When Satire Becomes Art: The long and lively history of political caricature
brilliant political cartoon can sum up the follies of the day (or the era) with a lightning-quick precision unavailable to even the most economical editorial writers. The graphic satirist has at his or her command a whole arsenal for lampoonery: exaggeration, speech balloons, and the usual draftsman’s tools of line, shade, and even color. As “Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine,” a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, up through March 4, makes clear, humorous or scathing works on paper, such as those by Goya or Daumier, can reach a level of artistry that goes far beyond most political cartoons on the op-ed pages of newspapers.
Caricature, the exaggeration of features and physiognomy to often comic effect, goes back to ancient times, but it was Leonardo’s drawings of small grotesque heads that seemed to set the most important precedent, even if his intent was to make studies of extremes in nature, not to mock or parody. The word comes from the Italian carico and caricare, meaning, respectively, “load” and “to exaggerate,” and the members of the 16th-century Carracci family in Bologna were the first to apply the terms to pen drawings of strange human heads. They paved the way for artists who “saw that selected components could be distorted without obscuring the identity of the subject,” according to Constance McPhee, associate curator at the Met, in her introductory catalogue essay for the exhibition. In Northern Europe, Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder expanded upon the medieval practice of decorating the margins of manuscripts with drolleries and odd creatures, filling their canvases with hybrid life forms that still startle and inspire today.
Animals, particularly birds and monkeys, have appeared in satirical works since the Middle Ages, the latter proving particularly handy to “ape” the bestial aspects of human behavior. The Met’s show includes a 16th-century woodcut by Nicolò Boldrini spoofing the Laocoön group, the famous Hellenistic sculpture, showing the principals as writhing apes rather than men. The original target, an obscure theory of anatomy, is lost in the thickets of time, but the lampoon of a revered masterpiece is still wickedly funny.