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Giles Exhibition
Jan. 16th, 2009 08:33 amTuesday afternoon I met up with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fjm at the Cartoon Museum on Little Russell Street to look at its current exhibition on the work of Carl Giles.
I grew up towards the end of Giles' peak of cartooning fame, which arguable ran from the early 1950s until the late 1970s. He carried on drawing into the late 1980s, but by then his trademark 'Giles Family' (an early British foreshadowing of the Simpsons, in some respects?) was starting to look a little out of its time. But my family had a large stock of Giles annuals, which looking back gave me a lot of insight into the social, economic and political concerns of the fifties, sixties and early seventies.
The exhibition is small but comprehensive, and puts Giles' work nicely into context. The cartoons are well-chosen, and seeing them at full size emphasises Giles' extraordinary attention to detail and skills at composition. The annual album covers in particular, which had to work without captions, are masterpieces of visual narrative and hidden jokes.
If I have any criticism, it is that some captions might have given a little more context. For this cartoon, neitherfjm or I could recall what the Denning Report was about; on checking, its subject was the Profumo Affair. And with some ten thousand cartoons dating from World War 2 to the fall of the Berlin Wall to chose from, it can only scratch the surface of his amazing range. Fortunately, there's a comprehensive searchable archive at the University of Kent, so you can browse Giles cartoons (with helpful annotations) to your heart's content. I was able to find my favourite, which delightful shows Giles' talent for combining superb technical accuracy (the detail of the A7L spacesuits that Al Shepard and Ed Mitchell are wearing) with sheer daftness (the lunar sample jamjar!) Also, although you can't quite see at this scale, the little Lunarian in the background is indeed writing a parking ticket for the Lunar Module!
The exhibition is on until the middle of February, and the museum is £4 to enter (or free if you are a student like me).
fjm at the Cartoon Museum on Little Russell Street to look at its current exhibition on the work of Carl Giles.I grew up towards the end of Giles' peak of cartooning fame, which arguable ran from the early 1950s until the late 1970s. He carried on drawing into the late 1980s, but by then his trademark 'Giles Family' (an early British foreshadowing of the Simpsons, in some respects?) was starting to look a little out of its time. But my family had a large stock of Giles annuals, which looking back gave me a lot of insight into the social, economic and political concerns of the fifties, sixties and early seventies.
The exhibition is small but comprehensive, and puts Giles' work nicely into context. The cartoons are well-chosen, and seeing them at full size emphasises Giles' extraordinary attention to detail and skills at composition. The annual album covers in particular, which had to work without captions, are masterpieces of visual narrative and hidden jokes.
If I have any criticism, it is that some captions might have given a little more context. For this cartoon, neither
fjm or I could recall what the Denning Report was about; on checking, its subject was the Profumo Affair. And with some ten thousand cartoons dating from World War 2 to the fall of the Berlin Wall to chose from, it can only scratch the surface of his amazing range. Fortunately, there's a comprehensive searchable archive at the University of Kent, so you can browse Giles cartoons (with helpful annotations) to your heart's content. I was able to find my favourite, which delightful shows Giles' talent for combining superb technical accuracy (the detail of the A7L spacesuits that Al Shepard and Ed Mitchell are wearing) with sheer daftness (the lunar sample jamjar!) Also, although you can't quite see at this scale, the little Lunarian in the background is indeed writing a parking ticket for the Lunar Module!The exhibition is on until the middle of February, and the museum is £4 to enter (or free if you are a student like me).
