The End Of The Caricature

Over break The New York Review of Books‘ signature cartoonist, David Levine, died. Levine was the caricaturist behind all the funny but also insightful drawings that the publication published. Today, Garry Wills has a beautifully written and deserved piece in the NYRB about Levine. Read it here. An excerpt:

Levine was a man of high intelligence, wide reading, and solid artistic training. He composed, shaded, and drew with the eye of a practiced painter. But more than that, he had great psychological insight into his subjects. What he revealed could be scathing. The sadness of Richard Burton’s career is in the picture of his drink-raddled face and bleary eyes as he poses, in his Hamlet costume, tiptoe on the skull of Yorick (1989)—the real death’s head is his own.

Despite such dark visions, Levine had a kind of surreal imagination that took the next step, the way Mark Twain used to. It was not enough for Twain to say that a train was so slow it had no need of the cowcatcher; he added that the cowcatcher was needed in the rear of the train to keep cows from ambling aboard. In the same way, Levine began with a picture of Lyndon Johnson crying little crocodiles for tears (1965). But later on, he had to top that—he shows a crocodile shedding little tear-images of Lyndon Johnson (1966).

With Levine’s death rose the larger prospect of the death of the caricaturist form. Today most print publications (the ones still standing) don’t use caricatures or drawings for their images and when they do they’re tweaked by computers. The result can be really nice looking but paint me nostalgic when I say that the caricature just can’t be replaced. It’s a type of drawing that requires insight in a single image and also humor —a delicate and hard to achieve mixture. The artist has to first depict the subject in a recognizable way, then he has to exaggerate some of the person’s features to get the opinon across. The job is as hard as it sounds, if not harder. And Levine was the master. There was something about Levine’s death that seemed to mark the end of that style of drawing. And so his death is doubly tragic.

–Daniel Strauss