Babylon

Tomi Ungerer, noted French cartoonist of the last century, had the knack of exposing the vices sequestered in the mythic Pandora’s box and of capturing the perverse behaviors within contemporary culture with his fluid pencil sketches.

Included in this volume entitled Babylon, recalling the biblical city noted for immorality, vice, and wickedness, are about fifty reproductions of his flowing ironic caricatures of the visible human defects evidenced in the middle of the last century. These scribbled images are as relevant today as when they were first committed to paper. Each of the cartoon drawings draws on the imagination while challenging the viewer to fathom its significance in the political, militaristic, religious, or egoistic milieu.

Check out the moneymaker fingering his paunchy calculator or recall a more familiar cartoon of the blind militarist working his phallic weapon, testosterone trumping reason. Cartoons can scald the senses with their piercing revelations of human folly, as this master sketcher appears to achieve by brilliantly caricaturing the ongoing issues in politics, race relations, the women’s movement, self-idolatry, and other social questions. This is a work that will appeal to artists, cartoonists, and the engaged reader.