Books in Brief: Masters of Caricature

Masters of Caricature, edited by Ann Gould, introduction and commentary by William Feaver (Knopf, 240 pp., $25).

Here we have Lives of the Artists: brief commentary on the fives and work of the great caricaturists arranged as a reference volume. Included is information you will find nowhere else. Daumier, Dore, Tenniel, and Nast are all profiled, but so are the excellent and little-known artists of the post-Civil War political magazines Puck and Judge. Vanity Fair’s “Spy” (Leslie Ward) and “Ape” (Carlo Pellegrini) are each placed under the glass, but so are The New Yorker’s Ralph Barton (whose fortunes “rose and fell with the 1920s,” and who committed suicide in 1932, after four marriages) and the Mexican anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias, whose work appeared everywhere from Esquire to Time in the 1920s and ’30s. As well, there are features on the various moderns, including some by-now redundant material on the masters of our own age: Ronald Searle, David Levine, and Edward Sorel. Leaver, an art critic, offers just enough in this work to make it comprehensive; he is also a passable stylist. Describing such old British masters as Cruikshank, Hogarth, Rowlandson, and Gillray, he writes, “Here, as in Restoration comedy, as in opera buffa, characters took on the dimension of fops and boobies. The thin were made skeletal, the fat were impossibly distended. The courtiers fawned, the scolds raged, the villains strutted.” But he does his best service in reprinting the definition by Annibale Carracci, highly regarded by Hogarth, which has not yet been surpassed: “Is not the caricaturist’s task exactly the same as that of the classical artist? 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 the 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.”

JM

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Masters of Caricature, edited by Ann Gould, introduction and commentary by William Feaver (Knopf, 240 pp., $25).

Here we have Lives of the Artists: brief commentary on the fives and work of the great caricaturists arranged as a reference volume. Included is information you will find nowhere else. Daumier, Dore, Tenniel, and Nast are all profiled, but so are the excellent and little-known artists of the post-Civil War political magazines Puck and Judge. Vanity Fair’s “Spy” (Leslie Ward) and “Ape” (Carlo Pellegrini) are each placed under the glass, but so are The New Yorker’s Ralph Barton (whose fortunes “rose and fell with the 1920s,” and who committed suicide in 1932, after four marriages) and the Mexican anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias, whose work appeared everywhere from Esquire to Time in the 1920s and ’30s. As well, there are features on the various moderns, including some by-now redundant material on the masters of our own age: Ronald Searle, David Levine, and Edward Sorel. Leaver, an art critic, offers just enough in this work to make it comprehensive; he is also a passable stylist. Describing such old British masters as Cruikshank, Hogarth, Rowlandson, and Gillray, he writes, “Here, as in Restoration comedy, as in opera buffa, characters took on the dimension of fops and boobies. The thin were made skeletal, the fat were impossibly distended. The courtiers fawned, the scolds raged, the villains strutted.” But he does his best service in reprinting the definition by Annibale Carracci, highly regarded by Hogarth, which has not yet been surpassed: “Is not the caricaturist’s task exactly the same as that of the classical artist? 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 the 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.”