Page 33 - Studio International - May 1966

cence, by the contrast between his own expectations and publications for only six years. He began in Punch. He
reality as it confronts him. The resulting shock makes first began to plumb his own depths working for Private
him visualize the extreme to which the present reality Eye. It is early to be certain. But I repeat that he seems
may be pushed. And he draws this extreme in an attempt to me to belong to the proper and rare tradition. Certainly
to exorcize it. I can think of no other draughtsman in England who,
I do not want to suggest that the process is purely emo- since the war, has shown more promise in this genre.
tional and subjective. It isn't, because it engages at the Scarfe draws as though the scene were there in front of
same time with social realities. The artist's comparative him as unambiguously as a still-life. He accepts unex-
innocence can be consciously maintained as an obstinate pected angles, awkward foreshortenings—because that is
refusal to compromise. The drawing may really exorcize, how it is. And as he draws, he composes. The composition
by warning others. But if one does not stress this personal gives to the finished drawing a unity which makes it a
necessity working within the satirical artist, there is no testimony instead of just a sketch for an idea or fantasy.
way of explaining the one characteristic by which he can He is fastidious. There is that essential distance between
always be recognized : his fastidiousness. the intelligence occupied with the drawing and the ima-
However passionate his hatred, however terrible the cor- gination that sees the corrupt extreme. Into that distance
ruption he portrays, however exaggerated the formal dis- I read, in his case, a sense of the pleasure of life—as felt by
tortions, the way of drawing remains precise, unaffected, the young—and the barbarity of those in league with
almost impersonal. There is a distance between the sub- death. The death-dealing ones devour the innocent. All
ject and its presentation. And in that distance one can their predatoriness is concentrated in their mouths. Their
read all the artist's original expectation of what life could intestines are the workings of a ruthless society. (The
be. One can read the geniality of Daumier, the sexual process of eating had a similar symbolic meaning for
delicacy of Goya, the domesticity of Grosz. Brueghel and for Goya.)
Gerald Scarfe is 29 years old. He has been working for It seems, therefore, that Scarfe is concerned with some-