So some guy from the bowels of The Irish Times rings me and says, "there's this absolutely stunning, brilliant book of caricatures floating around and I suggested to "Them" that you might review it". Of course, unbeknownst, he had already done the job. Stunning. Brilliant. Not a lot more to say, but because newspapers don't take kindly to white space I have to say a little bit more, just to fulfil the contract.
Wendy Wick Reaves and her assistant Pie Friendly (a name worth a book in its own right) have laboured through the archives of the Smithsonian and created a history of caricature in America from the 1920s to the 1950s. It is a period recognisable by a distinctive minimalist style which held sway in magazines and newspapers until David Levine re-invented Victorian cross-hatching and spawned a new generation of maximalist (why use one line when a thousand might be more fun) caricaturists. I was of that latter ilk myself, but as one gets older and more tired then this minimalist lark seems far more attractive - less energy expended. Sadly, it is also more difficult, so we'll abandon that, then.
The book makes a reasonable stab at describing the motivations of the artists - money, hunger and rent always play a bigger part in artists' lives than most writers bother to mention - so Reaves anecdotally forays into their personal lives. You get the lot: joy and despair, suicides, adultery, happy marriages, the usual stuff, but with jolly good pictures.
One slight irritation is that the book, as its title mentions, is about celebrities, but there are few enough who would be instantly recognisable to those of us who live in this different country at this different time. It would have been nice to see some of the subjects photographed so we could compare them with the caricatures. I know they are great pieces of visual art, but I don't know if they are good likenesses.
But aside from that, for those of you fascinated by this sort of art, (and which person of sound mind, with taste and discrimination, isn't?) it is well worth mortgaging the garden shed and getting a copy.
Martyn Turner's next collection of cartoons, Brace Yourself, Bridge It! will be published by Blackstaff in October
Celebrity Caricature In America by Wendy Wick Reaves, Yale University Press (£29.95 hardback UK, 304 pages, large format, stacks of illustrations, mostly in colour)