The art of caricature — the exaggeration of a recognisable feature until the figure is at once unmistakable and absurd — has had a peculiar standing in the history of European visual art. It has been continuously practised since at least the seventeenth century, has produced figures of acknowledged skill (Hogarth, Daumier, Beerbohm), and has accumulated an audience that no fine-art genre has matched. Yet it has been treated, in the standard histories of art, with the same mixture of acknowledgement and quiet relegation that is given to popular forms whose seriousness embarrasses the discipline.
The relegation has its reasons. The forms most associated with caricature — the political print, the satirical magazine, the social vignette — were commercial in production, ephemeral in intended use, and explicit in their topical references. They aged poorly, in the sense that audiences a generation later required footnotes to understand them; they appeared often, blurred the line between art and journalism, and made claims about contemporary figures that did not survive the deaths of those figures. The qualities that made the work potent for its audience were the qualities that made it inconvenient for the museum.
The relegation has also concealed something the surviving work makes plain. The technical demands of caricature are not the technical demands of straight portraiture, but they are not less for being different. To exaggerate a face until it is unmistakable, while still remaining a recognisable face, requires an understanding of facial structure that few straight portraits demand; to render a political moment in a single image, with figures whose identities the reader must immediately decode and whose attitudes the reader must immediately read, requires compositional choices whose difficulty has often been underestimated. The careless reader of a Daumier sees a quick sketch; the careful reader sees a kind of solving.
To restore the form to a more accurate place in the history of European art is not to call it the equal of every other practice — caricature has, by its nature and by the brevity of the encounters it stages, scope that more meditative forms exceed. It is to recognise that the dismissal of the form on grounds of its commerciality or its topicality has obscured what the form is actually doing in its best instances, and that the work of its strongest practitioners deserves the attention the museum routinely extends to forms whose accomplishments are not, on close inspection, of a different order.
The author's attitude toward caricature as a form is best described as: