Having a laugh?
Rude Britannia: British comic art
Tate Britain, to 5 September
Admission £10/£8.50
Reviewed by
Suzanne Muna
STEPPING INTO the galleries
of Rude Britannia at Tate Britain is like walking into a well-ordered
attic. Beano and Viz comics rub shoulders with priceless pieces by
George Cruickshank and James Gillray. A curious chamber-pot
incorporating a bust of Napoleon can be found alongside collections of
old photographs and postcards. Ostensibly, the main theme for this
exhibition is an exploration of the many faces of rudeness in British
comic art – six rooms featuring work ranging from the satirical and the
grotesque to the bawdy and sexually explicit. But it might have better
been entitled ‘Disrespect’.
The collection has a
surprisingly broad historical sweep, spanning the mid-1600s to the
present day. Political lampooning forms the backbone of the exhibition.
One of the earliest examples (from 1654) is by the Dutch artist, van der
Hoeve, and portrays the end of the turbulent and bloody civil war which
overthrew the English monarchy in favour of parliament. The artist
depicts Oliver Cromwell wearing the crown of King Charles I, with the
latter’s severed head weighing heavily on the scales of blind justice.
In 1805, Gillray penned his now famous (and much plagiarised) image of
William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte at dinner, carving up the world in
The Plumb Pudding in Danger. Contemporary works include the shocking
(but sadly unlikely) Belgrano Nightmare – Thatcher Wakes Screaming
(1982) by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe.
That political propagandists
of all persuasions have exploited the power of comic art is well in
evidence. In 1938, David Low created a beautifully simple pen and ink
drawing in which Hitler and his generals are reduced to remorseful tears
by the earnest reasoning of pacifists Aldous Huxley and Dick Sheppard.
Meanwhile, the anti-war movement of today has used images such as the
breathtakingly shocking photomontage showing a delighted Tony Blair,
mobile phone aloft, photographing himself beside an exploding oil well.
Yet the political satire is
likely to pose the biggest problem for the viewer. It largely requires
recognition of the featured subjects and situations, and this becomes
more difficult as time passes. In a print
Occasionally, however, a work
of political satire is also timeless. The tragic Political Drama No.4:
John Bull (1883) shows a depressed John Bull in a sparsely furnished
kitchen beside a fireless grate and a table set with broken crockery.
John Bull thinks morosely to himself that such is the lot of the
‘freeborn’ Englishman that, despite working hard all week, he is paid
too late on the Saturday to buy food, coal, tobacco, tea or soap. He
cannot go out – the austere church warden is patrolling outside his
window – so he sits at home, cold, dirty, hungry and bored. Then as now,
working hard and abiding by the rules does not guarantee the barest
creature comforts.
Undoubtedly, one of the most
compelling features of the exhibition is that the work displayed was
intended to be accessible, rather than to serve the elite. Works of art
have generally been objects commissioned or bought by the wealthy for
their own consumption. Or, especially in architecture, as a means of
reinforcing the separation of the classes. Such art continues to exist
as a financial investment opportunity for the rich. Yet, while Rude
Britannia’s objects were also frequently traded commodities, the growing
prevalence of the printing press in Europe over the period featured
allowed the mass production and cheap circulation of imagery, poetry,
literature, drama, music and song. Art became less exclusive.
The accessibility of British
comic art is also reinforced by the exhibition’s broad tolerance of
techniques and styles: high art and low can intermingle. From the 1600s,
European fine art spanned the baroque, the Dutch school, neoclassicism,
romanticism, modernism and post-modernism, among others. Yet the comic
art on show embraces the highly-accomplished, sharp political satire and
skilful execution of Ralph Steadman, alongside the garish colours,
simplistic imagery and schoolboy humour of Donald McGill, and a
considerable number of pieces by anonymous amateurs.
British comic art did not
only challenge the aesthetic elitism and exclusivity of the art
establishment. It also celebrated the pleasures – mainly drinking and
sex – that ‘polite society’, often cynical and hypocritical, tried to
deny. It is almost inevitable that as Edwin Landseer produced his
cloying morality paintings, and the pre-Raphaelites indulged a love of
sickly-sweet romanticism, the Victorian working classes subverted newly
emergent photographic technology to capture and mass produce
pornography, and Aubrey Beardsley drew delicate works of erotic art. The
antidote to orthodoxy is a powerful need and reminds us that there is
always an underside to the story.
Yet the exhibition also shows
that British comic art has indulged in moralising of its own. English
artist William Hogarth spent a year (1732-3) painting a series of
canvases, A Rake’s Progress, later mass produced in print. The scenes
depict a young man as he inherits then squanders his father’s wealth,
spends time in a debtors’ gaol, marries a rich widow, loses a second
fortune, falls into insanity, and is finally interred in Bedlam. The
contemporaneous narrative accompanying each image reinforces the moral
message of the work. Nonetheless, in this and similar works, Hogarth has
captured London street life in the richest detail and depicted an aspect
of society ignored or at least sanitised by many of his contemporaries.
His work provided later generations with a valuable, visual social
record. Whether in high art or low, much would have been lost without
such work.
The Rude Britannia title of
the exhibition is inadequate. It fails to explain, for example, the
inclusion of the Absurd Room, which contains surreal rather than ‘rude’
works, and where not all the featured artists are British. Nonetheless,
the variety of exhibits and sheer range of media (paint, pen and ink,
photography, sculpture, pottery, television drama, film and music) show
that, for at least 300 years, every imaginable medium has been deployed
in railing against prudery, stupidity, injustice, hypocrisy and, above
all, authority. However tenuous the thread linking its exhibits, Rude
Britannia celebrates an unapologetically disrespectful and largely
egalitarian strand of art which flourished despite the snobbery and
elitism of much of the art world.
