by Jon Lackman | 14 April 2006 | Books, Modern
The Juvenal of painting, James Gillray (Tate; NYPL) had no qualms about rendering the prime minister as a snub-nosed broomstick. In her new book on the artist, Claudia Oberstebrink argues that the poetics of Gillray’s caricature depended on the overinflation of the sublime into the mock-sublime and the dismantling of the heroic into mock-heroic. For reviewer Christine Tauber, the book amply demonstrates that Gillray’s work, in creating chimeras and monsters out of familiar elements, used classicism’s own weapons against it, bursting open classical unity in a hyperbolically overdone plurality. However, she cautions against excessive leveling of the differences between text and image, and considers one of the book’s claims — that caricature is the true origin of Romantic-modernist artistic autonomy — chronologically and geographically oversimplified.
