Room for Hope: The Art of G.B. Trudeau’s Doonesbury

“Satire works by inference,” cartoonist G.B. Trudeau says in Brian Walker’s new book Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau. “What you condemn should reveal what you value, what you stand for. That’s why I don’t like categoric, 360-degree attacks. Scorched-earth artists leave no room for hope.” Since its debut on October 26, 1970, Doonesbury has attracted devotees as well as devoted critics with Trudeau’s heart-on-his-sleeve liberalism. Walker walks through the evolution of the Doonesbury, which began in 28 newspapers and now boasts 100 million daily readers, and gives not a biography of Trudeau but rather a biography of the life of the strip itself. Despite all the wars—cultural and shooting—of the past four decades, Trudeau never forgot to leave room for hope, and Walker’s affectionate tribute reminds us of that crowning achievement of his art. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Room for Hope."

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau by Brian Walker.]

Natural Progressions

Rodolphe Töpffer often gets credit for being the first comic artist, but I think an equally strong case can be made for William Hogarth. Born November 10, 1697, Hogarth made illustrations for books and poems that showed sequentially the dynamics of seventeenth century English life. In A Harlot's Progress, Hogarth traced the slow descent of an innocent girl into the world’s oldest profession and, finally, total dissolution. The third image in the sequence (above, from 1732) shows the “harlot” Moll moving on from the semi-respectable position of “kept woman” to the level of common prostitute. Hogarth witnessed how English society allowed young women to fall into such situations by limiting their prospects essentially to marriage, destitute spinsterhood, or the exchange of sex for money. A few years after A Harlot’s Progress, Hogarth designed the series titled A Rake's Progress in which he showed how young men took advantage of their position in the English patriarchy and wasted their lives in vice. With a clear eye and savage remorselessness, Hogarth struck directly at the heart of English society and showed it the face it wanted to ignore in the mirror.

Despite such moralizing in his work, Hogarth remains hilariously funny. Hogarth’s six paintings derived from the satiric comedy play Marriage à-la-mode show how marriage wasn’t that much better an option than prostitution in some ways. In the third panel of the series (above, from 1743-1745), Hogarth shows the Viscount, the “catch” of the story, visiting the doctor to demand a refund for the mercury pills prescribed for his syphilis. A young prostitute beside the Viscount touches an open sore on her mouth that represents the onset of syphilis. For Hogarth, the venereal disease of syphilis stands in for the larger spiritual diseases of the twisted sexual politics of English society at the time. The double standard in which men could frequent prostitutes yet woman had to remain pure or else become “damaged goods” results in a tangled mess of morals rather than a sound foundation of civilization. Such imagery seems strikingly modern for Americans in light of the culture wars in which, among other issues, fundamentalist religion calls for sexual abstinence instead of sexual education despite hard statistical evidence proving how America’s youth suffers from enforced ignorance.

In The Abu Ghraib Effect (reviewed here), Steven F. Eisenman praised Hogarth for not playing along with the violence embedded in Western civilization and its art. Eisenman specifically cited Hogarth’s 1751 series The Four Stages of Cruelty. In four panels, Hogarth traces the life of a young boy who begins by torturing animals and later graduates to killing people before dying himself at the end of a hangman’s noose. In the fourth and final panel, The Reward of Cruelty (above, from 1751), Hogarth shows the subject’s final fate, in which anatomists dissect the murderer’s body as sanctioned by law. Hogarth, who loved animals and actually kept a pet cemetery for his birds and dogs behind his home, knew that childhood cruelty to animals often led to violent, sadistic behavior as an adult, a phenomenon that psychologists today also recognize. In Hogarth’s day, cruelty to animals and, in the case of murderers, people didn’t seem at all unnatural. Not until the Anatomy Act of 1832 did the practice of dissecting murderers end in England. (The Cruelty to Animals Act of 1835 addressed animal abuse just a few years later.) Literally ahead of his time, Hogarth saw the cruelties and foibles of his society and drew them in the hopes that others would draw the same conclusions that he did.

Light Hearted

Even casual art fans know Rembrandt’s Night Watch, the mammoth 1642 group portrait that immortalized a company of local militiamen. Rembrandt build much of his name and reputation on such self-important showpieces until he could no longer abide such self-important people, individually or in groups. Almost a century later, the market for grand group portraiture still thrived in Amsterdam, filled most admirably by Cornelis Troost. Born October 8, 1697, Troost painted The Regents of the Almoner's Orphanage, Amsterdam (above) in 1729. Troost’s Regents is actually slightly larger than Rembrandt’s Night Watch. The clothing and hair styles clearly show a century’s shift in taste, but even more significant is the shift in mood painted by Troost. The men seem relaxed and natural, not posed like action figures. You believe that the young boy on the right, one of the orphans under their care, could actually approach these men. It is as if the big wigs of Rembrandt’s day, who worked so hard to make Holland a world power, finally felt comfortable enough a century later to take a deep breath and survey their handiwork. Troost’s laidback style perfectly fitted this confident air.

If Troost patterned himself after any artist, it wouldn’t be Rembrandt as much as William Hogarth, the English satirist. Troost’s 1739 Self-Portrait (above) even looks like Hogarth’s 1745 Self-Portrait, perhaps a sign of recognition from Hogarth. Both artists place their self-portrait in a frame within another painting strewn with the bits of their life, trying to show how their art belonged with everyday life and not separate from it. Did Hogarth know Troost’s Self-Portrait and copy his contemporary? Both artists were born in 1697, but Hogarth grew up in an England captivated by the wit and wisdom of satirists such as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Both Swift and Pope poked fun at English society and politics with a sense of moral seriousness that Hogarth translated into his highly popular prints. Growing up in Holland, Troost failed to receive a similar satiric education and his works lack the same moral punch that Hogarth’s works do. Many called Troost “the Dutch Hogarth,” but the similarities are limited.

Troost’s most extended examination of social mores comes in his NELRI series, which follows the course of an evening as a group of reunited friends get increasingly drunk. NELRI is an anagram of the first letter of each of the five paintings’ Latin titles. Rumor erat in Casa (There was a Commotion in the House) (above, from 1740) shows the men partying heartily and starting a ruckus. In Hogarth’s hands, the drunks would illustrate the moral depravity of the society as well as the individual. In Troost’s hands, however, they’re simply people having a good time with good friends. If things get out of hand, Troost seems to say, it’s not the end of the world. Maybe heavy moralizing is a particularly Anglo-Saxon trait, but it’s easy to see the roots of today’s liberal Netherlandish society in Troost’s time. Just as Troost keeps a light moral touch, he maintains a light painterly touch, rendering people and things just so with a gentleness and humor that you just can’t take seriously, in a good way.