Note: This is the final excerpt from the upcoming The Comics Journal #310.
My biographical intro to my Gerald Scarfe intro runs over 19,000 words and covers his life from birth to approximately yesterday. I chose as an excerpt his early interest in drawing as a teenager to his entry into professional cartooning and the beginning of his ascent as one of Britain’s foremost practitioners of caricature and political cartooning.
– GG
A KNACK FOR DRAWING
He had always drawn and continued to draw. He was a good drawer — everyone said so — and good enough that the headmaster of his school thought he should apply to attend St. Martin’s School of Art in London. But he blew the interview with the principal by not bringing samples of his art. He continued to draw compulsively. He had, as nearly as I can tell, a major aesthetic revelation when he created a painting of a house he stayed in in La Bourboule in France for an asthma treatment. The painting is not just competent, but astonishing for a 15-year-old — with a lovely and imaginative color scheme, nicely composed. But, its very properness was the problem that Scarfe grasped at the age of 15. He describes his reaction to it:
It is a watercolor and perfectly respectable in that the hotel itself is drawn architecturally correct with perspective. Little green shutters on the windows and surrounded by trees, not so well painted, It’s OK, but I was coming to understand (and it worried me) that this was really just a sub-photographic image and that an artist’s job was to offer something more, Another vision. More information than in my artwork’s rendering of buildings and trees. What was that something more? I knew it was there but I didn’t know how to find it — and I had no one to ask. … I was so frustrated with the way I drew. I seemed to be unable to break way from the conventional. I wanted to be more expressive and to say something more than the obvious. … All I knew was that my work was boring and not good enough. How did you get from here to Picasso?
Scarfe’s watercolor style, circa 1952.
This was apparently the first time he recognized that the essence of art was interpretive, an insight that he would embrace with a vengeance throughout his career.
At around the same time, in response to a call for amateur artists to submit samples, he sent a drawing to Eagle, a (presumably) humorous drawing of a line-up of its comics characters with mismatched heads and bodies, which they published in the November 7, 1952 issue (vol. 3, #31). More significantly, Scarfe entered a drawing competition in Eagle in which readers were invited to draw an advertisement for Ingersoll watches — and won first place! Eagle published his drawing in its December 19, 1952 issue (vol. 3, #37). He takes great pride and amusement in pointing out that one of the runners-up in the same contest was none other than David Hockney.
Scarfe’s first printed drawing: “Eagle Artist’s Nightmare,” for the Eagle comic, c. 1952. He was 16.
The Education Act of 1944 (or the “Butler Act”) mandated public education through age 15, at which point you were — or, at least, could be — on your own. Scarfe left school at age 16. Art school and University was apparently out of the question. “My parents were convinced that I would be dependent on them for the rest of their lives, and my mother told me so,” he wrote. “But I had other ideas.” Those ideas did not include entering the banking profession, which is what his father lobbied for. Young Gerald interviewed at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which turned out to be another failed interview (he had not yet become a good interview subject). Scarfe seemed to have a gift for self-sabotaging when it came to taking advantage of opportunities for which he was temperamentally unsuited. He obviously had no interest in banking, but serendipitously, his uncle Cyril owned an advertising agency, prophetically called Scarfe Studios, in the Elephant & Castle in South London, and offered to hire the 16-year-old Gerald at 30 shillings a week (the equivalent of $24.81 today). He demanded from his uncle that he receive no nepotistic favoritism and he therefore started at the bottom of the rung: his initial duties included hauling buckets of coal “from a filthy shed up the threadbare linoleum stairs … and light the antiquated stoves with newspaper and wood” and “to clean the artists’ water-pots, sweep the floor and make the morning tea.”
Fine artist David Hockney, who is about the same age as Scarfe, was a runner-up in the same Eagle comic contest.
Recognizing Scarfe’s innate but untutored skill, Uncle Cyril moved him to the art department where he quickly learned how to draw precise representational images for print advertisements — of furniture, bedding, kitchen appliances, any domestic goods that could be sold. Scarfe describes the work as “excruciatingly tedious.” On the plus side, he learned how to “draw just absolutely anything and everything, from a bicycle to a banana.” Ironically, his uncle thought that he had the inchoate skills to become a fashion illustrator (who were among the highest paid artists in the advertising trade) and sent him to St. Martin’s School of Art in Charing Cross Road to improve his figure drawing. This proved to be his best academic experience. It was the first time he had drawn from a model (not to mention the first time he had seen a naked woman); he learned “how to depict bones, muscles, foreshortening, a feeling for flesh and blood on paper.” He discovered that figure drawing was an entirely different perceptual experience than drawing the inanimate objects he specialized in at Scarfe Studios, and therefore this was another leap in his artistic education. (“This was quite different; this was a soft, flesh-and-blood living human being and a much more complex emotional task.”) The physical space and the act of drawing was also a far cry from the antiseptic environment he was used to at Scarfe Studios. This was a place they could indulge in spontaneous and messy drawings. “I felt at home at last,” he wrote.
He continued churning out advertising illustrations, but he was “bored stiff” — and “depressed.” And he knew what he was doing was wrong — aesthetically wrong, and maybe morally wrong as well.
I knew I was misusing my talent, prostituting my ability. I already felt that the whole point of being an artist was to use my craft to tell what I saw as the truth. This advertising was lies — attempts to hoodwink the public. … It was so untruthful. So I was telling lies. I was helping sell things to the public and being fraudulent about it. I hated it. … I think that’s another reason my cartoons became ultra truthful because I realized the whole point of being an artist was telling the truth and if one misuses it and prostitutes it by doing lying drawings, it’s wrong.
After working at Scarfe Studios for five years, he quit to become a full-time freelance artist, which, he said, felt “momentous.” His uncle gave him freelance work to tide him over until he could build up a commercial clientele, which he did. But, freelance commercial art was not what he wanted to do, either. It was during this time that he started producing cartoons: Uncannily mirroring the economic pattern of American comic book artists of the ’30s and ’40s (but without the ethnic component), he saw cartooning as a way to break out of his economic and social circumstances: “I had always made little cartoon drawings to amuse myself, so cartooning still seemed like a possible way out — rather like boxing and football are to other prisoners of life.” He submitted gag cartoons to the Daily Sketch, a conservative paper that ran intermittently from 1909 to 1971 when it merged with the Daily Mail, “and to my excitement they accepted one and paid me three guineas” (approximately $100 in today’s currency). He became a “joke factory,” and expanded his cartoon submissions to the Evening Standard and the Daily Mirror, who also bought them. It was his success selling cartoons that finally gave him the confidence to move out of his parents’ house at the age of 19 and into an apartment in North London that he would share with a school friend, Remo Tamburini.
He began frequenting Prompt Corner coffee shop, which, according to Scarfe’s description, sounds like an East Village Beat bar, full of bohemians and artists and aspiring artists. (“There would be bearded writers in polo necks … lounging on cushions, expounding on Sartre and Proust.”) He briefly joined the Cartoonists’ Club (later renamed the British Cartoonists’ Club), which was founded by the political cartoonist Ian Scott in 1960, but Scarfe wasn’t much of a joiner and this association didn’t last long. Once a week he’d informally get together with other young cartoonists (such as Frank Dickens, the creator of Bristow, which has the distinction of being the longest-running comic strip by a single cartoonist, according to Guinness World Records) and brainstorm gag cartoon ideas. He was making a good living selling five or six gag cartoons to the Sketch, Mirror and Evening Standard every week, but he found himself at another crossroads. He was now in his early 20s and a reasonably financially successful cartoonist, but, while cartooning was better than sweating it out at Scarfe Studios or doing freelance commercial work, he didn’t want to be a gag cartoonist. Gag cartooning, or at least the kind of gag cartooning he could sell, he felt, had “become routine and tedious. Surely, I thought, there must be more. Once again I felt I was treading water and really wanted to move on now that I had discovered I could express my thoughts and feelings through my drawings.” But, move on to what? Like the caricaturist and painter David Levine when he was in very much the same place in his career — struggling professionally and existentially — Scarfe thought comic books might be an option, so he drew samples for a Robin Hood comic for an English publisher. But, like Levine, he couldn’t adapt to the comic book idiom and didn’t make the cut — for which we can all be thankful, as it turned out.
In what appears to be another attempt to find himself as an artist, he attended weekly classes in “General Drawing” at the Victoria and Albert Museum where he studied under Leslie Richardson. “I wanted desperately to know the secrets of art,” he wrote, “and Leslie brought the best out of me, teaching me specifically how to use color and how to use different implements. But what he did so well as talk about the theory of art: what I should be doing and looking at.” Studying under Richardson turned out to be another epiphanic moment in his life’s trajectory: “Although I had drawn all my life, I was still not convinced that it was my vocation. It took Leslie’s kind wisdom to give me the confidence to say: I am an artist.” Richardson himself recalled that Scarfe “was less complacent than most about his work — he was never content, always striving to take the development of his style farther and farther.”
It was during this period that Scarfe cultivated his love of cinema. He has described Britain in the ’50s as “dull”: “Oh my God, was Britain drab! It was postwar, and fun was banned. Streets were gray, people were gray.” But foreign films opened him up to new artistic experiences. He would frequent the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead and watch such films as Bicycle Thieves, The Cranes Are Flying, Jules and Jim, 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita. The master of graphic absurdity, Jacques Tati, was a favorite. “I can see now that I was very much influenced by comics and cinema — mainly visual storytelling,” he has written.
BREAKING INTO THE MAGAZINE SCENE
In 1960, Scarfe finally had a cartoon accepted by Punch. To a cartoonist breaking into the magazine market, Punch was the UK equivalent of the New Yorker or Playboy in the U.S. — the gold standard of mass market cartoon publishing. Among the educated classes, reading Punch became sine qua non. Its humor and satire was sophisticated without being offensive or threatening. It published a long list of distinguished cartoonists throughout its years, including Quentin Blake, H.M. Bateman, Michael ffolkes, Leslie Illingworth and many, many more. It was even the first to coin the term “cartoon” (in 1843). But by the time Scarfe was accepted into the ranks of Punch, and had become a regular contributor, the magazine was already on its way to becoming editorially sclerotic.
Punch’s attitude toward cartooning, which Scarfe charitably referred to as “feudal,” is neatly encapsulated in a statement by its then-editor, Bernard Hollowood, in an exchange between Scarfe and Hollowood (circa 1963) that must be savored in its entirety:
SCARFE: Couldn’t you have a cartoonist with a view of his own?
HOLLOWOOD: I don’t see much point in letting a cartoonist have his own say if one doesn’t think much of his views anyway. Obviously, people buy a newspaper or magazine because they find its views stimulating. And the best way we can guarantee interest among our readers is by recruiting a group of competent artists who can translate ideas into drawings under editorial guidance.
Scarfe’s early work from Punch. TOP: October 4, 1961 Punch cover. BOTTOM: From Punch #19, September 1962. The punch line: “Is this the second syllable they’re acting or the whole word?”
Scarfe quickly chafed at producing the anodyne gag cartoons the magazine routinely published, however beautifully drawn or executed they were — “They seemed as endless and meaningless as the blankets and shoes I had drawn in the commercial art studio.” Pushing against the magazine’s “official” philistine view of what constitutes creative work, started contributing cartoons of wry, piquant social commentary — often ambitious double page spreads with multiple drawings. His graphic style was clearly influenced by his two graphic heroes, Ronald Searle and André François. These were not quite political cartoons, but they had what Scarfe called “satirical undertones”; you can practically see him champing at the bit to express himself more freely, and to find his full creative expression. “I wanted to move on and felt an urgent need to make drawings that had some purpose, that expressed my hopes and fears about life around me: above all the need to capture on paper some sort of social comment. I wanted to use my pen to speak.” He considers a graphic commentary titled ”The Pleasure Seekers,” a barbed observation of consumerist absurdities, a breakthrough. “I realized that humor, properly used, is a devastating weapon. I had a found a new direction.” At the age of 27, he was considered radical enough to be touted as “The New Face of Punch” on the cover of Advertising Weekly (“The Journal of Advertising & Marketing”).
Too radical for Punch, as it turns out; but, fortuitously enough, along came Private Eye, which Scarfe says changed his life.
Private Eye was a satirical magazine whose iconoclastic energies were aimed squarely at the English political scene. It was started in 1961 by a tight-knit group of like-minded intellectuals/malcontents: Christopher Booker, William Rushton, Peter Usborne, Paul Foot, Andre Osmond, John Wells and Richard Ingrams — all of whom would go on to become, variously, novelists, satirists, publishers, actors, comedians, cartoonists, journalists. But in 1961, “the journalistic scene was bleak,” as Ingrams wrote, and they were all in their 20s, itching to shake things up. Inspired by the surrealist/absurdist comedy revue Beyond the Fringe (Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore), they sat around pubs brainstorming a new magazine until Osmond finally agreed to put up £300 to kick it off. The first issue appeared October 25, 1962. A short announcement ran in the Times.
The first copies of a magazine called Private Eye, edited from London by a group of recent Oxford and Cambridge graduates, have been published. The staff, mostly former writers for the Oxford undergraduate magazine Mesopotamia, are waiting to see how the sales go before launching the magazine as a national weekly next year. Private Eye concentrates on satirical commentary.
In short order, Private Eye became the most welcoming vehicle for cartoonists in the UK (and quickly supplanted Punch as the most vital publisher of cartoons). In its first decade, it published the young Ralph Steadman, Wally Fawkes (“Trog”), Michael Heath, Bill Tidy, Terence Parkes (“Larry”), Barry Fantoni, Hector Breeze, Edward McClachlan, Timothy Birdsall (whose brilliance was cut short, dying in 1963, age 27) and a young American, Sam Gross. And Gerald Scarfe.
It was the cartoonist William Rushton who, at a party at Scarfe’s home, suggested that he try his hand at political cartooning and submit something to Private Eye. “The Profumo scandal was in full flight so I took off after it,” wrote Scarfe. The Profumo affair, for those of you who have not seen the 1989 movie Scandal, was about the Secretary of State for War John Profumo’s affair with a model named Christine Keeler. It exploded in the then-easily-shocked press, and even caused Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, whose only tangential connection was that he chose Profumo to be part of his cabinet, to resign in disgrace. (Ah, those were the days.) There were a series of infamous photos of the 21-year-old Ms. Keeler (ostensibly taken as publicity shots for a proposed film about her) posing nude on a chair that were making the media rounds, and Scarfe drew a naked Macmillan in the same pose as one of those photos. It appeared in their April 5, 1963 issue, and it made such an indelible impression (on Private Eye’s readership, at least), that they used it again for the cover of their 1964 annual compilation (Private Eye’s Romantic England). This caused such a stir that England’s four biggest book wholesalers — W. H. Smyth’s, Wymans’, Boots’ and Menzies — banned the book and refused to distribute it. In truth, it is one of Scarfe’s lesser drawings, but it was the idea that a Prime Minister could be depicted naked on the cover of a magazine that raised hackles and made Scarfe an overnight media sensation within London, or English, circles. “If any one cartoon marked the rejuvenation of insult and aggression in graphic satire, Scarfe’s was it, since no major figure of state had been ridiculed in his nakedness since the 1790s,” wrote Vic Gatrell in the Times Higher Education. “Cartooning of this audacity opened the way to others and helped focus a public skepticism about the great and not so good that had long lacked a language.” He was seen as the boundary-slagging second coming of the scabrous 19th-century political caricaturist James Gillray. And in many ways, although he had not yet achieved it, that is what he became.
“Dirty Goings-On at Cliveden.” From Private Eye, regarding the Profumo Affair c. 1963.
This was, really, only the beginning. He continued, “to lash out in every direction, sometimes flailing wildly and hitting my targets by a combination of luck and instinct. I drew every politician under the sun — as libertines, vultures, philanderers, dogs and pigs. It tumbled out, spilled and oozed. I was accused of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I really enjoyed myself.” It certainly looks like he did. He was enormously prolific, as he would be throughout the rest of his life. His drawing became more assured during this period; he was finding his voice while honing his craft, the two passions complementing each other. He taught himself anatomy during this period by drawing from medical books — “My efforts to represent faithfully the human body led to caricatures that showed its workings, the bones, sinews, muscles, skin, bulging flesh and veins and sometimes the innards.” His drawings of politicians were becoming freer, as if they were exploding from the constraints of representational drawing, wildly grotesque and rampantly febrile. There were still hints of the elegant line-work of François and Searle, but the anger and disgust expressed through his drawings looked like he was adopting George Grosz and Otto Dix as new mentors. Scarfe had discovered his signature approach to political cartooning, which focused as much on the grotesque caricatural dimension of the drawing as it did public policy. “I was able to use this style to its full-blooded extent,” he wrote. ”I felt I could let go and proceed at full rip.”
Scarfe credits his stint at Private Eye with not only helping him find his vocation (“For the first time I knew what I had to do — I knew the way”), but also for propelling him into commercial success. He was, he wrote, ”deluged with commissions, offered books, interviewed on television, given exhibitions, won awards and critics took me seriously.”
THE CARTOONIST’S JAGUAR
In 1964, the Sunday Times (not to be confused with the Times, newspapers that were founded independently of each other, but which were both bought by Rupert Murdoch in 1981) commissioned Scarfe to cover the 1964 U.S. presidential campaign from a cartoonist’s perspective: He was supposed to tag a ride on LBJ’s and Barry Goldwater’s respective campaigns and draw what he saw. At 28, he found himself in New York begging LBJ’s campaign press agent to let him onto the campaign plane with the other reporters. He finally joined them in Chicago and spent several weeks following Lyndon B. Johnson [LBJ]’s around, to Ohio, through the South and down to Cape Canaveral, where he had plenty of time to sketch him. He managed to perform the same trick with Goldwater and even had the Senator from Arizona sit for a portrait while flying over New Jersey: “I made notes at the time: ‘Goldwater seemed very solemn and thoughtful. He has an unfortunate face, in some ways his mouth movements are unpleasant — almost a snarl when he talks.’”
From the Sunday Times magazine, November 1, 1964. Lyndon B. Johnson’s election campaign, scene at the airport.
In that same year, Esquire magazine flew him to Germany to record his graphic impressions of that city, still under reconstruction from the war. (Scarfe had come to Esquire’s attention when, in 1963, they ran a feature on Private Eye. In the article, Esquire censored a cover that showed a cubistically pixilated John F. Kennedy about to hit the nuclear button, replacing him with another figure instead.) Another memorable moment in Scarfe’s career came in 1965, though the story begins a year earlier. The Times, for whom Scarfe was freelancing more and more, though not entirely happily (“They commission work, but reject a lot of it,” he said), asked him to draw Winston Churchill on his last day in the House of Commons, July 28, 1964. Scarfe drew him as he saw him that day, not as the defiant icon of WWII, but as “a shambling figure supported on both sides by attendants who carefully eased him on to his usual seat at the end of the row. And there he sat, apparently unaware of his surroundings. A senile old man.” He made a number of detailed pencil sketches from which he drew a charcoal portrait. It was another work from him they rejected, on the grounds, they told him, that Churchill’s wife “Clemmie would be very upset when the newspaper dropped through the letterbox the next morning.” However, when Churchill died the next year, Private Eye showed no such sentimental aversion and, at Peter Cook’s insistence, they ran it on the February 5, 1965 cover. Later in 1965, the Sunday Times flew him to Egypt (with the writer Martin Paige) to “report on how well the Suez Canal was running during the economic difficulties President Nasser was facing.”
Later that year came what may have been the most significant turning point in Scarfe’s career. The Daily Express ran a profile about him in the November 3, 1965 issue, titled “Ghoulish Advance of Mr. Scarfe,” in which it heralded him as “undoubtedly possessed of the most ghoulish line of British cartoonry today.” (Yes, they even invented the word cartoonry for the occasion). Scarfe’s career had been gaining momentum ever since he drew the Profumo cartoon in 1963, he was in high demand already, and this short celebratory article was more proof that the wider world was paying attention, and is most likely what generated interest from two of the leading London papers, one of which was the very paper it ran in, the Express, the other being the Daily Mail. Scarfe heard from both of them shortly after the article appeared and according to Scarfe’s autobiography, they proceeded to engage in a bidding war for his staff services as a political cartoonist. The Express editor, Derek Marks, offered him a salary of £5,000 and a Rover, a posh but stodgy-looking British built car. The Mail’s owner, Vere Harmsworth, upped the ante by offering £6,000 (roughly $120,000 in today’s money) and a Jaguar (which was a magnificent sports car in 1965). When he hesitated, Harmsworth added free gas: “You can fill up at the Daily Mail garage.” I can’t say with certainty that this is the only time in the history of cartooning that two papers vied for the services of a cartoonist, but it’s got to be rare, and salaries this high are now virtually unheard of.
Scarfe “Checkpoint Charlie” image for Esquire, 1964.
Scarfe was bedazzled and accepted the Mail’s offer, a decision he regretted almost immediately. Although he lobbied for editorial freedom, he didn’t get it. “The drawings I had been given the freedom to do for Private Eye were not possible in a ‘family newspaper.’ The Mail wouldn’t print the kind of explicit material I’d been producing for Private Eye. They had signed me up because of my notoriety at Private Eye, but, as another journalist explained, when the readers opened the familiar Daily Mail in the morning and saw a Scarfe drawing, it was as though the family dog had just shat on the breakfast table.” It sounds like they wanted Scarfe because he was “hot” (and possibly because he was young): but once they landed him and confronted the reality of publishing him, they didn’t know what to do with him. They already published two political cartoonists, the estimable Leslie Illingworth (63 years old) and John Bertram “Emmwood” Musgrave-Wood (50 years old); what to do with a third?
Soldiers in Da Lat, for the Daily Mail.
One assignment they gave him was to fly to Vietnam and cover the war. He spent time there with the journalist Richard West sketching the atrocities of war. Scarfe prided himself on his ability — and willingness — to draw anything, but in Vietnam he met his match. He got permission to draw in an American morgue in a hangar at the Tan Son Nhut airbase in Saigon. The sergeant who met him asked, “You sure you wanna do this?” to which Scarfe replied, unsteadily, “Sure.” Once he stepped inside, he saw the remains of an Army platoon: “mutilated bodies, bits of bodies — no heads, no limbs — disemboweled half figures. Lumps of meat.” He almost fainted, and certainly couldn’t draw what he was seeing. “‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled,” he wrote in his autobiography. “‘I can’t draw this.’ I found myself clutching my armpits and sweating.”
His reaction to working at the Daily Mail wasn’t much different: “I loathed my time there,” he wrote. A year after he joined, he quit, and went to work for the Sunday Times. “You are a radical and I am a radical,” the Times editor Harry Evans said to him when he hired him as a political cartoonist, formalizing a professional relationship that had begun three years earlier when they sent him to America to cover the presidential election. Although he was happier working at the Sunday Times, it was not perfect, either. “In my early days at the Sunday Times, just as at the Daily Mail, Harry had difficulty placing me. He certainly couldn’t print the overt drawings I had been able to make at Private Eye.” Therefore, in addition to doing drawings for the weekly paper, he was sent on assignment to sketch what he saw at: the Six-Day War (June 5–10, 1967); an oil spill at Cornwall; Northern Ireland (during The Troubles); a protest march against the Mafia with Danilo Dolci in Sicily; the Cannes film festival; a cholera epidemic in India; the military coup in Greece (April 1967); the Mosley Common Colliery coal mine; even back to America to draw the portraits of Robert McNamara, Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali. Although some of these sketches were published in the Sunday Times, others were eventually “completed by artists who had never seen the event they were depicting” and published in the Illustrated London News (which shared the Sunday Times’ owner, Roy Thomson).
Scarfe's controversial Winston Churchill drawing, July 28, 1964.
The drawings he did in his role as a graphic journalist are generally freer of exaggeration or satiric impulse, though not entirely. There is a degree of distortion in his sketches from Vietnam and the Six-Day War, true, but they still retain the profound human significance of the people they depict and the gravity of their circumstance. His drawing of the miners in Mosley Common Colliery, three miles under the earth, is solemn and naturalistic. They are played straight and affirm the dignity of the subject matter, which is usually humans in extremis. His famous portrait of Churchill is not unduly cruel. And his drawings of Robert Kennedy, Stephen Spender, Muhammad Ali, et al. are “respectable” portraiture. On the other hand, by the early-to-mid ’60s, he had perfected his approach to satirical imagery. He distorted the features of his subjects (or victims) to a more artfully grotesque degree than any of his peers (with the possible exception of Ralph Steadman), pushing the caricatural boundaries between likeness and abstraction as far as it could be pushed. His drawings of Nixon in the ’60s and early ’70s are especially horrific, Nixon’s nose and jowls rendered as cock and balls. Scatological and sexual elements are often grafted onto them, e.g., South Africa’s racist PM, Ian Smith, suturing a gigantic Black penis onto himself. It was as if distilled moral outrage and disgust was thrown on the page with ink and held together by pure craft.
From the Sunday Times, July 23, 1967. Miners, three miles underground in Lancashire.
While working for the Mail in 1966, Encounter magazine, edited by the poet Stephen Spender at the time, asked him to draw portraits of prominent American intellectual and artistic figures, and so he did: Arthur Miller, Stravinsky, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Oppenheimer, Leonard Bernstein, Mark Rothko, Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell and others. He spent time with each of them and drew them from life, to varying reactions — Oppenheimer was “upset” by his; Rothko said, “I don’t like them!”; Mailer thought his looked like a “punched-up Beethoven”; and Ginsberg, of course, propositioned him (without success), but apparently approved of his portrait. All of this, mind you, while contributing to both Punch and Private Eye and others.
Studies from life: boxers Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston, mid-1960s.
He was also drawing for the New Statesman under the conservative editor Paul Johnson and the literary editor Nick Tomalin. He drew caricatures of literary and artistic figures (Bob Dylan, Orson Welles) as well as more Private Eye-ish political cartoons (e.g., LBJ literally shitting bombs on Vietnam).
Time magazine commissioned him to draw a Beatles image for their September 22, 1967 issue. He sketched them both at their homes, but instead of drawing or painting an image, he chose a more experimental approach, translating his sketches into a three-dimensional sculpture “by dipping small pieces of torn-up newspaper on a flour-and water paste and applying them layer after layer on to a wire armature, which was then photographed for the cover.”
Above: Life drawings of American intellectuals for Encounter magazine, 1966. TOP: Mark Rothko. BOTTOM: Arthur Miller.
Scarfe was, it seems, always working on multiple artistic projects at the same time throughout his career — a high-end form of multitasking. He began a relationship with the BBC in 1968, when he co-directed (with John Irvin) a documentary, “I Think I See Violence All Around Me,” part of the BBC Two series, One Pair of Eyes, a (roughly) monthly program that allowed a “presenter” who was a prominent or successful practitioner in his field (Tom Stoppard or Spike Milligan, say) to create a program. He mixed animation and live action and “took as my theme what I saw as the violent state of the world” (and partly filmed in an abattoir, of course). Violence, again. He flew to the U.S. to cover the 1968 presidential election, during which he sketched Bobby Kennedy on his private jet for Fortune magazine (he was in LA when Kennedy was shot). He began showing in galleries as well: in 1968, his first exhibition in America, “U.S. Election ’68,” was shown at the Waddell Gallery in New York (to be reprised a year later with another), and in 1969, his exhibition of sculptures, “Hung by Scarfe,” was presented at the Grosvenor Gallery. (This show traveled to the Sears Vincent Price Gallery in Chicago, which is, weirdly, exactly what it sounds like.) He did two Time magazine covers in 1968, both sculptural, of the economist and public intellectual John Kenneth Galbraith and Rowan and Martin of Laugh-In. In 1970, he was commissioned to create sculptures for a themed exhibition about British literature to be shown in Osaka, Japan, which he apparently tackled with his usual gusto, creating gigantic sculptures of Sherlock Holmes and Gulliver, among others (the latter of which required a crane to lift the 30-foot-tall Gulliver over his garden wall and onto a truck for the trip to Japan). The BBC commissioned him to direct a documentary about his 18th-century predecessor, William Hogarth, for their Omnibus documentary series. I have not seen the film, but Scarfe described the filmmaking process thusly: “I had five actors capering and looning about London and Kent in an effort to recreate Hogarth’s Peregrination: a journey he made from London to Rochester. I nearly lost them all in the fast-flowing Thames, but all was well in the end.” It was released in 1971. He was asked to exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery with David Hockney and David Bailey in ’71. This is when he created his famous Chairman Mao reupholstered chair “sculpture,” which I have been lucky enough to see close enough to touch, and which is perversely breathtaking both in its sheer conceptual audaciousness as well as its execution. He almost, in this same year, designed a film by the renowned director Michael Powell, based on The Tempest, to be called The Magic Island. Although he did sketches for it, and he and Powell and James Mason, who was to star in it, sat around in his studio and discussed the screenplay, it didn’t come off, as so many films don’t, because the money evaporated.
*Excerpt from interview
ORGANIZING GRAPHICALLY
GARY GROTH: I want to talk about your drawing a little more and then get back to the ’60s. You said, “I’ve always cared tremendously what the drawing looks like, and I always do my best to organize it graphically and make it aesthetically pleasing, even though it may be grotesque, even though it may be horrific.” What do you mean by organizing it graphically?
GERALD SCARFE: Well, it’s purely personal, of course, but it has to balance.
Compositionally?
Compositionally. You know, even if it’s grotesque, it can be elegant. It can be a grotesque drawing, which has an elegance, an underlying elegance to it. People can be beautiful in their own way. There’s a French word, something like jolie-laide, which means ugly/beautiful. They’re kind of ugly, beautiful people. You know, Serge Gainsbourg? Kind of an ugly man, but he’s got an elegant beauty.
But it’s very difficult to define all these things because I don’t really think about them that much. I just do what I do. It’s interesting when I’m questioned because it does make me think, how does this come about and why does this come about? But if I could find the perfect way of doing it, I would, naturally, do it all the time. But organizing graphically, so it fits the space, has the most impact.
A lot of journalism is about impact. You’ve gotta hit hard in a newspaper because you’re dealing with all the headlines. You’re dealing with these fantastic photographs. You’re dealing with advertisements, which have been designed by experts to now catch your eye. There’s quite a lot of vying for attention that goes on in a newspaper. So, you’ve got to find an image, which is, in some cases, shocking, because that shock gets through. It’s a hard playing field to work in when you’ve got all these other guys [at the] top of their game doing it, too.
How do you organize the page when you attack it with such urgency? In other words, is the composition in your head, or do you simply assault the page without quite knowing where the elements are going to be placed?
Both, really. I used to just start with the pupil in the middle of an eye and then put the iris, then the eyelid, then the eyebrow, and then start the line going down the nose. I would think, oh, I can take this line further. If he’s got an enormous nose, he’s gotta have quite a big jowl here. So, it develops as it’s going along. Other times, I have a preconception of what the image would be, and that’s what I try to achieve. On occasions like that, I might make a quick sketch to show what I visualize it as being, because you think you remember things, but you don’t unless you make a quick sketch. It’s a bit like a dream, it evaporates before you can remember it again. And any other thing that you are doing tends to cloud what your first vision would’ve been.
So, the answer to that is both. One is the contemplative line that you follow along and it takes place and unravels and other times you’ve got a complete concept. I want to achieve that. So, I can, on occasion, work on various parts of the painting at the same time. I could do a little bit on the nose, and then I can dash across to the ear and down to the legs and it’s developing bit by bit.
Trump denies: New York Review of Books, January 2018. 131–135: From Scarfe: Sixty Years.
One of the things you said was, “The graphic aspect of my work is important to me. I want my drawings to be precise. And a steel nib used like a scalpel is my usual favorite. A steel nib can cut into the paper like a knife.” Do you need that tactile sensation in order to draw?
Yes. And even with using a softer thing, like a pencil or a Sharpie or something like that, I don’t have that contact with the paper that I have with the steel nib. It’s cutting. You can actually feel it trembling through, cutting through the paper. And that really activates if it’s working. It’s not always working like that. But at its best, I’m cutting into the paper with it.
Are most of your colors drawings watercolor?
Yeah. Which is a gentle, gentle art, really.
You did, sometime in the mid-’50s, a huge panoramic painting of Parliament. It looked to me like gouache, but I’m not sure.
That was oil. That’s hanging in Parliament now — well, in a building adjacent to Parliament, where all the parliamentarians have their offices. So, yes, it’s in parliament and the Churchill hung there, too, in Parliament. I’ve often thought of giving it back to them. They wouldn’t pay for it.
Of the various media you use, watercolor, oil and the techniques: brush and nib —
Pen, ink and watercolor and oil. Acrylic, it’s like a sort of plastic.
I think you’ve used wash.
Wash is like watercolor, just wash it with water.
You taught yourself all of these techniques over the years just by trial and error?
Yeah. Whereas my dear son, as I told you, has been properly taught.
ALEX SCARFE: What’s that?
You’ve been properly taught technique. And he can use any medium. I mean, I guess oil is the trickiest to handle. ’Cause it can get very muddy very quickly if you’re not careful.
And it takes a long time to dry, doesn’t it?
You’ve gotta wait before you go back over it. It’s also a different technique in as much as you start dark and come through to the light. You add a very dark, dense thing, and then you start picking out the lighter colors until you come through to the highlights eventually. Whereas watercolor is almost the other way around: You start with the white paper and then you put the black, the dark bits into it. I’m not describing that very well. But there you are.
COLOR
You said something really interesting in an interview once. You said:
It was a big difference [going from black and white to color], and in some ways a good difference. I was known in the ’60s for my black-and-white drawings; there was masses and masses of crosshatching. You could only achieve “color” by crosshatching and getting a gray effect. Now when I draw a jacket I can paint it in gray, I don’t have to crosshatch it gray, so it has produced a different type of drawing. I think it’s given me more freedom and it certainly makes the drawings quicker and certainly helps with the deadline because I can splash on some color very, very quickly. So, there is a change and I don’t know if it’s stolen something from the drawings or not, but they’re less ferocious than they were because my very, very early drawings were very, very detailed. I seemed to want to draw every wart and pimple in those days. Now my drawings has become simpler.
I was known in the ’60s for my black-and-white drawings; there was masses and masses of crosshatching. You could only achieve “color” by crosshatching and getting a gray effect. Now when I draw a jacket I can paint it in gray, I don’t have to crosshatch it gray, so it has produced a different type of drawing. I think it’s given me more freedom and it certainly makes the drawings quicker and certainly helps with the deadline because I can splash on some color very, very quickly. So, there is a change and I don’t know if it’s stolen something from the drawings or not, but they’re less ferocious than they were because my very, very early drawings were very, very detailed. I seemed to want to draw every wart and pimple in those days. Now my drawings has become simpler.
From the November 11, 1973 Sunday Times: Henry Kissinger in “Nixon’s Behind You.”
Do you think that moving to color has lessened the graphic ferocity of the commentary?
Well, it had pros and cons. I suppose it’s easier to put a red wash on a jacket than trying to achieve it with [black and white], and in some cases if it’s a splash of blood in bright red on a painting, it should have more impact. But I’ve found it interesting that in all those days of black and white, when I used blood quite a lot, it was always black, and yet it’s red in the people’s minds, it’s just as worrying as red blood. So, the people looking at black-and-white drawings, although they don’t know it, are trained to look at black-and-white drawings, and are able to interpret them into color in their minds. When they saw a black splash, they knew it was a red splash.
Yes, the crosshatching was laborious, took time, and it also made me draw in a certain intricate way with all the warts and pimples and little nobbles and so forth. There was a point somewhere along the way where I suddenly wanted to simplify. I think a lot of, as we grow older, do simplify. We get like Matisse; he became incredibly simple and his was a lot to do with his eyesight, I guess. In fact, he made those cutout patterns, you remember, and all that. That is a natural progression of age, I suppose. But it was for those intricate, vicious, biting little detailed drawings that I became known, and, I guess, I departed from that to a certain extent.
The content was hopefully just as vicious, but it may not have been portrayed in such a vicious way. I was still trying to do the same message but in a different method. I can’t help it, you know, I have to move on. I can’t go back and start trying to reenact Gerald Scarfe 1963 when I’m at this point. We all have a natural progression in our work and our endeavors, and I suppose that I wouldn’t want to admit that, but I guess I am admitting that maybe some of the pain has gone out of it because a nice red jacket is easier on the eye than a crosshatched busy, angry scratchy little jacket.
There’s a certain prettiness.
There is. Color is pretty, you’re quite right. I love color, and when it first came it was like a playground to be able to use after these years in this black-and-white wilderness that I was going through. I didn’t miss it before it arrived. But once it had arrived, then I realized what I had been missing.
The post Gerald Scarfe: ‘If we falsify the world around us, we are dishonest to ourselves and to posterity.’ — The Comics Journal #310 Preview appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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