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April 7, 2012
In its purest form caricature—from the Italian carico and caricare, "to load" and "to exaggerate"—distorts human physical characteristics and can be combined with various kinds of satire to convey personal, social, or political meaning. It is a "loaded portrait" and so it is different from a cartoon, which is the satirical illustration of an idea.
In Fantastic, Deadpan & Deadly in the New York Review of Books David Bromwich refers to the exhibition of caricatures recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine.
David Levine, Lyndon Johnson
The above drawing originally appeared in the May 12, 1966 issue of the New York Review of Books with the article Vietnam: The Turning Point. It refers to LBJ with lifted shirt, revealing the scar of a removed gallbladder in the exact shape of a map of Vietnam in front of reporters at Bethesda Naval Hospital. It allude to Johnson's obsession with the bombing maps.
The exhibition is a history of a mode at once fantastic and deadpan, which was made possible by Hogarth and brought to perfection by his successors during the Napoleonic Wars and which includes the great names of caricature—James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, Honoré-Victorin Daumier. Caricatures and satires are generally created to comment on specific events or moments in history.
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