DAVID LOW BREAKS ONE RULE BUT NOT TWO

David Low,  the greatest political cartoonist of World War II,  gave this advice to young cartoonists about drawing dictators:

To draw a hostile war lord as a horrible monster is to play his game.  What he doesn't like is being shown as a silly ass.

Low was second to none at depicting tyrants as silly asses:

 

Low was so effective at getting under Hitler's skin that prior to WW II, the Nazi government lodged a formal protest about Low's drawings. 

Despite Low's rule about not dignifying tyrants by drawing them as "horrible monsters," sometimes the war became so horrifying that he couldn't resist giving tyrants the full "monster" treatment.   His outrage overcame his resolution.

Yet,  Low's outrage never caused him to lose artistic control.  He recognized that to make the most powerful statement he could not abandon restraint; a picture overcome by passion and emotion is usually less potent.

Look how thoughtfully Low constructed the wonderful drawing above.  To draw the worst creature imaginable, many artists might make Hitler a literal monster-- perhaps a vampire with blood and fangs and claws.   But with consummate skill, Low transforms Hitler into a beast primarily by changing his posture.

Keen powers of observation at work: Low didn't need to resort to fur or tentacles to make a monster; all it took was splayed legs, hunched shoulders, dangling arms and effective shadows.

Similarly, look at how simply yet carefully Low evokes those victims in the cattle car.  They are a sea of humanity, yet each sufferer has character.

Or consider the staging of the picture-- the cattle cars behind Hitler, as his legacy; the shadows on the ground with the stripe of daylight between train cars reinforce in this tight space that we are looking at a series of such cars; the shadows on the sides of the cars give the drawing graphic power while conveying the dark weight of the cargo; the slight incline of the hill lowering Hitler and leading up to his nemesis; these were all conscious choices by a master.  Nothing in the picture had to be that way.

The more extreme an artist decides to treat a subject,  the more talent is required to keep the drawing from going off the rails.

As Peter Viereck reminded us, "Art, being bartender, is never drunk."