Description
The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their
Enduring Power
A lavishly illustrated, witty,
and original look at the awesome power of the political cartoon
throughout history to enrage, provoke, and amuse.
As a former editor of
The
New York Times Magazine and
the longtime editor of
The Nation, Victor S. Navasky knows just how transformative—and
incendiary—cartoons can be. Here Navasky guides readers through some of the
greatest cartoons ever created, including those by George Grosz, David Levine,
Herblock, Honoré Daumier, and Ralph Steadman. He
recounts how cartoonists and caricaturists have been censored, threatened,
incarcerated, and even murdered for their art, and asks what makes this art
form, too often dismissed as trivial, so uniquely poised to affect our minds
and our hearts.
Drawing on his own
encounters with would-be censors, interviews with cartoonists, and historical
archives from cartoon museums across the globe, Navasky examines the political
cartoon as both art and polemic over the centuries. We see afresh images most
celebrated for their artistic merit (Picasso's
Guernica, Goya's "Duendecitos"), images that
provoked outrage (the 2008 Barry Blitt New Yorker cover, which depicted the Obamas as a Muslim
and a Black Power militant fist-bumping in the Oval Office), and those that
have dictated public discourse (Herblock’s defining portraits of McCarthyism,
the Nazi periodical
Der Stürmer’s anti-Semitic caricatures). Navasky ties
together these and other superlative genre examples to reveal how political
cartoons have been not only capturing the zeitgeist throughout history but
shaping it as well—and how the most powerful cartoons retain the ability to
shock, gall, and inspire long after their creation.
Member
Price: $25.00 |
Non-Member
Price: $28.00 |
Author: Victor S. Navasky
Book Info: 256 pp, hardcover (2013)
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 978-0307957207
Product #: TAC001