ART REVIEW : Revolutionary Caricatures

It was extreme art for extreme times. The French Revolution required an incisively witty and devastatingly irreverent brand of caricature to record the machinations of a venerable society in a state of upheaval.

Dozens of artists, both anonymous and famous, rose to the occasion, as we see in “Politics and Polemics: French Caricature and the French Revolution, 1789-1799,” at UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery (to Dec. 18).

The exhibition of 180 prints from the French National Library in Paris kicks off the university’s yearlong commemoration, “1789-1989, The French Revolution: A UCLA Bicentennial Program,” while introducing an intriguing body of political art that is little known in this country.

Complete with a hefty catalogue--containing entries on each print and essays on related topics--the exhibition is a complex production that captivates casual viewers with outrageous images while offering serious students extensive scholarship.

The prints reinforce “a common apprehension of history as something grotesquely grand and frighteningly jumbled, running at fatal speed,” writes Robert M. Maniquis, director of UCLA’s celebration, in the catalogue foreword.

It’s an apt assessment. Most of the passionately executed and highly detailed images depict people who seem hellbent for destruction--propelled either by their own greed, vanity and stupidity or by overwhelming social and political forces.

According to the artists, France’s seminal decade was populated by pampered women whose absurdly towering coiffures and billowing hoop skirts reached a level of incapacitating fashion that has probably never been equalled. Men, on the other hand, were demons, sniveling fools or overfed monsters. Everyone is engaged in selfish pursuits; perhaps the most difficult thing to find in this show is an indication of humility or compassion.

Self-satisfied noblemen and clergy ride on the backs of commoners, as in a hand-colored etching where the human pack animal laments, “I’ve got to hope I’ll be done soon.” Louis XVI is a gargantuan dandy who eats every scrap of food his starving subjects can provide. Members of the Third Estate get revenge against tyranny by using papal bulls as toilet paper and watching church and government authorities burn in hell.

The artists didn’t imagine that abuse of the people was limited to France, however, as a section on emigres, foreign wars and counterrevolution illustrates. Despite having a constitutional form of government, the English are seen as victimized by their king. One of Jacques-Louis David’s most diabolical prints portrays the English government as a flayed red devil who has snakes for hair and the head of George III on his buttocks. In this scatological image the king vomits taxes on a terrified citizenry.

The spectacle is such that one can lose sight of the fact that “Politics and Polemics” is a carefully organized exhibition, curated by James Cuno and Cynthia Burlingham of UCLA’s Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. Arranged in 11 sections with an introductory text for each, the show begins with pre-revolutionary caricatures, then progresses to the fall of the Bastille.

Subsequent segments examine the three estates: nobility, clergy and the Third Estate (a so-called middle class that comprised more than 90% of the French population in 1789). Then come sections on foreign affairs, revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, the Terror (a program designed to intimidate enemies of the French Revolution), the Directory and the First Consulate (two post-Revolutionary forms of government).

Anyone who takes time to digest the entire exhibition and its catalogue will surely come away with the knowledge that the French Revolution and its reverberations entail much more than the sensational moments of storming the Bastille and delivering Marie Antoinette to the guillotine. Those who only stroll through the gallery and peruse the prints will at least see an outpouring of passion, often matched by talent.