Reviewed: ‘The Efflorescence of Caricature’

Posted in books, reviews by Amanda Strasik on October 1, 2011

Recently added to caa.reviews:

Todd Porterfield, ed., The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759–1838 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 240 pages, ISBN: 9780754665915), $99.95.

Reviewed by Amelia Rauser, Franklin & Marshall College; posted 15 September 2011.

Caricature still has the power to inflame. In the last five years, several incidents—from the Danish satires depicting Muhammad to the racially tinged caricature of Barack Obama as a crazed chimp published by the ‘New York Post’ early in his presidency—have shown that caricature can still spark rage as well as pleasure. Developed in tandem with modern conceptions of identity, caricature is a quintessentially modern visual language. Caricature paradoxically reveals the truth of a person’s interior through the deformation of her or his exterior, thus making the invisible visible and satisfying a cultural desire for transparency and the unmasking of hypocrisy. At the same time, caricature is deeply subjective, its virtuosic linearity ostentatiously imaging the hand of the artist, and thereby providing an alibi for the truths that are unmasked: this is only my opinion, the caricature seems to say, and I’m only joking.

‘The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759–1838‘, Todd Porterfield’s edited collection of essays on caricature’s “golden age,” is uneven, but on the whole it enriches and expands an understanding of the first flowering of caricature in the modern West. Emerging from a 2006 conference, the volume is more international than usual in two ways: the essays frequently address issues of influence, exchange, and imperialism among different nations; and the authors themselves are from several different countries, thus bringing refreshingly different approaches and concerns to bear in their contributions. Besides this internationalism, Porterfield also stresses the importance of a broad, “continental” definition of caricature in his introduction to the volume. This approach allows for a diverse array of satirical imprints to be included, including those that completely eschew bodily deformation as a means of communication. But it also invites inexactness and can lead to conceptual confusion . . .