The greatest art form?

Yesterday’s post on the Azeri satirical journal of the 1920s reflected my admiration of graphic arts as a whole - let alone those who do caricature – which has been defined as “moral satire – making some point about the nature of man rather than a specific individual”. I would amend that slightly to replace “rather than” with “as much as” since some of the most famous caricatures have savaged individuals. The classic caricaturists for me are Goya and Daumier – with the Germans (Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, Kathe Kollwitz and Max Beckmann) making a powerful contribution in the early part of the 20^th century before the later British caricaturists such as Gerald Scarfe.

A retired British politician who has such a great passion for political caricatures that he was instrumental in opening a London museum devoted to the art suggests on this interesting video on the history of British caricature that “graphic satire is an art form (the only one) which Britain created” – starting with William Hogarth. In his steps followed James Gillray (the work above is his - an ambassador presenting his "credentials" to the King - more here), George Cruikshank and Max Beerbohm 

And, during my researches for this post, I was delighted to find this glorious output from some Glasgow artists in the 1820s giving incredible insights into the lives of Glasgow people in those times.

I had been aware that it was not easy to find books (in English) about this art form (however defined) or even its best practitioner such as Daumier. A very useful 1980s article on the genre (the only one I could find on the internet) tells me that it has been viewed down the ages as inferior. For the life of me I can’t understand why – since its exaggerations and social scenes are far more inclusive and tell us so much more than what passed for portrait painting.

A recent exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum reminded us of the greats. For those who want to know more, here is a two hour video with three presenters. And there is a great website on Daumier which not only gives all his works but actually explains the background of each!

The Bulgarian tradition of caricaturists is a very strong one – starting (I think) with Alexander Bozhinov a hundred years ago and including people such as Ilyia Beshkov, Marco Behar, Boris Angeloushev and Jules Pascin  whose main efforts were in the pre-war period.
One of my prize possessions is a copy of a 1954 magazine called New Bulgaria with each of its 18 pages covered with 3-4 amazing pencil caricatures almost certainly doodled by Bulgaria’ most loved graphic artist – Ilyia Beshkov.
I was happy to pay 250 euros for the journal – after all I got 50 sketches for about the same price as the going rate for one (admittedly larger) caricature of his! 

And delightful, comprehensive volumes have been published (in Bulgarian of course) on the first three of these individuals – Beshkov and Behar in the pre 1989 period; Angeloushev more recently.
Bulgaria at least honours its graphic artists properly.
Here's one blogger's introduction to eight old Bulgarian illustrators - a more general word, perhaps, than "caricature", "satire", "comic"........

How artists coped during communist repression is a fascinating subject - some (like Boris Denev and Nikolai Boiadjiev) refused to toe the official line on painting and almost stopped painting; many other moved into theatre design and cinema; others had to emigrate. One of them, Rayko Aleksiev, so annoyed the communists that he was arrested on their coming to power and died in prison under suspicious circumstances. An important Gallery is named after him – on Rakorski St. Things eased only in the 1980s largely due to the influence of PM Zhivkov's daughter who was a great art afficiando!

View of another world

Although I blog frequently about Bulgaria and Romania (between which countries I have been dividing my life in these last 5 years), I should say more about the other countries in which I have spent significant time – Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Kyrgzstan, for example. A New York Review of Books blogpost and a review in The Nation of a forgotten Azeri satirical magazine of a century ago gives me an opportunity to rectify this oversight. To give an easy introduction to the various actors, I borrow from the review in the Nation - adding in, where appropriate, links one of which is to a recent book on the magazine containing many of the caricatures with powerful line drawing and colours.

The backstreets of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, have a certain, winding magic. They house former caravanserai, once flophouses offered to travellers throughout central Asia, that have today been polished up into candlelit restaurants. Tall, grey blocks mingle with flourishes of Persian architecture - a symbol of Baku's straddling geography between Russia and Iran. But there are dozens of bookshops tucked away in these streets, shelves stacked with first editions and Soviet periodicals from the city's communist era, which ended in 1991.
It was in one of these booksellers near Maiden Tower that Slavs and Tatars, a collective of artists and writers, discovered a true bibliophile's dream: editions of one of the region's most daring yet overlooked satirical publications - Molla Nasreddin. Stating their sphere of interest as everything east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China, Slavs and Tatars make this loosely defined area of Eurasia their patch. Starting as a reading group that shared translations of books from this region (what they call "an arcane version of the Oprah Winfrey book club"), they've since exhibited sculptures and installation work in museums internationally, and been part of group shows at The Third Line gallery in Dubai.

"The illustrations drew us to Molla Nasreddin," says Slavs and Tatars. "They're reminiscent of Honore Daumier or Toulouse Lautrec." Molla Nasreddin was founded in 1906 by editor-in-chief Jalil Mammadguluzadeh and satirist-poet Mirza Sabir, both proud Azeris yet champions of a "modern" and markedly western system of values. It espoused this worldview via beautifully wrought yet withering cartoons and editorials that remain biting today.
Few were spared the editorial wrath: suffocating and outmoded fanatics, meddling European and Russian imperial powers, the position of women in society at that time and the hypocritical elite. Education, equality and regional independence, through a lens of secularism, was Mammadguluzadeh and Sabir's vision for central Asia's future. It was penned in Azeri Turkish in three different scripts - Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin alphabets - showing the three forms that the language went through as Azerbaijan passed into Soviet hands. This made translation into English difficult when Slavs and Tatars set out to publish a reader in 2011, titled "Molla Nasreddin: The Magazine That Would've, Could've, Should've". Here's another good review which gives a sense of the treasures the book holds

The book features their selections from 3,000 illustrations, curated into the different avenues of critique that the magazine took - such as Education, Colonialism and Women.
One illustration, for instance, shows two Azeri women wrapped from head to toe in fabric, and pointing in envy at the barred windows of a prison. The caption alongside reads: "Sister, look how lucky they are: they have windows!"
In another, five beaten-down Azeri men carry bespectacled donkeys on their back; plumes of smoke rise from long cigarette holders in the mouths of these remarkably aristocratic looking beasts.

Despite moving offices to and from Georgia and Iran, intermittent bans, and 10 years of the Soviets increasingly shoving editorial directives down the throats of the magazine's staff, Molla Nasreddin survived until 1931. Simultaneously, a cloud of obscurity seemed to settle over a region that, says Slavs and Tatars, had been one of the most intellectually and politically important places in the past 2,000 years.

"If anybody even takes notice of this region, they think of it as obscure, especially the more west you go - you talk to people about Kyrgyzstan, and you might as well be talking about Star Wars," says Slavs and Tatars. "But Baku was producing half of the world's oil until the first half of the 20th century," noting as well that Azerbaijan was one of the first countries in which women could vote (well before the UK), and publications such as Molla Nasreddin demonstrate an intellectual, progressive rigour from this part of the world that has been so far overlooked.
"That's why we're called Slavs and Tatars and not by our real names: it's not the work of a group of artists but the work of a region that has many nationalities, and had a shared heritage at some point. "From the point of view of the West, with this nonsense that passes as conventional wisdom that the West and Islam are on a collision course; you have to look at a part of the world where they have long coexisted." Namely, Eurasia.
The collective say, however, that Molla Nasreddin is also their antithesis in that it took modernity to mean westernisation. "We don't believe that at all, in fact we believe in quite the opposite - more of an indigenous or hybridised form of modernity."  But they still acknowledge its historical significance: "It's a shame that it came down to us as artists and writers in the early 21st century to rediscover one of the most important publications of the Muslim world," they continue. "That's testament to how overlooked this part of the world is.
"Very few people would spend two years of their life working on something they disagree with, but we are living in an increasingly insular world intellectually - less and less are we embracing the things that we disagree with."

I’ve been wanting for some time to do a post (if not a booklet!) about beautiful publications - which bring together layout; font; illustrations; paper quality; binding; and writing. It's a challenging combination which some cookery books almost manage (with the exception of font and writing)