Britain and France are often seen as opposites, but one thing they certainly share is the love of satire. Whether it's Molière or a film by Cédric Klapisch, Much Ado About Nothing or a scene from Noël Coward, each has an equal relish for comedy of manners. Both have used it to wage social, even political, war. Yet this specific genre as first embodied by Hogarth, Gillray, Grandville and Daumier, has lacked a true female successor. Now, Paris' Pompidou Centre is awarding that place to Posy Simmonds in a new exhibition.
Rosemary Elizabeth "Posy" Simmonds was born in rural England on August 9, 1945. Over five decades of work, she has done it all: comic illustration, daily press cartoons, weekly comic strips, best-selling albums, children's books and screen adaptations. Simmonds' True Love, which appeared in 1981, is considered by most to be Britain's first graphic novel. But she is better known for three that followed: 1999's Gemma Bovery, 2007's Tamara Drewe and 2018's Cassandra Darke. Each is her satiric twist on a classic novel: Gemma was inspired by the ennui of Madame Bovary; Tamara Drewe the sexual intrigues in Far from the Madding Crowd; and Cassandra Darke the seasonal A Christmas Carol. The new show's subtitle is Dessiner la littérature, "Drawing Literature."
In 1977, in the Guardian newspaper, Simmonds began a strip called The Silent Three of St Botolph's. Its title was a nod to The Silent Three of St. Kit's, a girls' magazine comic she had read as a child 20 years before. The strip featured crime-fighting schoolgirls clad in cloaks and masks, but Simmonds made them into middle-class adults. Her "Wendy Weber," "Jo Heep" and "Trish Wright" were the earnest wives of a pompous sociologist, a whiskey salesman and an adulterous adman. The characters were upfront parodies of their readers: the right-thinking, left-leaning Guardian subscribers described by Simmonds as "well-meaning, woolly, middle-class liberals."
Later known under the title Posy, these dramas ran through 1987. They were immensely popular and led to a string of best-selling books: Mrs Weber's Diary (1979), Pick of Posy (1982), Very Posy (1985) and Pure Posy (1987). In 1981, the same cast featured in the aforementioned True Love, and Simmonds was named Cartoonist of the Year at the British Press Awards. In 1988, she left the Guardian for the Spectator. There, she produced some of her most ingenious work and the 1993 compendium Mustn't Grumble.
Cape, 1993. © Posy Simmonds, all rights reserved.
Critic Matthias Wivel notes that, while Simmonds' satire pictures "privileged life unsettled", it does so with a "trademark British understatement which ensures that satire never subverts story." He cites her for a remarkable sense of place he feels rivals that of Jacques Tardi. Simmonds' longtime champion, Paul Gravett, a co-curator of the Pompidou show, believes her to be one of our most accomplished pens. Much of Simmonds' resourcefulness, he tells me, comes from her knowledge of lampooning's Anglo-French inheritance. And this is exactly what the Paris show celebrates.
Both Simmonds' Gemma and Tamara have appeared in the States, where her work has long enjoyed a fervent cult. (Cassandra Darke remains with Jonathan Cape in the UK.) Yet, for many American readers, her utterly English humor (like her view of humor's role in British life) remains mysterious. The chances for a better understanding have, in recent years, diminished. This is not least because, given America's digital dominance, a large amount of "British culture" is shaped for U.S. consumption.
Such is not the case in France or in Europe. Here, Simmonds' art is widely read and exhibited. It receives a nearly constant stream of prizes, recently topped up by 2022's Grand Prix Töpffer from the city of Geneva and 2022's Sergio Aragonés International Award for Excellence in Comic Art from the National Cartoonists Society and the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. In 2017, Simmonds served as Jury President at the Angoulême Festival, having won its Grand prix de la critique and Prix Les Essentials eight years before. Her first French translation, 20 years ago, sold so rapidly it inspired the founding of Jean-Luc Fromental's imprint Denoël Graphic at the Paris publishing house Éditions Denoël. Denoël has now produced the Pompidou show's catalogue, titled True Love, after Simmonds' 1981 book - a stylish 144-page volume stuffed with treats and rarities.
A comics show at the Pompidou puts one in select company. Staged in the Centre's Bibliothèque publique (Bpi) and free of charge, these exhibitions recognise artists the institution feels "have changed comic art and its codes." So far, honorees have included Art Spiegelman (2011), Claire Brétécher (2015), André Franquin (2016), Riad Sattouf (2018), Catherine Meurisse (2020) and Chris Ware (2022). The Simmonds expo features 130 originals, including drawings, roughs and personal sketchbooks. It's a wonderful tribute to an eminent career. But, most importantly, it's an object lesson: illustrating how an artist sees their own culture better by looking beyond it. That's where Simmonds' "Anglo-French" heritage comes in.
Posy Simmonds herself is gracious and soft-spoken. Among the traits she happily lacks is a publicity doppelganger; she has no shadow self to alternate self-promotion with fake humility. Wary with words, she can even seem self-effacing. But Simmonds' discretion is that of an ace observer. Behind her calm tone and amenable deportment lurk a piercing eye and a truly acid wit. She is also as comfortable speaking French as English. Her mother's family came from Cahuzac in southern France. "All of us had to speak French," she says, "it was an obligation."
"All of us" means four siblings: two elder brothers as well as a younger brother and sister. They shared a "fairly simple" childhood in the country, something which the artist now sees as priceless. "After my older brothers went to school, five years passed before my sister was born. So I had plenty of solitary time, time to just be bored and to create. I learned to be independent quite early on because I started school at 4 and I went by myself."
From her early childhood, Posy Simmonds drew. But her inspirations were atypical; her first ideas of art came from some of the most cutting satire ever drawn. "My parents had all these issues of Punch in volumes. One or two were early Victorian, so they must have belonged to my grandparents. They all had drawings by quite good artists, people like George du Maurier and Graham Laidler - who I knew as 'pont.' There were also other volumes, issues that ran right up to the War. All of them had political cartooning.
"I was very small when I first looked at those. But I devoured them and they were very important. Before I even picked up a pencil, I knew a drawing always had some writing with it. Then, as soon as I went to school, I started looking at people like Hogarth, Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruikshank. Rowlandson and Cruikshank I was especially keen on. From the start, too, I looked at Daumier and Grandville... also Töpffer.
"Comics weren't totally approved of at home. But, as long we kept reading proper books, my parents would allow them. So I had my English comics and my girls' romance ones but I also had a lot of American comics. There was a U.S. Air Force base very near our village and the children of its officers attended our school. Every Saturday, they would buy imported comics and, eventually, those made their way to us."
The plucky schoolgirls she met in the pages of Britain's Mandy and Bunty, like their suitors in Marilyn, occupied a universe miles from that of Nancy, Sad Sack and Superman. Much as Simmonds loved them all, the imports honed her own sense of Englishness. By 8 or 9, she too was making comics, and they reflected her odd bibliography. In their small pages, exotic forms of violence erupt into decorous lives. Many such juvenile works appear in the show, with titles like "Marilyn Monroe Goes Shooting" and "How to Make Love and Be Loved in 4 Easy Lessons."
"'In How to Make Love,'" says Simmonds, "part of my instructions include dropping handkerchiefs. But, at the same time, I was drawing 'How to Turn Yourself into an Up-to-Date Ted.' Teddy Boys were the hoodlums of the day, these working-class dandies armed with bicycle chains."
Simmonds headed off to Paris at age 17. She boarded with a family, but, because her hosts were often away, she and her roommates enjoyed a surprising freedom. "Officially I was enrolled at the Sorbonne, but I skipped a lot of my classes. I would go hear jazz at clubs and sit around in cafés, drinking espresso and reading… I spent hours and hours in galleries and museums. I also knew a girl in Roland Petit's dance troupe, so I would go along to draw their rehearsals. One of my roommates was working as a receptionist and she met a lot of very different people. Once, she announced François Truffaut was about to arrive, he was picking her up to go for drinks. I raced out to buy a pack of Gitanes. But we were on the sixth floor without any lift so, by the time he arrived, Truffaut could hardly breathe. Cigarettes were the last thing he wanted."
Simmonds was intrigued by the 1960s French satiric comic press. Most of it was deliberately rude, sexist and keen to provoke. But, raised on Rowlandson and Gillray, she was less appalled than she was entertained. "That was when I found out about everything like Le Canard enchaîné and Hara-Kiri. I discovered all these artists like Siné and Reiser… and, of course, I found Sempé. When Sempé died last year, I was enormously sad; because I just adored him. Absolutely every drawing he did looks effortless. He had the art which conceals the art."
Paris was followed by London's well-known Central School of Arts and Crafts. There, Simmonds took a degree in graphic design. This helps explain her innovative use of layout and her frequently hilarious, hand-drawn type. However, just as vital was her six-month spell at the Heatherley School of Fine Art for a very classical course in drawing.
Simmonds insists that all the training mattered. "Drawing is a good example; who really teaches that now? Of course, some of it was boring… the drapery, the life class, copying plaster casts. But drawing will teach you how to really look; it helps you understand life. The more you do it, the more you always learn."
Nothing in her career could diminish her affection for early English satire. "Cruikshank and Gillray, they were just so fierce; that really sank in! In the London where they were working, life was very poor… and quite naughty, very bawdy. Yet they really knew how to laugh."
Simmonds' own comedy, while it exudes politics, almost never takes place in the political arena. So is it really plausible to rank her work with that of a Hogarth or a Gillray? To comprehend the logic, you have to understand the world of 18th century London's print revolution. This was a moment when elements of both France and England intersected to create a novel trade - one in ridicule. Although it centered on politics, the new art also targeted social blunders and behavior. Despite what one might assume, women were also an indispensable part of it.
Satire first boomed in England, where the press was freer. But elite French society played a critical role. Its taste helped define what the English saw as "society," as well as much of what that society did, bought and thought. Society women who were French helped it shape the concept of wit. Says the historian Benedetta Craveri, "In elite French life, when it came to etiquette, language and the leisure arts, it was the women and not the men who dictated rules... in haute society, women decided everything."
Each nation's privileged class being nosy about the other's, evolving culture and customs were soon swapped and emulated. London itself already had a large French population. This included Huguenot refugees like Simmonds' forebears, as well as exiled satirists and pornographers. As revolution looked more and more likely, the capital's Gallic ranks were swollen by those who fled it. All of this further embedded French ideas in England.
Satirical stereotypes of the French endured, of course, and the English continued to mock them as diminutive, effete and dandified. Yet many of their manners seeped into London life - and, once in place, escaped their national links.
Says Posy Simmonds, "I'm so interested in that moment. Partly because of my family, although they had arrived earlier. My mother's branch moved up the Thames and out of London. But some of the others, they became part of it all." Several of those ancestors, she says, were musical. "One sold instruments and sheet music near the Strand, right in that whole hotbed of graphic activity."
English satire retailed very well in Europe and was especially relished by the French. Its London-based publishers included French and English women, names like Mary Darly, Elizabeth d'Achery, Susan Vivares, Hannah Humphrey and Susanna Sledge. All of them owned and ran key print shops. In addition to his famous partnership with Humphrey, Gillray himself was published by two Frenchwomen.
But this world's women were more than merely social arbiters and print sellers. Legions of poorer females colored all the comic prints. Society figures such as Sarah Sophia Banks became keen collectors (Banks had Gillray note every character's name on each of her prints) and women like Maria Carolina Temple and Valentina Aynscombe actually designed cartoons. Before and after the Revolution, Paris society used imported prints to keep up with gossip. Many images of the era show working women gathered in front of London print shop windows for a laugh.
When it came to caricature, says Gillray's biographer Tim Clayton in his 2022 book A Revolution in Satire, "a female audience formed an important part of the market." Many women also became stars of satire. The soldiers, royals and politicians it lampooned found their mirrors in wily wives, molls-on-the-make and charmless "bluestockings." Countless laughs came from such women calling the shots.
Both Simmonds' family history and her personal taste ground her own comedy in this particular crucible. That she feels so at home there does not surprise her fellow cartoonist Nicholas Garland. Garland, now 88, is a British legend. He has drawn for publications from the left wing Private Eye to the conservative Telegraph, and in 2012 he was official cartoonist for the London Olympics. Twenty-five years ago, Garland began to insist that Simmonds was "a great comic strip artist."
While he recognized Simmonds' singularity, however, Garland did concede that it could be masked by her restraint. "The effect of Posy's work is comic because it is deadly accurate and completely familiar," he told the Telegraph in 2003. "But while you recognize everything, you also see past the everyday objects and cheerful expressions to the doubts and uncertainties. Simmonds' artillery is small bore but explodes smack on target. She attacks with a sort of ironic tolerance… Posy is forever moving off, smiling to herself but leaving no blood on the floor."
Once Gemma Bovery enjoyed its huge success, Garland felt vindicated. "There had always been another side to Posy which, in spite of being permanently checked, is never far away. It's darker, more passionate and sardonic than the rest. You get flashes of contempt, eroticism and hatred that melt into comedy even as they arrive."
The Pompidou exhibition shows you how true this is. It also reveals how much Simmonds, like Sempé, operates by stealth. But her art is far from mute, and she has what Garland calls "a wonderful ear for the spoken word." Says the artist herself, "That goes back a long way. My school had lots of Latin, which I was really good at and I'm sure that had something to do with sound. For my work, too, I always take sound notes. I've always noticed things like how a certain woman says 'no.'"
She herself is also a gifted mimic. "Even when I was tiny, I never had a part in the school Nativity play. Instead, I did the sounds. I could do the creak of the stable door and the donkey braying… all the different animals. I like to imitate accents and impolite noises. Basically, I like every kind of detail."
While long identified with the left-of-center Guardian, Simmonds' career started at Rupert Murdoch's newly revamped edition of the Sun. During six years of work, she gave them 1,500 gags, all starring a lecherous bear and a wide-eyed doll. Simmonds had begun these in 1969, for a small publication called The Posy Simmonds Bear Book. Delighted by the idea of a young and very pretty artist drafting racy jokes, the Sun offered Simmonds a daily tabloid slot. Dubbed Bear by Posy, this generated two hit books in 1974 and 1975.
Murdoch's money, says Simmonds, was a lifeline. "I had slowly been finding these little jobs, but it was always £5 followed by three weeks of nothing. I was incessantly making the rounds, showing my portfolio, leaving my number. But to pay the rent I was also cleaning houses, walking dogs, babysitting… even selling Pyrex dishes. When the Sun offered me £5 a drawing, that was amazing. It was more than my rent."
Rent was a bigger obstacle than sexism. "In those days, you know, the ads for flats all said things like 'Fifth girl needed' or 'Sixth girl wanted.' Just for some horrible basement you had to have four or five flatmates. It would always be a damp, unheated place, one with no kitchen, no phone and no fridge. All the flats were squalid and you lived from month to month."
Simmonds' words bring to mind the great Claire Brétécher. At the same moment in Paris, Brétécher, too, was struggling. She told a similar tale on radio to France Culture of her first meeting with Pilote's editor René Goscinny. Years passed, Brétécher said, before anyone told her just how repelled he was by her person. "He told everyone in Paris that I was really grubby and smelly… which, at the time, was probably true." Just like Simmonds, Brétécher was fighting to make the rent on "all these terrible squats."
Brétécher and Simmonds are often seen as twins, and there are certainly similarities between them. Just like Simmonds' strips in the Guardian, the French artist's Les Frustrés (published from 1973 to 1981 in the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur) mocked its own center-left readership's hypocrisies - and each trades in their characters' social, work and sex lives.
Brétécher, who died in 2020, was five years older, and she too was strikingly beautiful. But her comic style is far more slapstick and her graphics looser, more angular and expressionistic. Simmonds' cartooning, which is rounder and more plastic, has a different sort of coherence. Its characters' jaundiced view of life is not underlined but contradicted by the drawing, which has a clear sympathy with naturalism.
Brétécher's work was not something Simmonds saw during her first Paris stay. "I didn't discover her until the 1980s, when the Sunday Times began to run Les Frustrés. But as soon as I saw it, I hunted down the books in Paris and, of course, I absolutely love them." The pair met once, she says, at a Paris party. "I remember it perfectly. She was wearing a leather jacket and looked stunning. She had the most amazing eyes." But their talk, she says, "was all about deadlines."
Both women's characters experience societal change - something Brétécher expressly explores through dialogue. Simmonds, however, also probed it by changing formats. As Paul Gravett notes, "She just reinvents the medium. Posy will change the actual strips or the lettering and she often imports other perspectives, through graphic versions of diaries and letters, news cuttings or photos." She also speaks through graphic appropriation - drawing one strip like a Masereel woodcut, another as if it were 1980s MTV.
Simmonds also likes to parody formats from the 18th and 19th centuries. If her readers know little about their sources, she isn't bothered. "They might be shocked if they really saw early satire… especially now that all the publishers have 'sensitivity readers.' But who's really arguing women or Black people or Asian people or anyone marginalized shouldn't get their shot? Too many disparities have existed far too long…. But the fear of causing offence, that can become a straitjacket. People have always taken offence! Long, long before they could tweet, they wrote angry letters. I remember when I was first at the Guardian, I had drawn a Black doctor in some scene and I got a furious letter saying 'Well, this is PATRONIZING! Don't you realize most Black people in the health service are in the lower echelons?!'"
When it comes to complications, she says, some are much more basic. "English understatement, for instance… that's quite hard for American readers. I've had quite a lot of misunderstandings in that realm and it's usually been with Americans. Often it's just these terribly stupid, simple things. Once when it was really pissing with rain, I remember saying something like 'Ummm, lovely weather for the ducks.' The person I was speaking to replied, with total incredulity, 'What are you talking about? It's raining!'…. In Britain or France, though, subtext is second nature. There's this ongoing thing between us and, in that sense, our nations are very near. That satirical impulse, that tradition, is always there."
Simmonds' longtime translator, Liliane Sztajn, concurs. Sztajn renders a wide range of English texts into French, voices as different as Chester Himes and Dylan Thomas. Her love for England parallels Simmonds' love of France, and, as with Simmonds, it dates from her adolescence. "We both agree that, even when they express it in different ways, humor unites the English and the French. Americans, on the other hand, take things so literally and so rarely deviate from that way of seeing that they don't much use or understand irony."
"English," she adds, "is innately the language of understatement. So the words you're dealing with may be nearly the same. But, between an English writer and an American one, the point of view being expressed is always different. Americans, for instance, are permanently on show and their language focuses on what is shown and seen: "Arrrgggghhhh, help me!!! Help me!!! I've just stepped on a mine that's blown my foot off, oh my God, I'm dying…" Whereas a Briton is permanently understated: "Well, that's annoying, I've gone and stepped on a mine. Look! It's ripped my foot off!"
"Not being American," she says, "makes it far less difficult for me to grasp convey Posy's own caustic and mischievous way of thinking. The most difficult thing becomes the sheer length of French with its need to explain and develop. But it's still a double whammy because, unlike French, English is very concise. It's a language that can impart six concepts in three words… yet the size of speech bubbles is fixed."
From her effusive Wendy Weber to selfish Cassandra Darke, all Simmonds' characters are essentially types. Each is familiar and appears benign. But their trials revolve around something more private, which is those compromises bourgeois life demands. The toll it exacts–the false friends, casual betrayals and crushed ideals–provides many of Simmonds' laughs and supplies comic energy. But they also constitute a warning that, if such tradeoffs become reflexive, you get more than just social absurdity. You, like her characters, become a chronic opportunist.
Back in the day of Hogarth and Gillray, such a message would have been far more forthright. It would have been flung right in your face with monstrous vigor. Early French satirists admired that audacity and they rapidly set out to imitate it. Yet, despite their veneration, different presuppositions underlay their critiques.
As Benedetta Craveri puts it, "If French moralists, novelists, playwrights… and, by no means least, the socialites themselves, persisted in tearing off their masks to denounce the absurdity of the social comedy, this could only be because its authentic ideal of perfection endured." Early British satire lacked such an underpinning. Its laughs were so anarchic because the humorists behind them saw pretension as simply farcical, not as a deviation from some Platonic norm. Their mockeries were so cutting because they were autonomous - and, apart from that of Hogarth, much of their work can seem nihilistic.
Hogarth was the exception, a satirist who said he scorned the term "caricature." He was, he insisted, not a cartoonist but "a moral and comic history painter." French artists understood this better than Hogarth's countrymen - and the same thing has been true for Simmonds. The charm of her comic innovations, like the lightness of their handling, tends to mask the moral base she shares with Hogarth. For, in even Simmonds' most acerbic tales, there's a hope for human betterment.
The Pompidou exhibition is not the first iteration of Simmonds as Hogarth's heiress. Back in 2015, she was asked to create a piece that could hang alongside work by Hogarth, Cruikshank, Rowlandson and Hablot Browne (Charles Dickens' favorite and best illustrator). All were stars of an exhibition called "Drawing on Childhood," staged at London's Foundling Museum, which commemorates the UK's first children's charity, 1739's Foundling Hospital. Modelled on Paris's Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés, this gave a home to London's illegitimate infants until 1951. William Hogarth was one of its founding patrons.
For the Foundling Museum exhibition, Simmonds chose a scene out of the era's literature: a squire from 1749's The History of Tom Jones discovering the bastard child hidden in his bed. Her use of period lettering, inks and color construct a gentle scene of comic theatre. The sense of every page and frame as theatrical, as a personal proscenium, is another trait Simmonds shares with the 18th century. Says the artist, "I really think of every strip as a play. Even when a series is running week to week, I see each episode as a separate drama. Each one has its own inner rhythms and 'acts.'"
Those strips, like her book-length narratives, reprise the very English, very arch comedy practiced by a long line of actual playwrights - from Etheredge and Sheridan to Pinter and Wilde. But, as with Cruikshank and Gillray's cruder farts and bums, all the strategies those satirists use are male. In Simmonds' aspiring men and women of mode, her libertines and egotists, their dramatic archetypes live again. Yet her texts and images are far more tactful and much more retiring. Her restraint is such that even the most fallible figure starts to seem affable. Just as Garland and Wivel note, she always errs on the side of subtlety.
Hers is also the verdict of a female eye. Posy never accepts that things can't or shouldn't change, but, for her, reality comes first. Her comedy is drawn from it, made of those enduring gaps between social posturing and what really happens. You can, of course, cite her art as feminist, but she's never one to fall for trendy options or conventional dogma.
Her eye for the details that characterize an era are, like her ingenuity, those of a satirist rather than a cartoonist. Recently, the English author Jonathan Coe claimed that, since the 1980s, Britain's humor has been undergoing a gradual gentrification - it's being tamed. It was never cruelty, Coe maintained, that differentiated British satire from British "comedy." It was more satire's willingness to really expose and disturb. Today's social and political comedy, he claims, may be "very agreeable, very amusing, very pleasurable. But it's not really satirical, I don't think, because it's just a kind of amused reaction to current events."
The difference Coe cites is what makes Posy Simmonds original. Her work's surface skill belies its doggedness in sticking to the facts. Because Simmonds places her faith in the art alone, this stance is more ambitious than it might appear. Says the artist herself, "I think that when you're drawing life, you just have to choose. Either you're going to show life as it is, warts and all, or you're dealing with something else, something you've imagined. Not life as it is, but life as you want it to be."
* * *
Posy Simmonds, Drawing Literature (Posy Simmonds, Dessiner la literature) opens November 22 at the Pompidou Centre's Bpi (Bibliothèque publique d'information). Admission is free and the show runs until April 1, 2024. The catalogue, True Love, is published by Denoël Graphic.
The post Hogarth’s Heiress: Posy at the Pompidou appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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