The Draw Of Caricature

My take on #GerryBrownlee and the #Chch rebuild. Little Gerry doesn’t like to share. #caricature pic.twitter.com/JwosNFgig2

— Jeff Bell (@JeffBellNZ) April 11, 2013

Josh Fruhlinger reviews The Art of Controversy, Victor Navasky’s book on political cartoons:

[Navasky's] early dissection of the subject can be pretty abstract, but it does yield one concrete and intriguing interpretation of the power of the political cartoon: the idea that caricatures overload our facial-recognition circuitry and thus seem more face-like than actual faces. Such images “amplify the differences” between their target and the average person, exaggerating the features our brains latch on to in order to distinguish some individual countenance from everyone else’s. Thus Obama’s increasingly prominent ears on editorial pages across the country, thus Jimmy Carter’s teeth, thus Nixon’s . . . well, thus most things about Nixon’s face, as he was a caricaturist’s playground. “His nose told you he would bomb Cambodia,” cartoonist Doug Marlette once said.

It would be tidy if there were a moment in the history of art that we could point to as the birth of caricature; in reality, it’s been discovered again and again, in many times and places. Navasky does try to find early examples: Bernini’s seventeenth-century sketch of Pope Innocent XI looking like a skeletal alien creature; James Gillray’s 1798 “Doublers of Character,” which is essentially a primer for making various facial types more grotesque.

Previous Dish on the history of cartoon art here.