Caricatures and Parody
Exaggerated likenesses and mocking imitations used for humour, satire and political attack.
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About
A caricature exaggerates a person's features until character, or a charge against them, shows through; a parody imitates a known work or style in order to mock or rethink it. The word comes from the Italian verb ‘caricare’, to load, and the portrait sketches made as a studio game by Annibale Carracci's circle in Bologna around 1600 gave the form its name.
Print made it a political weapon. James Gillray lampooned George III and a tiny, raging Napoleon in London in the 1790s and 1800s, and Honoré Daumier was jailed for six months after drawing King Louis-Philippe as the glutton Gargantua (1831). Max Beerbohm's watercolours skewered Edwardian writers. Parody targets art itself: Marcel Duchamp pencilled a moustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa for L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), and Robert Colescott's George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware (1975) recast Emanuel Leutze's patriotic scene with racist stereotypes in order to expose them.
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