Political Protest

The extraordinarily prolific golden age of caricature (c. 1780–1820) was a peculiarly English phenomenon, arising out of a tradition of relatively free debate, party rivalries, imperial-industrial-economic growth, and the fear of the French A graphic reaction to the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). The Monster of War, German, c. 1630. Revolution and Napoleon. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) became (with help from other countries) the single most satirized figure in history. The masters James Gillray (1756–1815) and Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827) and, later, George Cruikshank (1792–1878), when not engaged in patriotic propaganda, took on a wide social range, scurrilously attacking individual political and social personalities. At this point, "protest" as embodied in caricature became a kind of social and political game played on shifting and not always honorable grounds. The broadsheet caricatures, often colored, were exhibited as conversation pieces in homes and became immediate collectibles whose seditious edge very occasionally landed artists and their publishers in jail. But to the degree to which the caricatures, some beautifully fashioned and labor-intensive (unlike the often rudimentary contemporary scribble), were entirely independent of the literary text, one may speak of a form of visual protest and satire sui generis, the equivalent of which in the early 2000s, in terms of its physical and moral independence, is the poster, not the newspaper cartoon, which, notoriously, is subject to being dropped or never being carried at all, if it might offend the newspaper's owners or advertisers. The freedoms of the artists were in fact greater than those of the writers, and the attacks of Gillray and others on the British royal family were of a virulence approached (but not surpassed) only during the 1960s. In Gillray's time the Royal family was embroiled in party politics, and attacked with a bias accordingly; and the Prince Regent, whose personal vices became a favorite butt, could only buy up copies of the caricatures against him, and hope to buy off the artist himself. Later, the anti-Royal cartoon was considered simply unpatriotic, and until the 1960s, in addition tasteless or cowardly in its attack upon a person or an institution not set up to respond in kind.

In terms of sheer recklessness, vulgarity, and, indeed, scatology, it may be that British caricature overreached itself, for the Victorian age demanded a quieter, more balanced, and less violent tone. Cruikshank is the transitional figure from Regency license to Victorian prudery, and Charles Dickens (1812–1870), whose literary art tried to subsume the pictoriality of the English satiric tradition, and who confessed himself a great admirer of Hogarth, could not afford his great predecessor's sexual openness. The reform movements of the 1830s and Chartism were the last fling of pictorial satire, which by the 1830s was beginning to infiltrate newspapers and magazines. Henceforth, after early years in radical opposition, the weekly Punch (founded 1841), standard-bearer of the humorous cut and the political cartoon (the word derived from an Italian art term, cartone), settled into a cozy commentary of bourgeois mores and dignified allegories (by John Tenniel at their best) of current affairs, always "patriotic" when international. Like the New Yorker (founded in 1925) in the United States, Punch became a kind of "official" magazine of humor and critical commentary until it was superseded by the truly radical, muck-raking magazine Private Eye (founded 1961) in the United Kingdom.

Punch called itself "the London Charivari" after the Parisian magazine that spearheaded a great satiric movement of graphic opposition to King Louis-Philippe and his betrayal of the Revolution Caricature of British King George IV. A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion (1792) by James Gillray. PHOTO CREDIT: VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON / ART RESOURCE, NY. IMAGE REFERENCE: ART 113206 of 1830. As a form of virulent and hilarious visual dissent against politics and politicians, the French satirists, led by Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), Jean-Jacques Grandville (Jean Ignace Julien Gerard; 1803–1847), Edouard Traviès (1809–1865), and many others were stopped in their tracks by draconian press laws of 1835 and forced to confine their efforts to comment on the social scene. Not all their art was comic. It is ironic that the French demanded a freedom of the press modeled on that of the English at the very moment when the English were no longer exploiting it as they had earlier; so that French "caricature" for a long period (after 1835), while no longer personal-political, is much stronger, more socially dissident, and more broadly based than the English (such as the staid John Leech or George du Maurier in Punch), who became the amused "illustrators" of a status quo they condoned. The French were also more artistically ambitious, and the caricature magazines aimed to give "art prints" (usually lithographs) that were more supple in tone, striking and simply larger in format, than the modest woodcuts of the English. Muzzled under Napoleon III (r. 1852–1871), political fury returned in France with the Franco-Prussian War, the fall of the emperor, and the Paris Commune, the disaster of which excited both sympathy and revulsion.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the humorous illustrated magazine caricature, and its important offshoot, the comic strip, achieved status as distinct cultural phenomena, Depiction of a government massacre. Rue Transonain, 15 Avril 1834. A murdered family (1834) by Honore Daumier. Lithograph. PHOTO CREDIT: ERICH LESSING /ART RESOURCE, NY and was well established in Western European countries, Latin America, even Russia and the Slavic nations. One may ask whether the idea of actually changing political systems survived this social institutionalization. Did the cartoon aim merely to raise a chuckle over morning coffee? Was it a Band-Aid over social wounds, an anesthetic against social pains, like religion, an "opiate of the people"? Was it merely a safety valve permitted—even encouraged—by governments adept at co-opting social discontent? The advent of potentially revolutionary and actually revolutionary movements gave a new edge to graphics. Socialism and anarchism, then female suffragism, regenerated protest graphics and joined with a new art, larger than even the full-page cartoon of old—the posters. In the United States the cartoon achieved a moment of glory with Thomas Nast (1840–1902), the pro-Union, antislavery crusader who was credited by his political enemy William Marcy ("Boss") Tweed (1823–1878) with having thoroughly exposed him in the eyes of the populace; it was through Nast's cartoons that Tweed was identified and returned for trial from Spain to the United States on embezzlement and corruption charges. Second to Nast was Joseph Keppler (1838–1894), founder of Puck (in 1877), with Judge and Harper's Weekly the leading U.S. critical magazine, which joined lustily in the strife caused by political rivalries, monopolies, and the emergent socialist and communist movements. "Dissent" during the whole era of democracy, when not truly radical (trying to uproot), may be defined as simply opposing the party in power from the viewpoint of its rival (in a two-party system, like that of the United States and the United Kingdom). To be sure, there have always been outstanding syndicated newspaper cartoonists taking on the fundamental questions of the age, but one wonders whether the larger context in which they are allowed to work, as a kind of "licensed jester" at the court of Capital, does not weaken any impact they might otherwise have. The advent in the 1960s of Ron Cobb cartoons in the so-called underground press ("alternative" or "radical" would be a better word), such as the Los Angeles Free Press and many college papers, offered drastic, existential views of war and other ills, which have struck deeper into the historical record.