The Celebrities Are Gone, but Their Caricatures, by a ‘Natural Born Genius’ of the Artform, Live at Manhattan

“Max Beerbohm: The Price of Fame”
New York Public Library
Manhattan

Has anyone alerted the Old Gray Lady—if, of course, it is still legal to label the New York Times as such—that cartoons are circulating in Manhattan? You’ll recall that the Times stopped publishing political cartoons back in the halcyon days of 2019. The reason? To further the cause of “expressing nuance, complexity and strong voices from diverse perspectives across all of our platforms.”

What really happened is that “woke” members of the front office noticed that “visual journalism” — postmodern newspeak for “the funny ones” — trades in humor and that humor typically involves exaggeration. It was considered completely excessive to allow such a thing on these august pages. Daumier would not have lasted two days under this dictate. Thomas Nast? Get out on his keister. There are many reasons to boycott the Times, and its active role in suppressing artistic freedom is one of them.

Admittedly, the caricatures in “Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity,” an exhibit at the main branch of the New York Public Library, might seem mild to contemporary audiences. After all, we live in a culture in which the art form often reaches extreme proportions – from the glory days of Mad magazine to the devastating distortions of Spitting Image, the race-based vaudeville of Robert Colescott’s paintings and Drew Friedman’s obsessively rendered portraits of ancient Jewish people Comedians, minor movie stars and Barack Obamas dressed as George Washington.

Ah, but the 1890s into the early 20th century were kinder and gentler times in the UK. Or maybe not. Beerbohm (1872-1956) was concerned about the caustic nature of his drawings, a preoccupation he began while still a student at Oxford and for which he later achieved great fame.

Explaining his process, Beerbohm wrote: “The whole person must be melted down in a crucible and then reshaped from the solution. Nothing will be lost, but not a particle will be the same as it was before.” An art historian, Bernard Berenson, referred to him as “the English Goya,” a description that overstates Beerbohm’s genius as a draftsman. That, and Beerbohm didn’t have the slightest bit of misanthropy in his muscular frame.

Max Beerbohm, “Un Revers”, 1909.
About the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press

Which isn’t to say that his portraits can’t sting. Oscar Wilde was an admirer – “The gods,” he insisted, “given Max the gift of eternal age” – but did he ever glance at Beerbohm’s depictions of him? His caricature of Wilde as a sticky creature of Jabba the Hut-like proportions can be seen in The Price of Celebrity, particularly in the form of Gerald Scarfe’s Thanks to Max tribute “I Have Nothing to Declare but My Flippancy.” (circa 2002). The smaller Beerbohm sketches hanging nearby aren’t much friendlier. One of them is wild.

Of course, it helps if you are familiar with the topics that came into Beerbohm’s sphere of influence. This observer laughed out loud as he responded to “Mr. HG Wells Foreseeing Things” (1931), in which the ardent socialist and free love advocate is portrayed as a doughy milquetoast, sheepishly pondering the future of things. “Mr. Whistler” (c. 1908) depicts the fashion-conscious aesthete as a sneaking predator. As for Beerbohm’s portrait of the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, you don’t need to know the subtitle to recognize the exaggerated arrogance at the core of the drawing. The subtitle? “Capitalist.”

As co-curators Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner remind us, some of Beerbohm’s most beautiful caricatures were those of himself. “Un Revers” (around 1909) shows Beerbohm at his desk with his protruding skull, tired sloe eyes and a Trash bin full of abandoned writings. “Sometimes,” Beerbohm said, “I have the feeling that I am a born genius in a field of human endeavor that has not yet been invented.”

As The Price of Fame clearly underlines, this endeavor was the creation of Max Beerbohm himself. The resulting exhibition is a welcome treat.