The Cartoon Museum, London
At the start of the second world war David Low, the political cartoonist, advised the War Office that the best way to combat Germany was ridicule. He cited as a prime example the anti-Nazi cartoons produced in Denmark in 1937.
In February 2006 the Museum of Cartoon History opened in a blaze of press and television interest roused partly by the furore over the recent publication of certain other Danish cartoons. For the museum the situation was fortuitous, offering widespread publicity and yet potential danger.
It reminded me of the opening lines of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity… we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.'
While the great, the good and the Duke of Edinburgh gathered in Bloomsbury, people were being murdered and embassies torched. As the 18th-century English poet Charles Churchill once remarked: 'A joke's a very serious thing.'
There are cartoon museums across Europe in Belgium, Germany, Poland and France, in Sweden and Denmark, in Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Macedonia and Portugal. This is the first - long overdue - in Britain. One of the indicators of a civilised nation is the tolerance of mockery of those in authority and an amused questioning of contemporary social mores.
More than 50 years ago HM Bateman begged for some 'official recognition of the worth of comic drawing… a permanent collection of some of the best examples… a sort of National Gallery of Humorous Art'. Fellow artists have echoed that plea. Ralph Steadman has reminded us that 'as a nation we have found the cartoon artform to be a vital dimension and an integral part of our culture and history'.
Well, a start has been made in this small but significant
gallery, which is within spitting distance of the British Museum and just round the corner from the birthplace of the caricaturist George Cruickshank.
The trustees boldly claim that Britain invented the cartoon artform. This might come as a surprise to the prehistoric painters of cave walls or the stitchers of the Bayeux Tapestry. But if the claim has resulted in the creation of this gem of a gallery - so be it.
The inaugural exhibition is a courageous attempt to span the history of British cartoons over the past 300 years. With space for a mere 250 exhibits, this is clearly an impossible task. It's consequently a bit like a posh stand-up buffet, with the visitor being offered titbits from different dishes.
Prints by Cruikshank, William Hogarth, James Gillray, and Thomas Rowlandson lead on to works by Low, Vicky, William Heath Robinson, Fougasse, Ronald Searle, Carl Giles, Matt Pritchett, Posy Simmonds, Gerald Scarfe and the inimitable Steve Bell.
Upstairs are rare comic pieces from the Beano, Dandy, Eagle, Topper, 2000 AD and that longest running and most deplorable of all British strips, the bourgeois frolics and doggerel of the repulsive Rupert Bear, Algy and co.
Watching visitors it is clear that people, like me, have tribal loyalties when it comes to humour. 'You never know why people laugh,' said WC Fields. ' I know what makes them laugh, but trying to get your hands on the why of it is like trying to pick an eel out of a tub of water.'
I observed crowds smiling before the works of Bateman and Giles. Both artists are, rightly, highly regarded for the brilliance of their draughtsmanship. But their subject matter, though forming an invaluable social history archive of the last half of the 20th century, is too genteel for my taste.
They represent one tributary of cartooning, the wry reinforcement, through visual gags, of social and class prejudices. I'm all for the crueller turbulent torrents, the satirical stuff that seeks to topple tyrants and demagogues.
There are some classics of the genre on view, including Hogarth's Gin Lane, Gillray's The Plum Pudding in Danger, Low's All Behind You, Winston, and Bruce Bairnsfathers's Well, If You Knows of a Better 'Ole…
Among the highlights of late 18th-century vitriol it was good to be reminded of the less well-known works, such as George Woodward's Immaculate Bachelors and Inaccessible Virgins or Richard Newton's Politeness, surely one of most chilling 'dance macabres' ever penned.
Cartoons work best when they lie ephemeral in our hands. Framed and carefully lit, and castrated by scholarly captions, they lose potency. Despite the smut, blasphemy, heresy and character assassination so graphically depicted on the walls the atmosphere remains reverential. People still whisper.
Snorting with glee at one cartoon I was disdainfully snubbed by a set of fellow visitors. I had become the latest three-dimensional version of a new Bateman opus…the man who dared to laugh in the Cartoon Museum.
Perhaps the energetic and creative curator Anita O'Brien should install periodic low-level bursts of recorded laughter 'pour encourager les autres'? Or a notice at the door, like the programme notes in cathedral concerts - applause is permitted - might be in order? It would be truly wonderful to enter a museum that welcomed visitors with the exhortation that LAUGHTER IS OBLIGATORY.
Good cartoons subvert. They have in them more truth than factual reports. The best are ambiguous. You laugh, take them seriously and act on them. I'm reminded that anarchic artists have sometimes been imprisoned or bribed. Pitt's Tory Government paid Gillray a pension on the condition that he left the Prince of Wales alone.
Cruikshank was backhanded the huge sum of £100 in exchange for a promise not to caricature George IV 'in an immoral situation'. What price Steve Bell? Perhaps we should be concerned that today's politicians and bigwigs are worried if they are not lampooned. And that the largest collection of parliamentary cartoons is that assembled by the Tory grandee Kenneth Baker. And that Prince Philip is the patron of the museum.
I believe we need our daily fix of wit, however scabrous. As Bernadette Devlin McAliskey once said, the British press collects news only as 'stuff to fill the space between their cartoons'!
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum
Project data
Cost: £96,000
Main funders: The Foyle Foundation, The Garfield Weston Foundation and others
Design: Joanna Leonard and Associates
Graphics: Homer Creative
At the start of the second world war David Low, the political cartoonist, advised the War Office that the best way to combat Germany was ridicule. He cited as a prime example the anti-Nazi cartoons produced in Denmark in 1937.
In February 2006 the Museum of Cartoon History opened in a blaze of press and television interest roused partly by the furore over the recent publication of certain other Danish cartoons. For the museum the situation was fortuitous, offering widespread publicity and yet potential danger.
It reminded me of the opening lines of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity… we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.'
While the great, the good and the Duke of Edinburgh gathered in Bloomsbury, people were being murdered and embassies torched. As the 18th-century English poet Charles Churchill once remarked: 'A joke's a very serious thing.'
There are cartoon museums across Europe in Belgium, Germany, Poland and France, in Sweden and Denmark, in Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Macedonia and Portugal. This is the first - long overdue - in Britain. One of the indicators of a civilised nation is the tolerance of mockery of those in authority and an amused questioning of contemporary social mores.
More than 50 years ago HM Bateman begged for some 'official recognition of the worth of comic drawing… a permanent collection of some of the best examples… a sort of National Gallery of Humorous Art'. Fellow artists have echoed that plea. Ralph Steadman has reminded us that 'as a nation we have found the cartoon artform to be a vital dimension and an integral part of our culture and history'.
Well, a start has been made in this small but significant
gallery, which is within spitting distance of the British Museum and just round the corner from the birthplace of the caricaturist George Cruickshank.
The trustees boldly claim that Britain invented the cartoon artform. This might come as a surprise to the prehistoric painters of cave walls or the stitchers of the Bayeux Tapestry. But if the claim has resulted in the creation of this gem of a gallery - so be it.
The inaugural exhibition is a courageous attempt to span the history of British cartoons over the past 300 years. With space for a mere 250 exhibits, this is clearly an impossible task. It's consequently a bit like a posh stand-up buffet, with the visitor being offered titbits from different dishes.
Prints by Cruikshank, William Hogarth, James Gillray, and Thomas Rowlandson lead on to works by Low, Vicky, William Heath Robinson, Fougasse, Ronald Searle, Carl Giles, Matt Pritchett, Posy Simmonds, Gerald Scarfe and the inimitable Steve Bell.
Upstairs are rare comic pieces from the Beano, Dandy, Eagle, Topper, 2000 AD and that longest running and most deplorable of all British strips, the bourgeois frolics and doggerel of the repulsive Rupert Bear, Algy and co.
Watching visitors it is clear that people, like me, have tribal loyalties when it comes to humour. 'You never know why people laugh,' said WC Fields. ' I know what makes them laugh, but trying to get your hands on the why of it is like trying to pick an eel out of a tub of water.'
I observed crowds smiling before the works of Bateman and Giles. Both artists are, rightly, highly regarded for the brilliance of their draughtsmanship. But their subject matter, though forming an invaluable social history archive of the last half of the 20th century, is too genteel for my taste.
They represent one tributary of cartooning, the wry reinforcement, through visual gags, of social and class prejudices. I'm all for the crueller turbulent torrents, the satirical stuff that seeks to topple tyrants and demagogues.
There are some classics of the genre on view, including Hogarth's Gin Lane, Gillray's The Plum Pudding in Danger, Low's All Behind You, Winston, and Bruce Bairnsfathers's Well, If You Knows of a Better 'Ole…
Among the highlights of late 18th-century vitriol it was good to be reminded of the less well-known works, such as George Woodward's Immaculate Bachelors and Inaccessible Virgins or Richard Newton's Politeness, surely one of most chilling 'dance macabres' ever penned.
Cartoons work best when they lie ephemeral in our hands. Framed and carefully lit, and castrated by scholarly captions, they lose potency. Despite the smut, blasphemy, heresy and character assassination so graphically depicted on the walls the atmosphere remains reverential. People still whisper.
Snorting with glee at one cartoon I was disdainfully snubbed by a set of fellow visitors. I had become the latest three-dimensional version of a new Bateman opus…the man who dared to laugh in the Cartoon Museum.
Perhaps the energetic and creative curator Anita O'Brien should install periodic low-level bursts of recorded laughter 'pour encourager les autres'? Or a notice at the door, like the programme notes in cathedral concerts - applause is permitted - might be in order? It would be truly wonderful to enter a museum that welcomed visitors with the exhortation that LAUGHTER IS OBLIGATORY.
Good cartoons subvert. They have in them more truth than factual reports. The best are ambiguous. You laugh, take them seriously and act on them. I'm reminded that anarchic artists have sometimes been imprisoned or bribed. Pitt's Tory Government paid Gillray a pension on the condition that he left the Prince of Wales alone.
Cruikshank was backhanded the huge sum of £100 in exchange for a promise not to caricature George IV 'in an immoral situation'. What price Steve Bell? Perhaps we should be concerned that today's politicians and bigwigs are worried if they are not lampooned. And that the largest collection of parliamentary cartoons is that assembled by the Tory grandee Kenneth Baker. And that Prince Philip is the patron of the museum.
I believe we need our daily fix of wit, however scabrous. As Bernadette Devlin McAliskey once said, the British press collects news only as 'stuff to fill the space between their cartoons'!
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum
Project data
Cost: £96,000
Main funders: The Foyle Foundation, The Garfield Weston Foundation and others
Design: Joanna Leonard and Associates
Graphics: Homer Creative
