Existing comment:
Sense of Humor
Caricature, Satire, and the Comical in Prints and Drawings from Leonardo to R. Crumb
Prints and drawings are particularly well suited for conveying and eliciting humor, understood as the quality that appeals to a sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous. Although humor is fundamental to the human experience, its expression in painting and sculpture has been occasional and often restrained. If anything, the high ideals and dominant values in those media have served as a source of humor.
The graphic arts have been the constant vehicles for caricature, satire, and the comical. Private in essence, drawing has always favored uninhibited play of the imagination and the distorted naturalism of caricature. Prints, as multiple images intended for wide distribution, have served throughout their history to express institutional and social criticism. Too easily overlooked, humorous prints and drawings constitute a continuous, complex, and significant tradition.
Sense of Humor celebrates that tradition. Broadly chronological, the exhibition traces the major developments of the art form and includes the principal types, from the earliest caricatures of the Renaissance to the pungent satires of eighteenth-century England and the provocative comics associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s. It features such great masters of the genre as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, William Hogarth, Francisco de Goya, Honoré Daumier, and Roy Lichtenstein. The exhibition reveals both the thematic and aesthetic richness of the tradition. All of the works in the exhibition come from the collections of the National Gallery of Art, with many presented to the public for the first time. |