues raised by the impassioned responses to both the Muhammad and Kissinger caricatures warranted further exploration, especially given the gamut they represented—the one involving matters of life and death whereas the other, an in-house revolt, was, on the surface, trivial (although one wouldn’t know it from the intensity of the outrage it provoked).
I quickly discovered what I should have already known: that cartoons and caricatures have been causing controversy for centuries. Hence, this book, which reaches far beyond the Danish Muhammads and David Levine to look at cartoons and caricature worldwide from before the time of Honoré Daumier, the legendary nineteenth-century French sculptor and printmaker who was thrown into jail by King Louis Philippe, up to and after contemporary cartoonists like Naji al-Ali, the Palestinian illustrator who was murdered on the streets of London in 1987.
What accounts for the supercharged outrage of those affronted by cartoons and caricatures? And what accounts for the outsized political influence of cartoonists throughout the world—from the vicious anti-Semitic caricatures of the Nazi periodical Der Stürmer, which helped turn a generation of Germans into Jew haters, to the civil-libertarian cartoons of America’s Herblock, who gave Senator Joseph McCarthy a bucket of tar with a big brush, and literally gave McCarthyism its name? Or what about the controversies that seem to be sparked by the cartoonist Art Spiegelman virtually every time he picks up his pen? What makes political caricature in particular so incendiary? Whence does it derive its power? Is there a correlation between the artistic quality of a caricature and the response it evokes? Why do cartoonists and caricaturists inspire such fear in tyrants and bureaucrats alike? And what do art historians, critics, psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, miscellaneous academics, the cartoonists, artists, and illustrators themselves, and other interested parties have to say about all of this?
My methodology was anything but scholarly. I plunged into what literature I could find on my subject. My reading included scores of books and articles, ranging from scholarly tomes on art history (see bibliography) to books like Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993). I discovered and joined a LISTSERV called Comix-Scholars. I also discovered and contacted an organization called the Cartoonists Rights Network International (CRNI), a network set up to help cartoonists around the world in political trouble. I consulted the files of the Committee to Protect Journalists (cartoonists included), on whose board I sit. I visited the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University, the British Cartoon Archive in Canterbury at the University of Kent’s Templeman Library, and the Cartoon Museum in London, of which I became a member, and the Museum of Comic Art in New York City. I visited the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover, and the Stürmer archives in Berlin. And I talked to anyone who seemed to have something to say on my subject who would talk with me.
And far from pretending to objective detachment, I want to make clear my biases. Bias number one: as you might deduce from my mention of Monocle above, I have long believed in satire as a particularly effective instrument of social criticism.5 It is probably no coincidence that the first article I ever published (as a Yale Law School student in 1958) was about parody. It appeared in Frontier magazine, a West Coast–based progressive journal of opinion that is no longer with us, and argued that parody deserved Supreme Court protection as free speech. It was pegged to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in a case called Benny v. Loews, which involved my favorite radio comedian, Jack Benny. In his TV parody of the 1944 movie thriller Gaslight, Charles Boyer tries to persuade Ingrid Bergman, his movie-wife, that she is going crazy, as part of his plot to kill her. Benny’s parody was called Autolight.
I’ll say a little more about the case only because it occurs to me now these many years later that in some respects parody is analogous to caricature, and as such, germane to our subject, which will come in due course (patience, dear reader). The Supreme Court split 4–4 in the Benny case, thereby upholding the decision of the lower court, which in my view had counted what it couldn’t comprehend.
I think the court assumed that parody should be judged by the same standards as traditional copyright-infringement cases, an assumption that ignored parody’s physiology. Parody is parasitic, approaching its subject from within. Go ahead and parody, said the lower court, only keep your distance, thereby ignoring the insight of The New Yorker’s great parodist Wolcott Gibbs, that “parody should be pitched so little above (or below) the original that an intelligent critic, on being read passages of both, might honestly be confused.” (It was Gibbs who famously wrote of Time magazine’s much-mocked style, “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind […] Where it all will end, knows God!”)
The lower court’s decision seemed to me mindless, and I said so, invoking John Stuart Mill as my ally, by quoting each of the classic arguments for free speech that he put forward in his essay “On Liberty.” I did my sophomore-law-student best to show why parody fit under each of them.
I concluded that since speech should promote the good and the beautiful as well as the true, parody, which amuses, criticizes, satirizes and creates, should enjoy the same constitutional protection as political speech and that, given the courts’ miserable record in the Benny case, perhaps “artists, not judges, should draw the relevant lines.”
Like parody, caricature distorts the original, it can be unfair, and it uses humor to reveal the shortcomings of, and occasionally to humiliate, its subject. For all that, it’s the difference between cartoons and caricatures, which speak in the language of images (which sometimes come with words attached), and words, which speak in the language of, well, words, that makes us ask when, how, and why visual language trumps verbal language when it does.
Bias number two: I am a free-speech absolutist. Even before I entered Yale Law School, where I took Professor Thomas Emerson’s internationally renowned seminar on political and civil rights and liberties, the first of its kind, I was a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Also, long ago I fell under the influence of Jürgen Habermas, one of the few living survivors of the Frankfurt School, the interdisciplinary group of Marxist theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research, founded in Frankfurt in 1923. I find his notion of the public sphere, a civil society dominated by neither the market nor the state, but rather governed by what he has called the power of the better argument, a compelling one, which is not to say that I have been unaware of the importance of the image in the history of art. Nor, having read Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957), am I ignorant of the way advertising can manipulate public opinion. And like everyone else, I have been exposed to the uses of visual propaganda in war- and peacetime political campaigns. Nevertheless I had always assumed that Habermas’s “better argument”—and it has to do not just with Habermas but also the American Civil Liberties Union, the First Amendment, the Enlightenment, and ultimately the case for free expression—would express itself in words, rationalize itself in logic, document itself with “best evidence,” prove itself in argumentation. But if it turns out that on significant occasion tyrants, presidents, courts, people—readers, viewers, citizens, illegals, what have you—are more moved to take political action by cartoons (especially caricatures) than by words, logic, and argument, then what? Stay tuned.
What follows, however, does not pretend to be a history of cartoons and caricature, for two reasons. First, I am not an art scholar or a historian; but more important, as far as I can see, those who are can’t seem to agree with each other on much of anything. Take, for example, the history of caricature. Although there have been any number of so-called histories of caricature, I can tell you that the experts can’t even agree on its date of origin. Some date its birth as early as 1360 b.c., in Egypt, when an anonymous artist skewered Akhenaten, Queen Nefertiti’s pharaoh husband. Others point to Gianlorenzo Bernini’s doodle of Pope Innocent XI (1676), because it was one of the first drawings to assert that no one is beyond ridicule.
Caricature has meant different things to different artists. The Viennese art historian Werner Hofmann argues that Albrecht Dürer’s “Ten Heads in Profile” (1513) represents a kind of proto-caricature. He writes that caricature “according to Dürer is a mathematical exercise that disrupts ideal beauty which is conceived as a norm.” But for Leonardo da Vinci, whom many consider to have invented the form, caricature is rather “an extrapolation of realism taken to its logical extreme.… Moving beyond Universal Beauty, Realism searches in the particular for an image of secular truth.”
In the sixteenth century, the Italian artist Annibale Carracci wrote that a good caricature should “reveal the very essence of a personality”—i.e., it should reveal its subject’s character. But William Hogarth, generally credited as the “father” of English caricature, didn’t agree; and not only that, he seemed to have had little use for the form. In his famous print Characters and Caricaturas, he juxtaposed the two; and later he wrote, “There are hardly two things more essentially different than characters and caricature. Characters are portraits presumably reflecting reality, and caricatures are something else again.” And he added, “Caricature may be said to be a species of lines that are produced by the hand of chance rather than of skill.”
And consider this: Despite Hogarth’s disavowal of the form, when art director and critic Steven Heller published his own book on caricature a few years ago he observed that by the late eighteenth century, “caricature … had been perfected in savage reflections of Britain’s high and low society.” Whom did he include on his list of “delightfully bawdy and scandalously irreverent” caricaturists, along with Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, and George Cruikshank? William Hogarth, of course.
So far from being a definitive history, what follows is an inquiry into how cartoons and caricatures get their power and their ability to make a difference, based in part on my own experience, that of a word person attempting to understand the impact of images.
• • •
I commence this journey in the growing conviction that, far from trivial, under certain circumstances cartoons and caricatures have historically had and continue to have a unique emotional power and capacity to enrage, upset, and discombobulate otherwise rational people and groups and drive them to disproportionate-to-the-occasion, sometimes violent, emotionally charged behavior. I’m talking about everything from overheated and irrational letters to the editor and subscription cancellations to censorship, prosecution, incarceration, and, as indicated above, violence and murder.
I explore three theories that explain why. The first focuses on substance: people get upset about cartoons because of their content (the Content Theory). The second focuses on form—people react so emotionally because of the form or image they see (the Image Theory). The third considers content and image together as a stimulus, and focuses on the brain’s response to it (the Neuroscience Theory). In what follows I briefly consider each of these theories; and then, before inviting you to wander on an unguided tour through the cartoon gallery, I subject you to my lecture on caricature, because it is the one subcategory of cartoon that most frequently seems to cause more than its share of comedy and tragedy, not to mention mischief.
1 The Nation, founded by abolitionists in 1865 following the Civil War, is America’s oldest weekly magazine, known for its dissenting, radical, and often troublemaking left-liberal politics.
2 The caricature was to accompany a meditative essay on the Kissinger Commission’s recently issued Caribbean Basin report calling for economic aid to Central America.
3 Six years after the fact, Levine’s judgment was, arguably, vindicated. When the American studies and art-history departments of Columbia University decided to mount an art exhibit to commemorate The Nation’s 125th anniversary, the curators—having surveyed the work of thousands of candidates, including such fine artists as Louis Lozowick, Ben Shahn, Rockwell Kent, George Grosz, and William Gropper—in ignorance of the dispute, chose Levine’s Kissinger as one of forty pieces to be exhibited; when the exhibit moved to the José Luis Sert Gallery at Harvard, they put the drawing on the catalogue cover.
4 When I first wrote about this episode in 2005 in A Matter of Opinion (see pages 356–9 in that book), I focused on Levine’s message, neglecting the importance of his medium.
5 My belief in the power of satire to achieve social change was reinforced one day in the spring of 1962. I was sitting in my Monocle office when I had an unexpected visitor. It was a little-known recent graduate of Harvard Law School named Ralph Nader, who went on to found the public interest law movement. He was just back from the Soviet Union, where he had been on assignment for The Christian Science Monitor, writing on Krokodil, the Soviet satire magazine. He was full of stories about how in Eastern Europe satire magazines—deploying cartoons—served the function of an ombudsman, and he thought the same thing could happen in the U.S.
“A visit from the Krokodil man is feared,” he told me. Not only that, but, as he would later report, Krokodil “is the granddaddy of twenty-two similar endeavors published in the native languages of the Soviet Republics.… ” In addition, each Communist country in Eastern Europe had its own satire journal, such as Poland’s Szpilki and Hungary’s Ludas Matyi.
He was most impressed with Krokodil’s use of cartoons. As Krokodil’s editor told him, “We don’t have much success in eliminating the evils of capitalism abroad, but we do expose corruption, irresponsibility, and other bad elements in our country’s economic, social, and cultural life.”
A typically powerful cartoon attacking the listlessness of sales personnel showed a row of mannequins and salesladies interspersed. One customer was telling another, “They are all just as attentive!”
