BRITISH AND FRENCH CARICATURES, CIRCA 1820

The British won the Napoleonic wars and then proceeded to swamp France with tourists. It was a bitter pill for the French who couldn't believe they were beaten by a race of people with buck teeth and no chins. Since I possess those attributes myself, I'll observe that buck teeth do indeed bestow on the bearer remarkable powers of intellect and tenacity, and so...of course they did well in that war.

BTW, this print (above) is derived from an oil paining by Dore.

Daumier was equally amazed by the buck-toothed British tourists (above) he saw.

How did British caricaturists treat the French? Surprisingly lenient once the war was over. Maybe that's because the British favorite target for humor has always been other British.

Available for ridicule were the high-collar dandies...tons of them. Somehow the war years spawned a gazillion of them (above), who attempted to be as visible as possible.  This was not lost on caricaturist William Heath.

The dandies chased out the old tri-corned people. They were so...yesterday.

They even chased out the beefy, earthy old Samuel Johnson types (above).  The new man was supposed to be lean and elegant.

Frock coats with tight waists were in. Even fat men wore them.

The British love class-based humor. Here (above) the pushy, social-climbing masses display their inability to do a simple thing like wait in line to visit an art museum.

WOW! CARICATURES BY AARON PHILBY!

Who is this Aaron Philby guy!!?? I'm always seeing his caricatures on the net, but they're never accompanied by biographical material. Usually they're not even signed. Whenever I see good people doing what they do anonymously I always assume they're on the lamb from the law, or are in the Witness Protection Program.

 Oops! Sorry Aaron. I hope what I said doesn't get you killed.

Wouldn't it be fun to go to the beach and get a funny caricature done like the one above? What a nice, clean line!

Aaron does what looks like acrylic portaits, too.

The man does what the best modern caricaturists do: he sees his subjects as weird, biological specimens. You see it in his two-man "friend" portraits, which always look like the love of a sea urchin for a flounder. I mean that as a compliment.

Friendship is one of the great mysteries of life. Two weird organisms (above) with different tastes and different physiology find each other and somehow just "gel." It's a strange and wonderful phenomenon and only caricature seems to capture it adequately.

 Wonderful (above), just wonderful!

Asians (above) can be a challenge to draw. The linear eyes are first thing Europeans see, but if you draw them like that some Asians get offended. That's because they don't see themselves that way. Look at Manga which always portrays Japanese as having huge, wide-open, glassy eyes. What's a caricaturist to do?

I think Aaron has the right approach. Just draw what you see. At least it's honest, and maybe one day  Asians won't be so touchy about it.

I love portraits where a big giraffe head (above) just leans in from the side. How do you like the arrangement of the teeth?

Above, another "biological specimen" portrait. You imagine David Attenburough describing the creature as a bottom feeder which uses its nose to stir up the sand, and its mouth to suck up the worms that live there. I'm guessing that the father of this technique was John K who watches animal shows on TV in order to understand humans better.

Very Nice (above)! I also like the way the chair comes off as an irregular-shaped cloth frame in this photo.

Probably these (above) were just-for-fun sketches, done at home. The task for a caricaturist is to retain this cartoony, class clown style even in a worked-up painting. 

Oops! I just discovered that this one (above) might be by Briam Oakes, I'll investigate.

I could write a whole article about these last three pictures (above). They look primitive but are actually very sophisticated. It takes real comedic and graphic talent to simplify faces this way. It's hard to do that when your subject has paid you and is sitting right in front of you. In that situation you delete everything funny in an attempt to chase the likeness. The funniest pictures are always drawn the next day when you're on the scent of a remembered impression.

This reminds me of something caricaturist Marlo Meekins said. She said she didn't mind it when people moved a lot while she was sketching them. The movement made her focus on her impression of the subject, rather than fidelity to reality.

Anyway, great work Aaron!

Aaron's blog:

http://aaronphilby.blogspot.com/

DAVID O'KEEFE TAKES A BOW

I've been laughing at this guy's paintings and sculptures for years (that's Seinfeld above), but I never knew his name til now. Maybe you didn't either. It's David O'Keefe, possibly the best caricature sculptor in the world right now.

Every caricaturist does Clint Eastwood, but how many do him this well (above)?

Above, an impressive Brando.

An awesome Nicole Kidman (above). Where'd she get a mouth like that?

Not a bad Sheryl Crow (Crowe?)!

O'Keefe paints too. You can buy prints on his site.  This one's (above) called "The Clinton Years."

Recognize Led Zeppelin?

Check out David's site:
http://www.davidokeefe.com/

THOUGHTS ABOUT INDIAN CARICATURES

Recently John K put up a terrific blog post where he argued that classic cartoon caricatures of indians were a natural exaggeration of the way indians really looked, and he put up several pictures of real indians to prove his point. It was a terrific article and if you missed it you should go back to John's site and read it.



I have to admit that Sitting Bull certainly looked like the old caricatures, especially the ones with big noses, but were noses like that really common among the indians?

[By the way, notice that Sitting Bull's eyes are top and bottom bracketed, and close together, which makes the nose seem even bigger. I've seen those eyes before, but where? Maybe in cartoons, where they were used even on white people. If this picture is responsible for that, then this might be one of the most influential photos in the history of cartooning!]



I'm no expert on native-American noses, but to judge from John's photos, lots of other indians had noses that were only slightly bigger than whites'. It's a small thing to argue about I know, but I'm in a nit-pickey mood so this disagreement finds itself on this page. John thinks I'm blind.




For me it doesn't matter much if big noses were common, or just limited to Sitting Bull and his relatives. The caricature works and is funny. I am glad that I got to thinking about this because it started me thinking about funny indian caricatures in general.

My question is, why is it common for indian caricatures to be wide-eyed, smiling, and full of energy? No doubt some indians must have been like that, but the ones you see in photos tend to be earnest and serious. The best photos of American Indians are among the masterpieces of 19th Century photography.



I have a theory about where the wide-eyed, fun-loving look came from. I'll bet cartoonists were consciously or unconsciously combining the indian look with what they thought black swing musicians looked like. Maybe the swing era conspicuously used a lot of tom-tom rhythms, so indians came to be associated with it. Compare the smiling wide-eyed indian above (the color picture) to Louis Jordan (the black & white photo).



Logically it doesn't make any sense to combine people who are so different, and yet the synthesis works like a charm. You can't argue with what works. Maybe this is one of the secrets of good caricature: combine elements that intuitively fit, logic be damned!



One of my all-time favorite indian caricatures is the wide-angled, copper-colored doll (above) holding the tomahawk. It's Louis Prima meets Sitting Bull. The wide angle face emphasizes the big, happy grin. This is a mischievous but highly likable figure that seems intended to diminish racial tensions, not inflame them.



Eventually Italians (above) got into the act. Look at those eyebrows! This isn't surprising considering that Italians often played indians in the movies.



The most famous of all Italian film indians was Paul Picerni, shown here (above) in a still from "House of Wax." I'll bet the red doll with the thick eyebrows (the picture above the picture above) is actually Picerni.



Just for the heck of it, here's (above)the original Cleveland Indians logo from the 30s and 40s...



...and the redo, done in 1950. I like them both, but my favorite is the older version. Thanks to Rogellio for the useful info about this.



You could argue that indian caricatures don't look much like real indians, but so what? Caricatures of white people don't look like white people, either. When's the last time you saw a white guy who looked like Barney Rubble?




Hmmm. Well, maybe I chose the wrong example. If you put my schnoz on Brad Bird's face...


One last word: John is afraid that this post will make his seem racist, which was far from his intent, and I'll add that it's very far from mine too. I can't stand racism and would never deliberately do anything to contribute to it. My intent is not to hold indians up to ridicule, but simply to show them in a humorous light, which is different. I'll bet if I lived in the 19th century and showed these pictures to indians, they'd double up laughing at the caricatures of their friends.

Thanks to Kali, John and Mike for letting me use these toy pictures. The opinions are entirely my own.

MORE CARICATURES OF ME!!!

Here's more caricatures of me by John Kricfalusi. The one on top has ears growing out of my cheeks, little curly hair whisps and lemur fingers. The expression defies description. It's an emotion that science hasn't catalogued yet. I see the figure as something out of "Island of Dr. Moreau":

"Men die under the lash...of his TORTURING WHIP...
Women SHUDDER at the touch ...of his CRUEL CARESS!
There's no escape...from this HALF MAN/HALF ANIMAL'S PARADISE OF TORTURE!"
Here I am (above) as a rat. I seem to be a likable rat. I have a curly, little whisp of an upper lip with piano keys dangling from it, a cavernous ear, and eyes that look like custard cups with a couple of flies sitting on them.
Oops! Here's the beast man again:
"What FIENDISH EVIL lurks behind this face? What WEIRD VENGEANCE is brewing!?"

TWO KILLER JOHN CARICATURES

Here are a couple more caricatures that John did of me. When I think about the John drawings of me that I've posted up till now I'm amazed at how many ways there are to draw just one face. There's the optimistic me, the seedy me, the retarded me, the rat me, the eager me... it goes on. A number of the ways of thinking about me required John to try a different kind of line or a different design concept.

I don't post these drawings out of ego, because I'm the model. I do it so this aspect of what John does will get into the historical record and so that these techniques won't be lost. And since history is watching I'll cop to accidentally cutting off the final "D" in "dreaded."



Here's me in pantaloons and cod piece. I'm stupid-looking here so the "V" of the head in the disdain drawing is inverted so the wide part is on the bottom, as if my head is too stupid to resist gravity. I like the tiny soda under the soft, rubbery upper-lip flap. The five o'clock shadow looks like it's made of toothbrush bristles. Tiny granny glasses cover the seedy eyes and the long, thin spectacle arm extends all the way back to the hay-filled ear. Warts, of course.

I like the restraint involved in making the wart on the end of the nose tiny and understated. If it had been bigger it would have taken our attention away from the elegant, sloping line formed by the nose and forehead. This long, continuous line is the true focus of the picture.