THE CARICATURE BOOK 1936–38
Completing the Manuscript in Vienna
In the months that led up to the Daumier exhibition, in the undisturbed quarters of Kris’s study, the two scholars continued their work on the book manuscript. Gombrich recalled the routine that they had adopted from the start of their collaboration:
I well remember visiting him in the Museum in those days when he was physically so tired from standing on his feet all day that he was close to collapsing, but he not only carried on, but would rush home in a taxi to receive the evening’s patients. After a rapid supper I would then come at about nine o’clock and we often sat together till midnight talking about caricature and about many other things as well. When it came to writing we really wrote together, he sitting on one side of the desk and I on the other. Usually it was he who held the pen but we would jointly formulate every sentence before he wrote it down.1
They intended the caricature book, in crucial part, for the Warburg circle in London, so that before Gombrich returned to England in February 1937, they packaged a still unfinished draft and sent it off to Saxl.2 In March, Saxl wrote to Kris offering to assist with the book’s publication:
I hope that you do not believe that I did not immediately read the caricature. I find it extraordinarily well-done in the arrangement. About the execution we must still speak. I believe that the book, as it is, would already find its readership in England—where I can help with that, I would very much like to help.3
In fall 1937, as Anschluss approached, Kris wrote to Saxl that he planned to complete the book’s final chapter, covering the psychology of caricature, in November.4
Gombrich translated the full German manuscript, Die Karikatur, into an English version, Caricature, for publication in exile. He kept the London manuscript to the same length as the Viennese: two hundred and fifty-four typescript pages of text and citations. On a separate sheet inserted in the Vienna version, he placed the rough draft of a German foreword with a partial, typed English translation of it, including handwritten revisions.5
Both the German and English versions of the foreword leave no doubt that the book aimed to bridge Kris’s Freudian researches and the Warburg circle’s art historical approach. Describing psychoanalytic theory as critical to bringing art history in line with science, Kris accepted the sole burden for applying Freud’s concepts:
When we speak of psychology, we mean a certain psychological school. One of us (Kris) is also a psychoanalyst and pupil of Freud; he carries the responsibility for the fact that the thoughts developed here conform closely to the Psychoanalytic approach. This should be specially stressed, because the nature of psychoanalysis has suffered from many misunderstandings. We base ourselves [superscript-lean upon] its findings, because it is the first, and to date the only scientific doctrine of the central psychic processes in man. We [take-crossed out] the approach of psychoanalysis, but use its terminology with reticence: we have attempted [to] formulate in the simplest possible fashion all psychological insights which we turn to account. The (type of) problems, then, posed in this work took this point of departure from psychoanalytic studies [here Kris’s first paper on caricature is footnoted]; which indicated the usefulness of extending the range of our work into this field.6
Behind the disclaimer remained the question: would Saxl associate the Warburg Institute with the book?
Aby Warburg interpreted symbolic images as vessels of memory that invited scientific investigation and he believed that Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious confirmed his view. Like Jung, he regarded image making as a spiritualizing process and rejected Freud’s theory of sexual sublimation as irrelevant to artistic creativity. As for Saxl, he explored the mnemonic and emotive power of images, but did not look for reinforcement from mental science or, as Gombrich later noted, seek a psychology of art. Kris and Gombrich kept Saxl’s ambivalence clearly in mind:
From our preoccupation with the historical material we have gained insights, which we neither expected nor sought. For these insights, as presented here, we are both responsible in equal degree. We worked on them together for several years, whereby Gombrich attended on his own to the collection of material in many areas. Although finally not living in the same place, thanks to the help of the Warburg Inst. we were able nevertheless to work over [superscript-revise] and set down this work together. We owe [feel-crossed out] a longstanding debt to [this Instit-crossed out]ute’s orientation in research and [the] scientific proficiency of this [Inst-crossed out] [sphere of work (brackets in original)].7
There followed a crucial parenthetical comment: “(We would not however make it responsible for the basic attitude of this study of whose problematic nature we are perfectly conscious[.])”8 Following this remark Gombrich added in German: “Except if Saxl strikes this sentence.”9 The foreword concluded with acknowledgments that emphasized first “the guidance of the Warburg Institute and namely the personal participation of F. Saxl.” They included, from Vienna, Otto Benesch, Leo Planiscig, and the cultural historian Hans Tietze, and from the Warburg Institute, Gertrud Bing and Rudolf Wittkower.10 Neither the German nor English manuscript of the book included a dedication, but Kris planned to dedicate it—as he had done his study of artist biographies—to the Warburg Institute.11
What now follows in this chapter will retain the book manuscript’s original order of presentation and adhere to its division into five chapters. Although Gombrich after the war became dissatisfied with this organization, it strongly reflects how his and Kris’s attitudes toward psychology, art, and politics developed during the crisis of the interwar republic and how their project evolved in response to that crisis. As threats to republicanism intensified, Kris and Gombrich broadened their conception of caricature. The study of an experiment in psychology and art expanded to consider how that experiment evolved into political protest. Ultimately, Kris and Gombrich came to see that the success of the psychological and artistic experiment depended strongly on its political fate.
The Classical Mask
The book’s first chapter, “Caricatura,” reviewed early theories of caricature. Defined as “portraits which show the features of the subject in comic distortion, without losing the resemblance,”12 caricatures raised fundamental questions about the ancient conception of art. Thus theorists made various attempts at reconciling caricature’s embrace of distorted and unstable appearances with the classical tradition’s search for ideal forms and universal laws of proportion. Perhaps the most prominent theory held that caricature art represented a different type of idealization, one that located perfection not in beauty but in deformity—the bella deformità. Other arguments suggested that it provided a unique form of escape for working artists, or a useful recreation for divinely inspired geniuses, or, more technically, a generative modelletto or sketch. One Neo-Platonic theory asserted that caricature sought to depict the essential quality—or Idea—of a person: “caricature is more like because it gives more than mere physical information about the subject: it grasps his essence.”13
For Kris and Gombrich, Renaissance-era caricature made a crucial discovery: the ignoble in human beings hid not behind the mask of nobility but within it. As they wrote:
[O]ne could even say (cum grano salis) that caricature, at least that of the 17th century, is a special order of the ideal portrait, an ideal portrait with inverted signs, in which it is not the noble [and] elevated in man which shines forth, but the low and ugly which stands unmasked.14
Like Karl Kraus, they asserted that caricaturists revealed new truths not by removing the mask but by reconfiguring it.
The great eighteenth-century satirist and empiricist William Hogarth explained the creation of such reconfigurations psychologically: a series of rapid mental associations produced a quick, unexpected connection between a familiar likeness and an unfamiliar distortion. Modern psychological theories, Kris and Gombrich pointed out, described the same cognitive shortcut as the “surprising realization of a similarity in the apparently dissimilar.”15 Caricature art thus appeared untrained, accidental, playful, and even childlike. And by producing pleasure and discomfort simultaneously, it became after Hogarth’s era a volatile art form: “In the 19th century all comic or aggressive art, particularly that reducing reality to a few lines, will come to be called caricature.”16
Kris and Gombrich traced caricature’s beginnings to a confidential, even secretive, activity within the neo-classicist artistic circle of Annibale Carracci in late Renaissance Bologna. The Bolognese engaged in isolated games with portraiture, surreptitiously drawing and privately distributing humorous or iconoclastic portraits for their own entertainment. Away from the view of patrons and public, they banished classical lines and proportions from their drawings, choosing instead to distort or exaggerate features of the face and body into comic configurations. The studio became an invigorating laboratory, closed off from the world of patronage and commissions.
Carracci and his circle eventually took their activity into the streets. The results survived in what became known as the “Munich notebook,” a compilation of sketches believed to be drawn by members of the Carracci circle or its later followers. In this notebook or sketchbook faces came to life from various angles and at various tempos: “distortions set in experimentally,” the caricaturists acting with “experimental swiftness.”17 These instantaneous products of the closed atelier or open-air street recalled well-known comic types from popular theater:
Thin and fat, dwarfs and giants point to a world familiar to contemporaries from the Comedia dell’Arte [sic]; the actors in a scenario which starts its triumphal march through European 17th and 18th century graphic art in the work of Jacques Callot.18
But although caricature derived inspiration from the comic stage performer, it acquired no social function or public audience. Indeed, it seems a strong peculiarity of caricature that at each phase of its evolution, it had first to pass through the filter of stage life before entering the public domain.
Not long after the Carracci initiated their experiment, Bernini steered it in a new direction, focusing not on the body but on the face alone and the perceived unity of facial expression. Rather than singling out and exaggerating distinctive physical traits, Bernini “compresses the multiplicity of form into a schematic shape.”19 Reminiscent of Loewy’s early theory of archaic art, Kris and Gombrich emphasized that Bernini reproduced only those facial features and expressive gestures that comprised a viable memory picture. And anticipating Gombrich’s theory of the transmission of conceptual schemas, they explained that Bernini produced those pictures by modifying pre-existing mental constructs:
Bernini starts with the whole, not with the parts; he conveys the image which we fix in our mind when we try to recall someone in our memory, that is with the unified expression of the face—and it is this expression which he distorts and heightens.20
Bernini represented an isolated phenomenon. For centuries caricature art remained socially ostracized, a mere private amusement. Caricaturists themselves let their spontaneous, unforgiving imaginings run riot, but in so doing acquired no reputation as artists.
Public recognition finally came when Roman patrons and connoisseurs took an interest. In Rome, Pier Leone Ghezzi developed a routinized, step-by-step memory technique for producing caricature portraits. Working from the mental image that he formed of the subject, Ghezzi introduced distortions into it only as he first sketched the image on paper. The finished portrait, however, toned down or removed the most severe deformations, safely muting the sketch’s offensive or confrontational aspect.
Roman elites now avidly sought caricatured likenesses of themselves and of their social circle. Caricature became a teachable technique and its images served as badges of status. Yet, it remained sequestered—an exotic curiosity or hothouse growth, like other objects invented or nurtured for the enjoyment and edification of aristocratic households. As Kris and Gombrich explained:
Nothing could better characterise the cultivated sceptical atmosphere of the early 18th century than the fact that it allows caricature, if only in adulterated form, to become a category of art in itself. The theory of the bella deformita[sic][,] of the unmasking function of a caricatured portrait, attracts a social stratum and a period which welcomed criticism of man in epigram, epic and satire. But this criticism was at once limited to a narrow, private circle; Ghezzi caricatures the friends and acquaintances of his patrons. Caricature acted as criticism, as unmasking—but criticism and unmasking are a game played by art-lovers. Caricature has become a branch of art, but a branch for connoisseurs. It has left the world of the artist’s workshop, but it has not wandered very far: it has found its new abode in the libraries and reception rooms of the nobles, the protectors of the arts, men of learning. It has never quite left this social milieu and is still today very much alive in the entourage of artist and art-lover. But that was not to be its most effective domain.21
Eventually, to draw caricatures—and to be caricatured—came to signify more than membership in the cognoscenti. Reconfiguring the mask ceased to languish as an esoteric game.
The Switch
As discussed in the manuscript’s second chapter, “Comic Art and the Pre-conditions of Caricature,” caricaturists flourished outside the elite world of aristocrat and patron because they maintained ancient but still thriving contacts with popular, borderline regions of art. In particular, caricature preserved faded but protean images of the grotesque—the surviving remnants of archaic anxiety and pagan excess. But the incorporation of grotesque imagery reflected also the inherent “switch character”22 (Kippcharakter) of vision. The human countenance formed a composite image, a mask containing alternative configurations and alternative truths. Relying on the switch nature of perception, caricaturists therefore directed viewers’ attention to possibilities already residing within the mask. Distortion and exaggeration functioned not only as mechanisms of horror or humor but also as techniques of subtle reconfiguration bringing new truths—psychological, social, and political—into view.23
Loewy had taught that the ancients incorporated visions of demonic creatures into ritual magic in the belief that the sight of their grotesque, grimacing faces would deter evil. According to Warburg, Renaissance imagemakers endeavored to detach those symbols from their archaic, violent memories. As Kris and Gombrich now described, the use of grimacing or grotesque visages remained a highly fluid, ambivalent activity:
The sinister expression of the threateningly distorted face is the direct predecessor of comic mimicry. The grimace, the distorted human face which is the autoplastic equivalent to the mask, plays even today this dual role in the human consciousness, which is revealed as it were in many a folk-custom. There is only a hair’s breadth dividing the grinning grimace from the laugh.24
Kris himself knew all too well how thin was this distinction: at the Kunsthistorisches Museum he had expected laughs in response to his joke directed against the Vaterländische Front, but instead met with frozen silence.
That same, unsettling switch between the humorous and demonic surfaced in Sedlmayr’s essay on Bruegel’s macchia. Kris and Gombrich now argued that with Bruegel the switch image “may have lost some of its terror because of its closer proximity to the didactic and illustrative.”25 It functioned as a visual pun. Sedlmayr, they knew, took the opposite view: Bruegel’s calculated ambiguity “such as also appears in the caps of the ‘Children’s Games’ which in conjunction make up a grimace, has an effect which Sedlmair [sic] has described as ‘alienation’ (Entfremdung).”26 Bruegel’s paintings indeed evoked a distancing effect: “Medical psychology shows that an impression of the uncanny is always accompanied by a feeling of depersonalization. A milder feeling of this sort gradually slips into the comic.”27 Comic art, however, “utilises feelings of alienation in the smallest quantities.”28 Sedlmayr’s interpretation rested on views other than medical psychology: “Discussion of Sedlmair’s [sic] provocative arguments would start from this basis, which give only partial access, of course, to his attitude.”29 Behind Sedlmayr’s theory of estrangement loomed the grim countenance of Austro-Fascism.
The switch nature of caricature pointed not only to its hybrid background in pagan antiquity but also to its multivalent quality in seventeenth-century Bologna. Like Bruegel, Annibale Carracci applied non-classical techniques to his own mestieri, or figures from the street:
If one considers the scenes in context and amongst works of art contemporary with them, one is amazed at the freedom with which it has been possible to view the various and typical forms of life. We have here some relationship with art north of the Alps in the spirit of Bruegel: the far-ranging eye for life, falling on the low-class as on the anti-decorous in the sense of antiquity, has an affinity with the Fleming’s basic attitude.30
Unlike Bruegel, Carracci did not produce a new vision of the masses or create a new type of portraiture; that accomplishment fell to the great Mannerist Caravaggio. Instead, he pursued the experiment of caricature within—not against—the classical tradition. His images served as commentaries on classicizing portraits rather than as borrowings from everyday popular art. Yet, the mestieri and caricatures brought Carracci—even if against his will—to a documentary perspective, one that benefited from a close observation of the world and a well-developed sense of irony toward his own classicizing art:
They [the mestieri and the caricatures] are connected through a common relationship to everyday life. If in the “mestieri” we have parodic application of the formal means of the “reformed” grand manner, then in caricature we have an analogous parody of the new theory of portraiture.31
Kris and Gombrich’s discussion of Carracci’s street drawings recalled Dvořák’s lectures: “The 16th century, as in Bruegel, went so far as to take typical figures such as peasants directly from the life, identifying them as members of a class; this gradual advance leaves one step to works like the mestieri.”32 Like Bruegel’s paintings, Carracci’s sketches and caricatures provided a visual record of the variety within everyday social existence.
Carracci’s faces also conjured imaginative, playful visions. His reconfigurations became comedic formulas: “The external appearance of the individual is generalised, transformed into a type. This world of types is comic even without comparison with the individual, even without a thought to the model caricatured.”33
Not surprisingly, after his death, Carracci’s figures came back to life not as images in visual art but as characters on the popular stage. And the agent of their revival was Callot, the master of switching between on-stage and off-stage visions:
The types which make their appearance in the Munich sketch-book are constantly resurrected in the comic art of the following century as variations on the theme of man. They pass from hand to hand and become basic to the repertory of comic pictorial types. The fame acquired through their dissemination is associated with the name of Jacques Callot, who arrived in Italy shortly after the death of Annibale Carracci and must have known caricatures by the Carracci and their circle such as were preserved in albums.34
Callot himself never drew caricature portraits. Instead, he fused actors’ masks onto the visages of real human beings and in doing so offered both a critique of society and a documentary vision of humanity. Enlivened and sharpened by the influence of Carracci, Callot went beyond sketchbook reflections and self-irony: “For the grotesque types of dwarf and Capitano, of figures from the Commedia dell’Arte and the street, provide a critical theory of man as in the work of Bruegel.”35 In the galleries of the Albertina, Kris and Gombrich had displayed Daumier’s work as the culmination of an anti-idealizing, documentary art. In the caricature manuscript, they traced its historical lineage in Bruegel, Carracci, and Callot.
Highly attuned to the switch character of images, caricaturists challenged the very stability of human vision. They thrived on the inherently fluid nature of seeing—on the visual and cognitive shortcuts that Hogarth described as the essence of caricature—and they exploited the mind’s capacity to alternate between opposite constructs of a single feature, gesture, or expression. Just as Arcimboldo manipulated the fluidity of perception—its power to switch between alternatives—to produce his famous heads of the seasons, so Carracci drew faces out of animal features.
Here Kris and Gombrich directed the reader to Schlosser’s work on the chambers of wonders. Arcimboldo had painted his images “out of fruit and animals, so that one can see them in two ways: as still-life, or as part of a face.”36 Carracci’s animal-like caricatures and Arcimboldo’s fantasized faces each relied on the viewer’s ability to respond to “the artist’s invitation to various modes of seeing and of interpreting shapes.”37 In the objects that Schlosser had guarded and cherished, Kris and Gombrich now recognized the vital and disconcerting switch character of appearances.
Hogarth’s satiric analysis of human nature took the switch technique to its furthest limits. In his drawings, play with form—not ritual magic—produced the switch between the grotesque and the comic: “Line and dot are according to Hogarth the ideal caricature of the singer; line and dot, seen as a man, are at the same time a grotesque image.”38
But Hogarth did not pursue the political implications of his insight. Daumier, however, did.
Kris and Gombrich’s third chapter, “The Satiric Image,” opened with Daumier’s world and its defining image: “La Poire.” Even in our day, it is not difficult to call to mind Philipon and Daumier’s depiction of the head of Louis-Philippe metamorphosing slowly into the pear: la poire in the caricature, fool or fathead in Parisian vernacular. The transformation of Louis-Philippe’s head into a pear challenged his competence as a leader; more importantly, it condemned his betrayal of the revolution that brought him to power. It exposed not an ineffective monarch but an illegitimate ruler who overthrew the July Revolution, turned against the people of Paris, and transformed into “the hated symbol of reaction.”39 The image marked a decisive moment in both the history of caricature and the politics of culture: “The visual game of the Carraccis which transforms a face into an object has not changed in principle. The joke for the few, however, has become an appeal to the masses, a private aesthetic has become a social phenomenon.”40
Daumier developed the pear into a vision of French politics—past, present, and future. A reminder of the republican revolution betrayed, his and Philipon’s image became a call to action. The monarch and his officials viewed it as “a prelude to depriving him of actual power.”41 And so, after a long period of private experimentation with artistic form and content, caricature in the century of Daumier generated a civic language and popular symbolism that inspired public responses.
Whereas the nineteenth-century pear evoked anger at the abandonment of the republic, in the twentieth century, such defamatory images—as the work of a “mob”42—became more dangerous, especially in the hands of nationalists and anti-Semites. Bringing strongly to mind Heinrich Heine’s prediction that those who burned books would end by burning people, Kris and Gombrich recalled that attacking effigies now provided training in the use of lethal violence: “Target practice with the enemy image has become all too familiar to us from the wars of our own time. Contempt and hatred here serve as pretexts for the primitive character of the action.”43 Defamatory images facilitated a hellish descent from symbolic to actual violence.
This volatility of visual images had been Warburg’s chief intellectual concern and consuming private fear, and in art history he had searched continuously for signs of progress away from defamatory magic toward reliance on symbolic communication. His seminal essay on Protestant broadsheets during the Reformation claimed to find spiritualizing signs even in the fevered propaganda and counter-propaganda generated by religious warfare: illustrators who used grotesque and demonic imagery to depict their religious adversaries wielded a visual vocabulary, not magical incantations. Despite, or perhaps because of, their own fears, Kris and Gombrich supported Warburg’s thesis. Acts such as overturning statues or carrying mock coffins revealed “a fluid tr[a]nsition here from true magical identification of man and image, to symbolic action.”44 Pictures of the devil or images that identified an enemy with the devil evolved from depictions of Satan incarnate to visual allegories and finally to comic personifications: “This supersession of the literal by the metaphorical is of a typical nature, for it characterises that development from sensory representation to logical signs, to which A. Warburg devoted his research.”45
Caricature thus could overcome defamation to become an instrument of social dialogue and political criticism.
The Moderns
The fourth and longest chapter, “Caricature in the Modern Sense,” detailed the rise and decline of caricature after it left the studios and salons and entered the public arena. Kris and Gombrich identified three tendencies of caricature in the modern sense: social commentary, psychological analysis, and technical experimentation. As social critic, psychological researcher, and technical innovator, Daumier integrated the three tendencies, and in doing so, created modern political art. No caricaturist had repeated his accomplishment since.
Caricature art as social criticism emerged with the growth of print media during the Enlightenment, as Kris and Gombrich emphasized: “Caricature finds its social role in the broadsheet.”46 The audience for caricature came from the widening political universe in which openness meant literally being open to view: “the public to which it appeals, before which the victim is to be mocked, must already be familiar with the appearance of the victim.”47 Civic spectacle and public confrontation created the necessary environments for caricature, which “presupposes a conception of public and publicity, a stage on which the individual moves, a forum where he can be judged.”48 Modern politics as performance stage and as popular forum generated two types of caricature, each with its defining practitioner. Politics as a communal theater inspired Hogarth, and as a collective tribunal, Daumier.
While connoisseurs in Italy exchanged caricatures within private networks, artists in Britain began to produce drawings for popular consumption. The closed world of Roman salons gave way to the open life of London streets, where British political and social critics transformed caricature into a public discourse:
Caricature found in England such fertile ground where it might flourish. Only here was there at the time of Ghezzi, after the “Glorious Revolution”, that atmosphere of publicity which can only be created by democratic institutions; here the broadsheet becomes “cartoon” in the modern sense, and the defamatory image caricature.49
Like Jonathan Swift and the literary satirists who followed him, caricaturists came fully into their own amidst the parliamentary deal making, backroom skirmishing, and popular agitation that characterized political life from the age of Walpole to that of George III and Pitt the Younger. The new caricaturists possessed far greater willingness to depict the street than did their Renaissance forebears:
The flood of satirical prints which sweeps in when the first phase of the reign of George III cedes to a more democratic period of active political participation in political affairs, carries unheard-of potency in pictorial satire as a whole. The display-windows of the booksellers and publishers Holland and Fores, who also hired out portfolios of the evening, are an expression of the new social role of this satire, in which portrait caricature is predominant and to which it gives its name. For these prints, which caused congestion of pedestrian traffic around the windows where they were displayed, which became universal “conversation-pieces” at social gatherings, and which were sometimes banned while their authors were imprisoned—are now called “caricatures” themselves.50
Caricature brought together visual satire and popular protest. What Hogarth grudgingly accepted as a limited experiment now threatened to break its artistic and social bounds. As Kris and Gombrich explained, “That fusion, which the old Hogarth feared would be detrimental to art as a whole, is now complete.”51
The caricaturist James Gillray shared Swift and Hogarth’s anxieties toward the new democratic masses and popular movements. Gillray directed his most scathing caricatures not at political institutions but at political personalities—Pitt being his chief object—and at national enemies, above all Napoleon. Although he used art chiefly to expose his target’s corrupt character, he also at times employed it to “unmask his politics.”52 Gillray and other English caricaturists displayed their portraits in shop windows and in widely distributed pictorial broadsheets. But having helped transform the broadsheet into a critical mass medium, they refused to ally their artwork with any popular political movement.
In Paris, under the bourgeois monarchy, Daumier took the step that Hogarth and Gillray rejected. Although not yet ready to associate themselves or their art with a revolutionary party or radical street movement, Philipon and the illustrators of La Caricature and Le Charivari—including the young Daumier—used caricature to critique the sham constitutional government. In the case of Daumier “the pictorial joke is addressed to an educated public with a preference for indirect representation through symbols which regular readers of the journal learn to understand. The pear is such a symbol, standing for the fathead Louis-Philippe.”53 Daumier pushed the use of classical language even further to make a political point:
Daumier’s impressive adaptation of Raphael’s Cartoon, where Paul preaching in Athens becomes Demosthenes appealing “Atheniens [sic], prenez-garde à Philippe”, is not intended as a mockery of Raphael, but as a meaningful re-use of a famous figure. The pathos of classical sculpture is not to be degraded, but exploited.54
Daumier’s experimentation with classical themes, according to Kris and Gombrich, injected the popular broadsheet with “figurative energy.”55
Political criticism in turn inspired artistic innovation. Daumier and his associates found their chief model not in British satire but in Goya’s documentary scenes and fantastic visions: “It is in the work of Francisco Goya that the broadsheet found, for what is probably the first time, and surely in the most magnificent form, true pictorial dignity.”56
In The Disasters of War, Goya employed a private visual symbolism to depict the sufferings of the Spanish masses under Napoleonic occupation. Building on Goya’s legacy, Daumier developed in caricature a “lingua universal,”57 which combined naturalist depictions with magical imagery and which moved beyond classicism to integrate the documentary and the symbolic. Artistic experimentation and political engagement reinforced each other. Further, as French censors became more active, symbolic inventiveness became more crucial to transmitting political messages. Philipon published the famous series of pears as a public defense against the charge of lese-majesty.
But censorship and the increasing use of symbolic language also encouraged a counter-impulse toward non-political play with visual imagery. The union of documentary substance and symbolic form that Goya had initiated and that Daumier had strengthened began to disintegrate. Grandville, who used caricature to construct ever more fantastic visual designs, attracted the notice of Baudelaire, who perceived in his artwork a fascinating dream world. Kris and Gombrich cited Baudelaire’s commentary in which the poet explained how Grandville—unintentionally—caricatured his own art:
Before his death he applied himself stubbornly to the noting of his successive dreams and nightmares in a plastic form, with all the precision of a ste[n]ographer writing down an orator’s speech. Grandville the artist really wanted his pencil to explain the law of the association of ideas! Grandville is indeed very comic, but he is often so without knowing it.58
Grandville’s broadsheet drawings reflected not worldly engagement but extreme introversion, as Kris and Gombrich wrote,
for in Grandville’s designs the game with form serves illustration no longer, it has abandoned all pretence to propaganda. It is even questionable how fantasies of this sort may still be brought within the realm of comic art. It is a psychic event which is represented, an inner sequence of images.59
The art that reproduced dreamscapes surfaced again in the next century, not as caricature but as Surrealist imagery: “Only with 20th century surrealism could such experiments become once more the object of artistic interest, and at the same time finally removed from the realm of the comic.”60
The Surrealists’ use of caricature epitomized its fate after 1900. What Daumier elevated to a medium of universal expression became a language not of urban politics but of dream psychology.
Political art as practiced by Callot, Goya, and Daumier, which forged caricature as its chief weapon and the broadsheet as its mass medium, declined rapidly in the twentieth century. As psychological art replaced it, the experiment with caricature turned inward. And as Kris and Gombrich considered this new psychological direction, they turned to Hogarth as the model of innovation—Hogarth, who had abhorred the use of caricature as a political tool and had been the first to mold visual parody into a psychological technique.
In psychological art, as in political art, caricaturists exploited the switch nature of images. The Carracci circle, followed by Bernini, had dispensed with stable physical likenesses and explored instead the intrinsic fluidity of facial appearances and expressions. Like other late Renaissance artists, the Bolognese became attached artistically and scientifically to physiognomics—“the theory of clues to character in the human face”61—and they searched the human visage for indicators of “concrete psychic states or particular mental attitudes.”62
Yet, the more closely caricaturists observed the human countenance, the more instability they discovered there. Bernini became the first caricaturist to focus on the “mobile human countenance.”63 He and the artists who eventually followed his lead emphasized not physiognomy but pathognomy, the approach that originated with Leonardo da Vinci and called for scrutiny not of physical or anatomical traits but of the “play of features.”64 Their observations centered on “forms of expression.”65 While Leonardo’s studies of human emotional expression extended beyond facial features to encompass gesture, action, and behavior, in the age of the Carracci the face began to serve artists as the crucial indicator. Thus the Bolognese and Bernini accepted “the primacy of facial mimicry in the representation of emotions,”66 and artists by the eighteenth century began to use the play of facial expressions as a tool of psychological analysis.
Hogarth’s revolutionary achievement was to create a lingua franca for psychological art. His accomplishment went far beyond a heightened mastery of facial reactions: “It is only in Hogarth that this type of human description takes on universal significance; finding its richest form in those prints in which the artist represents people singing[,] laughing or listening to a lecture.”67 For Hogarth the secret of portraiture lay in capturing outbursts of human spontaneity: “For spontaneous expression distorts man and unmasks him in the distortion.”68 Psychology became the great equalizer: “He shows us [how] man en masse lets himself go, how the similarity of reaction has a levelling effect: man is robbed of his rank and composure, he is just one man laughing amongst many.”69
A throng, helpless with laughter, appeared on the subscription tickets for A Rake’s Progress, the “curtain-raiser to a sequence of pictures which he wanted to be viewed as tableaux from the stage.”70 In that series of prints, elite society became the stage performers and the crowd their audience—necessary observers of the social drama, but transfixed, confined, and immobilized by it. For Hogarth, the crowd as an object of psychological study demonstrated the liberating effects of inward release and the rich diversity of emotional responses. Its social function, however, had to be limited to that of an astute and receptive audience.
Among the satirists who succeeded Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson also located in crowds the extremes of human emotion from hilarity to sorrow. Yet, Rowlandson emphasized above all else the presence of untamed avarice and wild fear. As Kris and Gombrich stated, “he too unmasks mass-man, but his unmasking serves to reveal not only the absurdity but also the innate ugliness of the human being.”71 Rather than replicate Leonardo’s “experiments of the scientific artist,”72 Rowlandson implemented “Swift’s vision of the Yahoos.”73 For him, the grimace represented not the exception in human emotion but the psychological norm: “The art of Rowlandson might be summarised in the notion that the noble expression of the human face is artificial, a fake. It is only genuine where the elemental breaks through in the form of the ugly.”74 Rowlandson’s caricatures depicted the crowd not as the audience of a grand spectacle but as the arena of the grotesque.
Psychological art found a necessary corrective in the work of Daumier, whose crowds expressed more than spontaneous catharsis or repulsive excess. His masses exhibited a shared pathos: “In Daumier too, all people in extreme situations are similar, yet not only similarly comic, but also similarly pathetic—similarly great.”75
Like Benesch, both Kris and Gombrich stressed Daumier’s perception of the crowd as heroic. Far surpassing Rowlandson as both a collective psychologist and group portraitist, Daumier recognized that the so-called mob embodied a common fate: “The Daumier crowd poseeses [sic] a p[a]thos to itself … In this he transcends Rowlandson.”76 Crowds revealed not merely the comic or grotesque extremes of emotional behavior but, more importantly, the core of psychological suffering: “He is the contemporary of the great naturalists in literature, of Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, for whom not only comedy, but also tragedy knows no more social boundaries. Daumier alone can claim this position.”77
But his images conveyed not only empathy for the supposedly disreputable masses but also insight into what passed for reputable behavior in the bourgeoisie. Carefully worked out angles of illumination revealed the switch nature of the bourgeois countenance, as astute contemporaries recognized:
The greatness od [of] Daumier and his role as a critic of the contemporary social scene has nowhere been better described than by the Journal (for March 13 1865) of the Goncourt brothers: “I saw the other day, apssing [sic] by Rue Lafitte, some magnificent Daumier watercolours representing panathenaeas of the judiciary, lawyers’ meetings, and judges’ processions against pale backgrounds, illuminated by the sinister glare of an examining magistrate’s study, by the grey light of a corridor in the Law courts. They are treated with fantastically spectral washes of Chinese ink. The heads are hideous, with a frightening ribaldry and gleefulness. These black men have some of the ugliness of repulsive antique masks, in the record-office. The smiling solicitors have a corybantian air, there is something of the faun in these macabre lawyers.” The switch-character of the satire has surely never been seized with greater precision.78
As in the later art of photography, manipulation of light could be enough to reconfigure the elements and reveal the truths that resided within the bourgeois mask of respectability.
Just as Daumier mastered light, so Hogarth mastered staging. And in his universal theater, he relied on character masks for his psychological portraits. Reproducing the switch between stage and stalls, spectator and actor, his drawings transformed middle-class theater-goers into figures on stage, where their behavior became the object of public scrutiny and the stuff of comedy: “The 18th century brings these actors into the auditorium itself.”79 Hogarth rejected what he saw as the forced, artificial instruments of caricature in favor of the ironic, unguarded potentials of theater. He constructed his scenes and positioned his performers with the eye not of a caricaturist but a moralist: “comic unmasking of the men about him is not the essential purpose of his art, for the didactic is foremost.”80
Hogarth’s genius consisted in revealing his subjects’ personalities even as they kept their masks in place and performed their accustomed roles. As Kris and Gombrich explained:
Hogarth accordingly creates the portrait of his figures the way an actor makes his mask: he represents them in their “character”—and it is no coincidence that this word bears in English the dual sense of “role” and “personal psychology”.81
Hogarth contended that the childlike distortions and irrational exaggerations of caricature detracted from art’s moral purpose and psychological effectiveness: “He therefore condemns caricatura which makes jokes instead of interpretations of character.”82 Hogarth made his point in the subscription tickets to Marriage à la mode on which “various Hogarthian heads are confronted with caricatures from Ghezzi and Carracci, but also with heads from Raphael’s Cartoons as examples of Character.”83 Whereas Daumier’s experiments culminated in the political broadsheet, Hogarth’s ended in the clinical case study and moral tale.
Beyond serving as a medium of political protest and instrument of psychological investigation, caricature in the modern sense for Kris and Gombrich eventually came to represent a technique of visual perception. In the nineteenth century, the citizen of Geneva Rodolphe Töpffer moved caricature in this third direction—away from physical distortions and toward elemental formulas. Töpffer borrowed a reductionist style from graphic arts and simplified it as far as possible to a few strokes, lines, and points: “The outline drawing, the ‘trait graphique’, represents the essence of things by suppressing all subsidiary matter.”84 The viewer’s imagination built upon a schematic design to construct a fuller image: “‘trait graphique’ allows one to guess at what it omits; while in a fully-fledged picture every gap in representation is disturbing, in the schematic drawing the observer assists the draughtsman; he completes the drawing.”85
Töpffer’s caricatures not only recalled the efforts of Bernini but also anticipated the findings of Gestalt psychology: “Every line which we see before us can be taken as a sign in the context of an expressive system.”86 The Swiss artist in fact transformed his artistic program into a laboratory test. He drew a series of facial expressions—“schematic masks of human faces”87—which he varied slightly from face to face and which he presented to diverse observers, gauging the effect of his variations on the viewer’s perceptions. Through such tests, as Kris and Gombrich described, “he tries in general to explain the emergence of various expressions in the picture by pointing to the conditions under which we interpret expression, and showing us just how few signs determine the character of an expression.”88 Although they sought to identify certain irreducible components of perception, Töpffer’s experiments instead demonstrated the inherently variable, unstable quality of human expression and communication.
The nineteenth-century German caricaturist Wilhelm Busch deliberately exploited that instability. In his portraits of Napoleon, Busch pictured the French emperor’s downfall through the metamorphosis of his face from momentous triumph at Austerlitz to final defeat at Waterloo, “revealing one by one the formative elements of the head, or the constituent elements of his expression.”89 The intrinsic malleability of the human face exposed, even foretold, Napoleon’s reversal of fortune: “The comic effect here relies on the ease of changeability, on the lability of expression.”90 Busch took advantage of this lability both to present a cautionary tale and to readjust his audience’s perception:
We find thereby a perfect, dual realisation of the potential latent from the beginnings of caricature: first, the victim’s face has become a true formula. For the Carracci and Bernini, this reduction to formula was a device for unmasking; it has now become a teachable essence in the literal sense. Second, and more important, we now reach a climax of the “process” of caricature as already described. By this we meant that caricature gives direction for seeing, initiates a visual re-interpretation (“Umsehen”). Here we are invited to pass from visual reinterpretation to visual re-creation.91
Caricature derived not only from the visual depiction produced on the illustrator’s page but also from the mental picture constructed by the audience. Only the observer’s psychological working through of the image conferred on the portrait its momentary stability.
Here caricature drawing converged with the modernist conception of art as technical construct. Rather than offer falsely unified products, it instead presented the visual components from which the beholder could piece together authentic images. It promoted the technique of “turning the picture into a mental exercise”92 and ultimately gave that method universality in cartoon illustrations and graphic stories. In keeping with Freud’s “theory of wit, when the essential remains unspoken,”93 cartoons relied on schematized pictures that left as much as possible to the imagination. Audiences enjoyed filling in the missing elements of the scene or story. Thus, after the political journal and the psychological portrait, the “dissemination of the simplified cartoon-style is the third reason for the expansion of the concept of ‘caricature’.”94 But unlike Daumier, the twentieth-century caricaturist no longer attempted to integrate political critique and psychological analysis with technical invention.
Kris and Gombrich worked and wrote in what they described as “a historic phase in the development of European art, the great stylistic crisis of Expressionism.”95 That crisis overwhelmed caricature art, just as modernist artistic currents swept away the original Renaissance experiment. Expressionists approached all reality as a mask of inward truth:
If art is not an imitation of the real world, but purely an expression of its inner processes, it becomes meaningless to differentiate between summary and detailed representation. The work of the more extreme Expressionists blurs for us once again (and now deliberately) the boundary between the comic and the serious. Before the poems of the Dadaists or the drawings of a Paul Klee or Max Ernst, the question of the boundary of intentional, i.e. comic distortion becomes again meaningless. This is not intended in a critical sense, but as a statement of a historical situation. The introverted imagery of Expressionism is fed from other sources, draws closer to man’s unconscious mind. Without wishing to interpret this phenomenon any further, let us summarise our thesis: many features of comic art are exploited by Expressionism, to the extent that a bra[n]ch of art becomes a movement of art.96
The methods of caricature merged with Expressionist techniques. Only the reduction and reconfiguration of reality could convey essential truths.
Outside the world of art, advertising posters now replaced broadsheets as the illustrators of daily life. Marketeers exploited the schematic formulas of caricature to attract an audience’s attention:
In much advertising imagery, simplification is pushed to the limit. For all the precursors discovered by the histories of advertising, the poster-designer of today is faced with a new task. The artist is often obliged to simplify, inviting the question “what is represented here? (What product are they trying to sell?)” This question may not remain with us for more than a fraction of a second, for the success of the advertisement depends on the immediate solubility of the problem. Simplification here serves as an eye-catcher, contributing a momentarily unsolved image which requires completion. The poster has be[c]ome [a] picture-puzzle.97
Once modern caricaturists had transformed image making into a mental exercise, advertisers remade the exercise into a business strategy, grafting it onto the narrow and tendentious aims of salesmanship. And as illustration sacrificed its documentary and critical content, the political mission of caricature, as epitomized by Daumier, lost its vitality and direction.98
Thus the twentieth century brought not the triumph but rather the disappearance of caricature both as an independent visual form and as a call to radical action. But the end came differently in art and politics. In art, the experiment underwent an apotheosis. Expressionists adopted caricature’s stylistic innovations and incorporated them into a more extensive and more profound artistic rebellion. In politics, modern marketing and political engineering co-opted caricature’s techniques, leading the civic experiment into the netherworlds of advertising and propaganda.
The Fate of Political Art
The experiment that had reached its apogee with Daumier had by the early twentieth century run its course: caricature ceased to exist as an independent political and artistic phenomenon. In the fifth and final chapter, “The Theory of Caricature,” Kris and Gombrich considered whether caricature, having lost its creative and critical function in art and politics, could still claim psychological significance.
From Carracci’s notebook to Daumier’s sculptures and lithographs, caricaturists had de-idealized not only the outward persona but also the ego that hid within it. The exaggeration of facial or bodily features, by creating a disproportion between parts, “enacts a dissolution of the totality of the person, the difference in physical dimension standing for its destruction.”99 Thus, on the eve of the Second World War, the British caricaturist David Low depicted Hitler as only forelock and moustache:
Nothing is exaggerated, but the isolation of a characteristic which is made to stand for the whole person, means an unmasking in the most vivid sense: this man is nothing but nose, he is nothing but monocle and forelock. These externals make up the whole man, therein lies his power, it is as easy as that to imitate or replace the powerful.100
By reconfiguring the ego’s mask, the caricaturist reconfigured its identity, a psychological procedure that began when Carracci remade human visages with animal-like features and Bernini reinvented human faces from a single expression:
When we next see the victim in life, the memory of the caricature makes us laugh, for we find ourselves changing him back again in the spirit of the caricature. The caricaturist has achieved his uttermost goal, he has appropriated his victim’s real-life appearance; the man drags the caricature after him, he is bewitched.101
Just as Callot transformed a living personality into a stage figure, the modern caricaturist remolded the subject’s face into an altered persona. The audience welded that new visage into an iron mask.
The complicity between artist and audience reanimated the visceral emotional power of image magic. Here Kris and Gombrich followed both Freud and Warburg in giving fundamental psychological significance to visual signs: “The image has greater archetypal value than the word … Magical beliefs cling longest to the image, and image-magic is still alive in the thinking of sophisticated man.”102
The mutability of the human countenance allowed caricaturists to reassemble—even disassemble—a supposedly coherent persona:
The practice of magic in the portrait as performed by caricature exploits the great mobility of physiognomic impression. The line which turns laughing into weeping can twist the portrait round. This lability of expression (familiar to students of the psychology of perception) appears in caricature as evidence for the artist’s power of control. With a single stroke, the transformation is effected, the similarity created or destroyed.103
The game that had begun in late Renaissance Bologna initiated an unpredictable, variegated experiment with inherently ambiguous, unstable images.
In its urge to control volatile powers, art replicated and ultimately spiritualized magical practice: such had been Warburg’s interpretation of Renaissance culture. For Kris and Gombrich, portrait caricature reconfirmed his account. The invention of caricature marked the final decline of pagan magic and the opening of a new period of artistic innovation. As subjects and viewers lost their fear of image magic, they began to take pleasure in caricature. Kris and Gombrich interpreted the change as the conclusion of a three-stage, psycho-historical process. At the stage of primitive image magic, “the hostile action is performed on the person through the image.”104 Subsequently, effigies or defamatory images became substitutes for the persons depicted, and aggression became redirected toward images alone. With the Renaissance, image-makers finally channeled the aggressive drive into play with form, into the manipulation of symbols, and into the reconfiguration of masks. Caricature therefore represented “a step in detachment from the magical associations of art.”105 But such detachment remained tinged with ambivalence, as the lure and fear of image magic persisted as unconscious elements of art.
The decline of magic alone, however, did not account for the emergence of caricature in the late Renaissance: the rise of Mannerism proved essential. The Cinquecento origins of caricature brought to mind Dvořák’s lectures on Mannerist art, and when they described those origins, Kris and Gombrich revived his art history as the history of ideas. To give visual representation to the internal, invisible world of the self, Mannerists developed new rules of artistic creation, free from the constraints of external likeness:
Something has changed in the figurative arts, not only in style or in form, but in its whole purpose. This becomes evident if one compares a Cinquecento sketchbook, which may contain visions, compositions, private visions of scribblings, with skecthbooks [sic] of earlier times. If the medieval pattern-book represents the repertory of tradition, and the Quattrocento sketchbook a utilitarian repertory of pictorial reality, one may, roughly, speak of the Mannerist sketchbook as a repertory of the possible. The work of art is more detached from reality, not because it is less true to reality, but because it opposes reality with a world of its own. This general and essential feature of Mannerism, which has constantly been stressed in all the recent books on the subject since it was first emphasised by Dvorak [sic], takes on a particular significance with the precursors of caricature. The deliberate ambiguity of form which makes a visual game of seeing, which consciously exercises the beholder’s power of perception, demonstrates this new level of freedom: a given picture is no longer a sign of reality, no longer imitation or prescribed ornament, but a playing with form in itself. This does not invoke external models, or iconographical substance, but the human imagination, the dream itself. This new world of themes is called “Sogni”, “Traumwerk”, “Songes Drolatiques”. The appearance of a tenet of Chinese art-theory in Quattrocento Europe, with Leonardo and others recommending the artist to exercise the imagination on chance configurations, is the preparatory stage to this inner freedom vis-à-vis the object. Peeling walls, clouds and stains are visually transfigured by the artist. They are occasions for the projection of inner visions. Caricature may be seen as the last step along this path. It is now the most concrete form, the external appearance of an individual which can occasion the artist to substitute for it the inner image evoked in him by this man. Just as he can heroise his subject in the idealised portrait, he can render him in comic distortion for purposes of aggressive criticism.106
Dvořák’s interpretation of Mannerism affirmed Kris and Gombrich’s account of the evolution of caricature. In the age of the Carracci—the time of Shakespeare’s Prospero—caricaturists channeled the aggressive and power-seeking impulses of image magic into artistic independence and invention. Thereafter, in the age of Hogarth, they turned to a psychological analysis of the mutability and volatility in human expression and perception. Finally, in the era of Daumier, they developed the full potential of caricature as a political tool. From Carracci to Hogarth to Daumier, from art to psychology to politics: points that defined the logic and history of modern caricature also marked Kris and Gombrich’s personal and intellectual paths.
After the First World War, the sharp split in caricature became increasingly visible, producing on the one hand a remote depoliticized art and on the other a dangerous demagogic weapon. As an experiment with artistic technique, it merged with the reductionist, introspective tendency in modernist art:
On the level of abstraction provided by Bernini, caricature might be termed timeless; the less “disegno” it contains, the mote [more] it approaches Hogarth’s formula of “dot and line”, “the purer” it is, the nearer it comes to what may be considered the “ideal type” of caricature. This ideal type is no longer an historically determined work of art, but the graphic crystallisation of a psychic process.107
But as a political instrument, caricature thrived in the arenas of crowds and propagandists, where defamatory images served the aims of emotional and ideological manipulation. In such forums the necessary condition for art had ceased to exist: “This condition palses [passes] when a social group acts en masse and regresses toward primitive modes of behavior; we know only too well how this happens in our own times.”108 Yet, the nature of caricature itself—as a plea for creative complicity with the audience and as a vision of control over its target—lent itself to demagogy:
Every game with words is a game with conventional signs, while the game with forms is a game with the thing itself. That is why the relationship with the legacies of magic is inherent in all caricature, particularly in the participation it invites of the beholder. By completing the act of seeing we experience for ourselves the caricaturist’s achievement. [W]e win with him, with his transformation, power over his victim.109
Whereas modernist artists used caricature to explore universal components of vision, contemporary propagandists wielded it to perform image magic: “The propaganda value of caricature is thus particularly marked, for it stands nearer to action than all forms of verbal comedy.”110 Caricature in the twentieth century had broken into two opposing identities: an ethereal mental pursuit and a profane demagogic activity.
In the 1936 exhibition catalog, Kris had written that Daumier’s comic art had compelled viewers to see themselves and their own social world as they actually existed. In the book manuscript, he and Gombrich now described the need for a new Callot or Daumier, for artists who used caricature to combat false idealizations. But the manuscript’s final pages expressed little confidence that contemporary caricaturists would recover Callot and Daumier’s comic purpose, artistic legitimacy, and critical spirit. In the closing paragraph of Caricature, they wrote: “No justification of caricature as art has ever quite succeeded. Like all forms of the comic, it stands at the edge of art.”111
Masters of magical techniques, most caricaturists never fully justified their reductionist or destructive aims. Only those committed to a transformative vision intuited the full creative potential of caricature. In his pure allegiance to classical form and his absolute commitment to documentary content, Daumier had created the republican hybrid: political artwork that was true art. He readjusted his audiences’ perceptions by helping them to see their accepted views of society as distortions. Caricature held up a corrective, not cracked, mirror to reality. To recover its purpose as political art, it had to revert to what it had been in Renaissance Bologna and Daumier’s Paris: a classical experiment of the street.
The caricature manuscript offered, in Gombrich’s phrase, a model of integration, one that approached image making and creative experimentation as evolving processes moved by intersecting and conflicting currents from art, psychology, and politics. Grounded in the Freudian principle of the overdetermination of meaning—now including cultural and political layers together with the psychological—it provided not only a language that bridged psychoanalytic and cognitive psychologies but also an awareness of the problems and methods that linked the humanities, the mental sciences, and the social sciences.
As depth psychology and art theory, Caricature identified the conflicting impulses of aggression and restitution that drove artistic experimentation from one period to the next. As ego psychology and art history, it traced artistic innovation as a ceaseless search for stable frameworks of cognition and vision. As a cultural history covering diverse media and images, it located the sources and aims of experimental activity not only in the studio and salon but also on the stage and in the city. Finally, it took into account how, especially at moments of crisis, societal conditions and political realities influenced artistic, technical, and cultural innovation. The rebellion within classicism started as a game with portraiture but became an experiment with politics. It merged symbolic, documentary, and critical imagery, giving rise to a civic art and a universal language capable of responding to the disintegrative effects of crisis. Yet by 1900, mutually reinforcing tendencies of self-isolation and public demagogy undermined it.
Kris and Gombrich’s conclusion that caricature culminated with Daumier and only began to recover its potential with Low reflected their judgment that it had all but lost its direction in Germany and Austria after 1900. German Expressionists embraced caricature but only to incorporate it within their psychological art, while nationalist, anti-Semitic movements transformed it according to their own demonologies. The book manuscript did not track these post-1900 developments in any detail. Rather, Kris and Gombrich would do so a few years later, when they worked as political analysts for the Allied war effort.
The manuscript’s most dynamic, intriguing, and innovative themes—that the truth of personality hid within and not behind the mask, that visual and mental images possessed a switch character, and that gesture, expression, and perception were fluid, volatile phenomena—represented in crucial part immediate responses to the corrosive, deteriorating conditions in Vienna. At the museum and university, Kris and Gombrich recognized the switch character in the faces of colleagues and professors. And they could see in the labile countenances of Austro-Fascist politicians and their supporters the grinning, grotesque masks known since ancient times.
Looking back on his training as a chemist in the late 1930s, Primo Levi recalled in The Periodic Table the moment when he realized the vital importance of chemical impurities. Pure zinc, he discovered, did not react with sulfuric acid; only impurity elicited the reaction that created zinc sulfate. Levi drew the political and moral conclusion, presented as a dialogue with himself:
In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.112
More than a century before Levi wrote those words, Daumier exalted the bella deformità, the grano salis, as the universal language of republicanism. His and Levi’s insight marked the authentic culmination of the Bolognese experiment.
The story of caricature that Kris and Gombrich wrote from 1934 to 1937 moved from a study in the psychology of art to a study of republican political culture. The story’s conclusion came when caricature, serving as a tool of marketeers and propagandists, became a source of advertising formulas and demagogic typologies. Ceasing to document social and political realities, it failed to preserve or integrate its life-giving impurities. And when it lost its vital links to republicanism, it ceased functioning as an ever evolving artistic innovation. The symbiosis broke down and it became a deadened and deadening form. As a record of that story, however, the caricature manuscript itself remained an experimental grain of salt, a bella deformità, within a Vienna that now tried to dissolve all irritants within a new national body.