Session of March, 21: The drawing styles of cartoon and caricature

Mutations of Laughter (LLC 591)

Class of Mar. 21, 2022

Towards a Poetics of Graphic Humor (I): the drawing styles of cartoon and caricature

At the end of the last session of the course, I started to approach specific perspectives of the cultural analysis of the historical origins of graphic humor, especially considering those which are more centred on what I am calling a “poetic” approach to these universes: for this purpose, I argued about how certain historians have identified, in different contexts of the genesis of these formats, on various aspects of the consolidation of some expressive strategies specific to visual humor, from the end of the 19th century.

Two lines of conduct emerged from this analysis in the field of cultural history. In the way suggested by Ian Gordon, for example, the processes of commodification of humorous drawing implied not only the advertising potentials of characters and their traits but also the different means of their reproduction and cultural circulation – in all sorts of spectacles typical of early modernity; It is in this way that Gordon associates the consolidation of the graphic humor of the daily strips with its dissemination in other formats, such as Broadway shows and the nascent animated cinema – in cases illustrated by the art of geniuses such as Winsor McCay and George Herriman.

 

“Comic strip characters also appeared in short live-action movies as early as 1902. And the first animated feature was Winsor McCay's comic strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland," which McCay himself animated in 1910-11. The popularity of comic strips was so great that even the burgeoning amusement park industry got in on the act with a Katzenjammer Castle and Toboggan Park erected in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the turn of the century. As usual, when it came to comic strips, William Randolph Hearst led the way. Hearst's Kinescope company produced many of the short features based on comic strips”. (GORDON, 1998, p. 84)

 

 Winsor McCay, Little Nemo (1911)

 

 

George Herriman, Krazy Kat (1916)

 

Aside from the fact that Gordon does identify common functional properties between the commodification of humorous drawing and the approximately aesthetic appeals of its symbolic and cultural effectiveness, the latter is unfortunately undermined, as a dimension of his analysis. His description privileges those variables of the origin of graphic humor that imply aspects of style in the technological and economic constraints of its circulation, as examples of a culture of modernity, typical of the beginning of the last century. In my own perspective, a more attentive focus on the poetic aspects of the art of drawing in comics should lead us to other scenarios of the origin of these formats – contexts in which the issues of style and the sensorial and emotional appeal of the drawing were finally brought more up to the fore.

 

This is how, for example, Donald Crafton's historical reflection on the art of the pioneer Emile Cohl helps us to discover, in the common origins of comic strips and animated cinema, some of the suitably poetic variables of graphic humor: in our last meeting, the historian's focus seemed more situated within the scope of questions about the relationship between different supports involved in the production of laughter through drawing; In this same line of thought, essential questions have emerged and cut across the historical debate on the consolidation of specific models of the visual spectacle – and hitting on the relevance with which an evaluation of an entire material infrastructure of cultural production in this field is required, in terms of the apparatus and technologies involved therein (without disregarding the artistic solutions found by the creators to deal with these relationships between different techniques and expressive resources).

 

In this context, Crafton proposes an exciting debate with specific ideas about the influences that would have been passed between the visual satire in cartoons and caricatures, typical of the art of drawing in the late 19th century, and the animation cinema emerging in the early 20th century: in the opposite line of certain illustrated truisms manifested on these issues (mainly represented by an article of the French critic Francis Lacassin, the historian tries to demobilize several precepts still circulating about the relationship between these two visual spectacles of early modernity: especially dear to Crafton is the question of the supposed historical antecedence of comics in comparison to early cinema, and the systematic production of certain effects of perception of movement in each of these arts – something that Crafton proposes as having a dual pathway of dependence, notwithstanding the factual antecedence of comics in relation with cinema. In Lacassin, the point is established as follows:

 

“In both, the language is composed of a succession of "shots," (that is to say, images with variable framing) in a syntactical arrangement or montage. The comic-strip page demonstrably corresponds to the film sequence, or to the act of a play, except that the background tends to change more often. The daily comic strip of three or four images is comparable to the cinematic scene”. (LACASSIN, 1972: p. 11)

 

Therefore, even though comics have a more remote historical origin, going back to the very first experiments on printed techniques of the mid-15^th-Century (which is basically David Kunzle´s thesis on the genesis of the comic strip), the coexistence between these two supports, from the 20th century onwards, conditions a fresher development of the art of comics in a direction that would not be conceivable, outside the context in which cinema consolidated some of these same procedures: illustrating such a point, we have the case of the reception that graphic artists from the end of the 19th century adopted, in the way of organizing their visual sequences, while basing these on decorative principles of the material presentation of filmic supports – for instance, adopting the sense of the linear series conferred by the vertical arrangement of successive frames on the surface of the film band. Crafton locates these as more stylized appropriations of cinema in the art of comics than functional resources consolidating their narrative strategies in a stronger way:

 

“At first the mass media were more influenced by the appearance of films as they were reproduced in periodicals than by their appearance when actually projected. The two panels of "Dans Ies fumeurs" (…) were probably intended to resemble the adjacent frames of film strips as they had appeared in articles like the one by Colomb. The artist has noticed that a characteristic of Lumiere stock was the absence of a distinct frame line; instead the images blended together at the top and bottom. The motive for mimicking this filmic trait in the cartoon might have arisen from the artist's desire to be trendy, or even to associate the woman of questionable morals in the smoker with the types that one might encounter in a cinema. A strip by Jean Frinot (…) not only eliminated the frame line but added an Art Nouveau border suggestive of sprocket holes that enhances the resemblance to film stock”. (CRAFTON, 1990, p. 246,247)

 

In what concerns me, however, the central problem does not involve any deliberation regarding such a determination on the proper flux of the influences exerted by the different supports in transit - in the origin of certain functionalities historically associated with what we designate as a proper poetics of graphic humor: it is inevitable that its origin implies this game established between these two formats that vie for the attention of a public lacking modern attractions - but even so, it seems to me that their more systematic examination requires, in the first place, a greater attention to the narrative function attributed to specific characteristics of these same productions (and rather especially in what respects the horizon of particular sensorial effects aimed at by the appearance of these iconographies).

 

And the first trace of these attractions stems from a playful relationship that these images perform between their modes of presentation and what they arouse in the appreciation, as an effect of perception: to be more precise, the question that interests me, in the characterization of a poetics of graphic humor, has to do with particular functions attributed to the drawing of humor, insofar as these result from the stylistic trait by which it can be properly recognized. In short, exploring the style of caricature and cartoon, as recognizable aspects of the art of humor drawing, I fundamentally imply the functional horizon in which these same styles are constituted in a commitment with certain effects of perception. And this is the first instance of the exploration I want to make about the origin of graphic humor, from now on.

 

I propose an examination of the narrative potentials of visual aspects of humorous drawing, looking at the dialectics between fixity and animation of the presentation of human subjects in caricature. My main concern here is with the possible complementarities between the stylistic traits of pictorial genres of portraiture (including caricature as a plastic matrix to represent human characters) and the very narrative structure of visual gags in comic strips. However, for the time being, I shall not entangle myself on issues about the sequential structures of visual narratives in the usual formats of gags and daily strips – which will be the subject of our next encounter. I consider the means by which the most fixed ‘aspectualities’ of character presentation in caricature might virtualize the representation of situations that are ultimately dynamic (hence serving for purposes of actual visual narrative episodes).

 

I hereby adopt the notion of ‘aspectuality’ as a defining feature of pictorial representation, in general – in line with what is suggested by a number of theories in the field of contemporary Aesthetics: instead of construing this presentation in terms of the mere visual recognition achieved by visual depiction, the aspectual oscillation between ‘fixity’ and ‘hyperbole’ is assumed here as the most important factor for the generation of the narrative virtualities of pictorial presentation of physiognomy; both aspects imply a different approach for the analysis of caricature as a sub-genre of portraiture - that is, one that invests the visual aspects of pictorial presentation with a capacity to articulate the discursive contents with which beholders identify (or from which they infer) the material actualization of subjects through drawing.

 

Furthermore, in addressing the problem of fixity in the visual forms of depiction, I also target another point on the discussion of narrative potentialities of pictures, one that is connected to the traditional approaches of pictorial genres: for instance, in portraiture painting, there is a tendency for the evaluation of the pictorial powers for individuating subjects, as something entailed by the stability of their physical presentation; accordingly, the more statuary aspect of the subject’s presentation before the painter is artistically reinforced by the latter, through the figuration of this fixed presentation in the iconological keys of a more enduring bodily presence of the sitter.

 

From my perspective, these assumptions about fixity of depiction are entailed by practical confusions (with further theoretical consequences) between what is required for the artistic production of these physical signs of the subjects through depiction, on one side, and the conditions for the aesthetic perception and amusement of these very qualities of depiction, from the “beholder’s share”. It is only fair to assume that, in the case of the painter producing depiction, fixity is clearly a defining trait of the subject’s presence in the face of the artist: this is indeed one reason why the model’s posed attitude is something required by the painter, allowing for the artistic rendering of such features in a proper pictorial manner.

 

In reinforcement of that point, there is an additional problem in considering this implication between fixity and pictorial experience: if understanding caricature involves being constrained by perceptual recognition of its subject (if we consider it as a species within the genre of canonical portraiture), one might probably assume visual hyperbole as its main semantical trait. As in the case of visual fixity in pictorial portraits, the formal exaggeration of a subject’s recognizable traits is assumed here as central to the visual meaningfulness of drawing, something that implies a confusion between the physical qualities of the picture and those aspects derived from the proposed interaction of the images with the beholder’s experience.

 

From such a perspective, the morphology of visual humor epitomized by caricature could only be fruitfully approached if the specific laughable quality of its grace could be addressed as an analytical complement in assessing the general problem of stylistics in the art of drawing: art historians such as E.H. Gombrich and H. Wölfflin defined pictorial styles like these as either ‘lacunar’ or ‘expressive’, both implying aspects under which visual meanings are achieved through association with dynamic potentialities of pictorial representation – either in their inherent plasticity or in their promoted interaction with the viewer’s perceptual experience.

 

“In this formulation caricature becomes only a special case of what I have attempted to describe as the artist’s test of success. All artistic discoveries are discoveries not of likenesses but of equivalences which enable us to see reality in terms of an image and an image in terms of reality. And this equivalence never rests on the likeness of elements so much as on the identity of responses to certain relationships. We respond to a white blob on the black silhouette of a jug as if it were a highlight; we respond to the pear with these crisscross lines as if it were Louis Philippe’s head”. (GOMBRICH, 1960: p. 276)

 

Charles Philippon, Les Poires (1831)

 

In addition, I propose to associate these different qualities of lacunar and expressive styles with a more ‘poetic’ approach of laughter, under which graphic humor could be generally grasped: the ‘incompleteness’ or the ‘simplicity’ of iconic composition in caricature (or in the cartoon-like aspectuality of daily strip characters) is instrumental to the realization of visual narration, but it only does so by implying the actualization of narrativity as dependent on the reading/perceptual experiences of beholders. On the other hand, the ‘hyperbolic’ or ‘grotesque’ aspect of political caricature can also be understood as resulting from the critical points made here regarding the false dichotomies between fixed/animated visual forms - together with the equally problematic entailments between narrativity and actual sequentiality, an almost arcane issue debated in visual strands of theories of narrative.

 

Once again though the main priority now is the dialectics between the “fixity” of the presentation of visual forms in drawing, and the “dynamic potentialities” of depiction. In considering some cases of the art of caricature, one might establish some conditions for approaching the very definition of visual and narrative discursiveness of comics: in treating caricature as a plastic counterpart of some inchoative visual narrativity, I have already hypothesized - as a consequence of theses coming from Gombrich and others – that daily comic strip formats are structured over a synthetic function that articulates the semiotic status of pictorial ‘likeness’ and the aesthetic, plastic dimension of ‘liveliness’ of pictorial representation.

 

From the standpoint of what defines the comics’ art of drawing in a denser fashion, one must trace its foundations back to the question of how caricature might appear as exemplary of a successful pictorial style. It is acknowledged that this sub-genre of portraiture was established as a typical modernist phenomenon, in strict correlation with the transformations occurring in pictorial arts of the eighteenth century; it is precisely this relationship of depiction in caricature – with the plastic overload of pictorial expressiveness – that indicates the general lines under which the art of comics will be developed as a genre throughout the following centuries – not only as a plastic matrix for the art of drawing but also as a project for modern visual discursiveness and narrativity.

 

“Our starting-point at the time was the question of why portrait caricature, the playful distortion of a victim’s face, makes only so late an appearance in Western art. The word and the institution of caricature date only from the last years of the sixteenth century, and the inventors of the art were not the pictorial propagandists who existed in one form or another for centuries before but those most sophisticated and refined of artists, the brothers Carracci. Few of their caricatures have been identified, but according to liter­ary sources which we have no reason to doubt, they also invented the joke of transforming a victim’s face into that of an animal, or even a lifeless implement, which caricaturists have practised ever since”. (GOMBRICH, 1960: p. 275)

 

Carracci Brothers, Caricatures

 

Gombrich also evokes the ways under which pictorial representation involves aspects of our understanding of the subjects of depiction in caricature: he states that pictorial experience has more to do with the ‘vividness’ of physiognomy than with the ‘impression of reality’ it generates; given the image of someone’s face, the source of recognition of these characters results from the assumptions a viewer can make about the entire scope of the subject’s expressiveness, in a much more determined way than the actual individuation of the subject’s defining physiognomic traits. This is precisely the context within which caricature operates to establish the principles for visual presentation of subjects: there is something that unifies the most ‘realistic’, canonical portrait, and the most Barroquely, ‘grotesque’ caricature, something that is made more explicit by our perceptual readiness to recognize these two branches of depiction through their most general traits (i.e. by lifelike animation of their presentation, ultimately exemplified by our own reaction to physiognomy, in ordinary contexts of personal interaction):

 

“We respond to a face as a whole: we see a friendly, dignified, or eager face, sad or sardonic, long before we can tell what exact features or relationships account for this intuitive impression. I doubt if we could ever become aware of the exact changes that make a face light up in a smile or cloud over in a pensive mood simply by observing the people around us. For [. . .] what is given us is the global impression and our reaction to it; we ‘really’ see distance, not changes in size; we ‘really’ see light, not modifications of tone; and most of all, we really see a brighter face and not a change in muscular contractions”. (GOMBRICH, 1960, p. 268)

 

Let us examine these issues under the light of some actual cases of physiognomic depiction and caricature. In such examples, there is a kind of anamorphic matrix of depiction prevailing in the drawing’s rendering of physiognomy. This is something that might be assumed as a constitutive trait of depiction in caricature – the fact that we can recognize the respective subjects of these images implies that they are presented in particular contexts of their dynamic behaviour (some might say that they are literally ‘captured in motion’).

 

Patrick Oliphant, Yasr Arafat

 

The characteristic features of visual representation are rooted in an original aspect of physiognomic expressiveness, becoming more apparent when we examine these very properties in contrast to their actual, expressive presentation through photographs of the same historical period.

 

 Yasr Arafat (foto)

 

Just for the moment, let us consider the relationships maintained between these qualities of depiction with the production of humorous effects through caricature: the visual hyperbole that defines this genre of portraiture works in a fundamental relationship with the proper comedic effect that characterizes a ‘poetic’ dimension of graphic humor; in these terms, the elements that come together into play to produce laughter are the principles of potential, suggested changes in physiognomy (which are mainly presentable in depiction through anamorphosis), correlated with the traits of personal individuation (either moral, psychological, or political) ascribable to the subject in the drawing style of caricature.

 

 

Patrick Oliphant, Nixon (1994)

 

In the case of caricature, the artist´s perspective works precisely from the standpoint of a process of constant observation of his/her subject’s most animated features, in straight opposition to those aspects of interest for realistic portrayal: therefore, cartoonists must neglect the most ‘permanent’ traits of physiognomic presentation in favour of those qualities derived from the subject’s suggested animation in particular moments – indicated by a global gestalt of his bodily attitude.

 

This implied aspectuality indicates the artist’s attention in a capacity mainly directed towards the global expressiveness of physiognomy, as solely presentable in particularly (even potentially) dramatic situations. Therefore, the depiction of physiognomy, once conceived in virtual and momentary variations (typical of the ways indicating segments of actions such as yawning, smiling or raging, among others), is probably the most important focus of interest for the cartoonist – especially in regard to the explicit purpose of portraiture in combining pictorial individuation with personal typification of public character.

 

“Thus a little experimentation with noses or mouths will teach us the elementary symptoms, and from here we can proceed, simply by doodling, to create characters. Töpffer maintains that the heroes of his stories thus arose out of his pen-plays. Only one more step is needed for the picture story. We must learn to distinguish between what Töpffer calls the ‘permanent traits’ indicating character and the ‘impermanent ones’ indicating emotion. As to the permanent ones, Töpffer makes fun of the phrenologists of his time who sought the root of character in certain isolated signs. All of a dozen profiles, he maintains, have the same forehead, that of the Apollo Belvedere. But look at the difference in the Gestalt! The ‘impermanent traits’ can also be found by similar methods of trial and error. We will soon be able to draw Johnny laughing and Johnny weep­ing and isolate the features which make the expression”. (GOMBRICH, 1960: p. 272,273)

 

 

Töppfer, Essai de Psysiognomie (1845)

 

From all we might have seen to this point, the pictorial rendering of momentary physiognomic expressiveness ends up functioning as both ‘selective’ and ‘aspectual’ trademarks for the recognition of subjects in depiction, which also allows us to think about the implications between caricature and the pictorial genre of portraiture. It does so in the sense of bringing into question the dynamic contexts of perceptual constraints of physiognomic recognition in everyday life.

 

The fixity through which subjects are presented in caricature exposes the character’s most lively aspects, which are only attainable in the temporal contexts of our understanding of their actions. As a consequence, the image interacts with the projective capacity of perceptual experience, with a tendency to promote aspects of human expressiveness that are properly selectable by symbolic systems of depiction – all of these are suggestive of representing either the subject’s momentary internal states or the subject’s disposition for taking actions in time.

 

In these terms, I identify the qualities that join together the art of caricature and the principles of anamorphosis in modern portraiture: the different states of body and physiognomic expressiveness, alongside the changing moods of the subjects, together indicate the most central locus of the attention of craftsmanship in portraiture drawing. Even if not conceived as a narrative form per se, caricature must be recognized as fostering such discursive status for visual depiction through which actions and broadly dynamic situations compose the most generic thematic universe of depiction as presented through the potential modifications of physiognomy – the global expressiveness of caricature necessarily connotes action, thus suggesting narrativity.

 

To achieve this point about the narrative virtualities of caricature, one must consider the terms under which physiognomic expression is, to say the least, indicative of a narrative. More precisely, one needs to think of how portraiture can be implied by visual discursiveness, especially in the sense that it is considered as some sort of narration. In other terms, what aspects of the physical presence of the picture’s sitter are of importance when one considers it as implied in her actions or in the dynamic situations that she might be engaged in?

 

Accordingly, the theoretical exploration of caricature advanced here could only integrate the recognitional dimension of depiction within the framework of the narrative representation of actions. Hence, there must be an assimilation of pictorial representation within the principles of a poetic composition of narratives. The ways in which I synthesize iconological structures of caricature and symbolic systems of textual meaning must have become clearer by now: the theoretical corollary of these entailments – under which comics strips will be ultimately integrated – is an assumption about hypothetical complementarities between disciplines of textual interpretation (Narratology, Semiotics, Literary Hermeneutics) and those belonging to the field of Kunstwissenschaften (particularly Iconology, Pictorial Aesthetics, and History of Art).

 

Considering the stylistics of caricature from a retrospective analysis of its effectiveness upon beholders, one will conclude that its success is somehow connected to the capacities of depiction to foster perceptual predispositions to dramatize such fixity. That is why I propose an examination of the drawing style in caricature, starting from those aspects that are suggestive of animation. Our attention is especially directed towards the expressive treatment of techniques of drawn traits and to the functions ascribable to this purpose of dynamism through the plasticity of depiction. I explore the range of these narrative potentialities of fixed traits in caricature by means of issues associated with the dialectics between aspectual fixity and experiential liveliness of this particular style of depiction.

 

The most important of these traits is the dynamics of visual forms in pictorial styles of drawing: in the theoretical traditions of formalism in art history (within which, by the way, one might find striking connections between tasks simultaneously ascribed to history of painting and visual aesthetics), this question on the drawing style in caricature is a characteristic point of inflexion, thus helping us to trace it back to the distinctive artistic features of pictorial styles (for example, in Dürer and Rembrandt). Separated by no more than a century and a half, the boundaries between these two artistic manners (presented in their respective workings upon painted dashes and strokes) help us to illuminate something that Heinrich Wölfflin had already noticed as the most important transformation in the history of Western art – one which marks the end of classical painting and the harbingers of modernity marked by the Baroque.

 

This passage is marked by the famous division between the ‘linear’ and ‘painterly’ styles: when Wölfflin summarises these ideas, he identifies, for instance, the most noticeable aspects under which the plastic sense of change in the visual traits of Baroque art is already a part of Rembrandt’s style; the particular vibration removing visual forms from their original inertia is precisely what calls for the formal interplay of these internal features of painting with a more dynamic context of the presentation of actions and the potential psychological animation of visual depiction.

 

These very effects of the potential animation of stable visual forms are not only noticeable in painting but also in drawing. Still within the realm of stylistic differences between Rembrandt and Dürer, Wölfflin reiterates the formal implications between the distinctive aspect of the drawn facture and their aesthetic qualities, especially the ‘tactile’ ones. While looking closely at the problem of physiognomic representation in the ‘painterly’ style of drawing, he looks at a portrait of the Dutch poet Jan Vos, which is made by his fellow countryman painter Jan Lievens (both friends of Rembrandt), evaluating, in particular, the fulfilment of the contour of his physiognomy, in clear contrast to the completeness of drawn lines (proper to a ‘linear’ style), thus resulting in one unstable composition of the visual shapes of the subject’s face, and finally implying an elliptical treatment of the limits of the model’s appearance.

 

 Jan Lievens - Jan Vos (1674)

 

“The expression completely vanished from the edges and sits in the interior parts of the form. Two dark, lively glancing eyes, a twitch of the lips; here and there the line flashes out, only to disappear again forthwith. The long tracks of the linear style are completely absent. Separate fragments of lines define the form of the mouth, a few broken strokes the form of the eyes and eyebrows. Sometimes, the drawing stops completely. The modelling shadows have no longer any objective validity. In the handling of the contour of cheek and forehead, however, everything is done to prevent the form from developing a silhouette, that is, to exclude the possibility of being read in lines”. (WÖLFFLIN, 1950, p. 35,36)

 

References:

GOMBRICH, E.H. "The experiment of caricature". In: Art and Illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959: pp. 289-312;

KUNZLE, David. "Töpffer", In: The History of Comic Strip, vol II: the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990: pp. 28-67;

LACASSIN, Francis. “The comic strip and film language”. In: Film Quarterly, 26/1, 1972: pp. 11-23;

PICADO, Benjamim. “Beyond the Fixity of Drawing: aspectuality and narrative virtualities of depiction in caricature”. In: Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 7/4, 2016: pp. 334-347;

WÖLFFLIN, Heinrich. "Linear and painterly". In: Principles of Art History, New York: Dover, 1950: pp. 18-72.