More than a Caricaturist

Since its debut during the newspaper strike of 1963, The New York Review of Books has depended chiefly on two artists--David Levine and J. J.

Grandville--to illustrate its long-winding reviews and political commentaries. Both often seem more trenchant than the text they accompany, and for Levine this has led to many an outside commission, including covers for TIME, Newsweek and New York. But his col league Grandville is a special case. He has been dead for over a hundred years. And besides, he was a Frenchman.

Grandville's caricatures, nonetheless, seem as pointed and contemporary as Levine's at their best. For a review about the cult of beauty in art, Grandville contributed a cartoon of a male au dience--literally all eyes--ogling a beauteous young thing in the front row of the grand tier. A review on Polish philosophy featured a huge bellows all but blowing people off the street with an endless stream of wind. For two books about Republicanism, there was a stout, complacent elephant in morning coat. The review of John Hersey's Algiers Motel Incident produced a long-beaked crane in judicial robes that was as bitterly mocking an image as any that Hersey could hope to evoke.

How did the Review come upon this incisive but altogether forgotten Frenchman? Pretty much by happenstance, says Editor Barbara Epstein. Painter Leonid Berman, an old friend who has a cherished collection of Grandville's il lustrated books (all now collector's items), proposed Grandville. Delighted with Grandville's rangy repertoire, Editor Epstein has published his drawings in nearly every issue since.

Lexicon of Symbols. Grandville was born Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard in Nancy in 1803, the son of a miniaturist and the grandson of a famed

French comedian. He inherited both these artistic strains; when father painted portraits, son slyly drew caricatures of his unsuspecting sitters. Off to Paris at 20, Gerard, who by now had adopted the name of Grandville, was soon invited to contribute to a new satirical magazine. By the time his book Metamorphoses of the Day was published in 1828, Grandville's sketches, according to Thackeray, "brightened many a little room in the Pays Latin," and his studio had become a gathering place where Dumas, Balzac and Daumier gathered to talk and drink, while Grandville idly sketched caricatures as the conversation went on.

With success, Grandville's pen grew ever more pointed. Relying on a lexicon of readily recognizable symbols (scissors for censorship, sugarloaves for graft, a pear for King Louis Philippe's heavy-jowled face), he fought for a variety of political causes, including a free press. In addition he illustrated La Fontaine's Fables, Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe, all the time building a memorable cast of hybrid creatures, half human, half animal.

Unattached Eyeballs. Grandville's favorite creatures were frogs, which he used to symbolize children, clowns, or murder victims, and he kept a pet frog on his drawing table. Insects, too, fascinated him. With his thin spidery line, he created a whole metaphorical insectarium--emperor moths confer with dung beetles, frivolous lady bugs are escorted by loutish caterpillars, cricket barkers play to snails and turtles.

When tragedy broke up his happy family life, first with the death of two young sons, then his wife, Grandville's art took a grotesque turn. He started sketching his dreams and nightmares, as Baudelaire decribed it, "with all the precision of a stenographer writing down an orator's speech." In 1847, his third son died. Brokenhearted, Grandville died a short time later.

But in the work of those last years, Grandville established a claim as an ancestor of surrealism. He experimented with mirror-image distortions and drew pictures of huge, unattached eyeballs. He split faces in two to suggest the war between the conscious and the sub conscious long before the terms were commonly known. Baudelaire was the first to see that Grandville was more than a caricaturist. "When I open the door of Grandville's works," he wrote in 1857, "I feel a certain uneasiness, as though I were entering an apartment where disorder was systematically organized. There are some superficial spirits who are amused by Grandville; for my part, I find him terrifying."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.