WAR HEADS
Heller, Steven
VIEWS REV I E W S WARHEADS BY STEVEN HELLER Since Jacques Callot caricatured cannonballs in Seventeenth Century prints, the bomb has served cartoonists as a unique symbol of the horrors...
...VIEWS REV I E W S WARHEADS BY STEVEN HELLER Since Jacques Callot caricatured cannonballs in Seventeenth Century prints, the bomb has served cartoonists as a unique symbol of the horrors of war...
...The graphics on these pages are from a new book, War Heads, that includes many approaches—captioned gags and visual allegories, editorial cartoons and comic strips...
...All royalties from "War Heads" go to the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign...
...In the public's consciousness, it paves the way for more detailed and articulated argument...
...In the early 1950s, when the Soviet Union had joined the United States in the exclusive nuclear bomb club, Herblock's diabolical, anthropomorphized H-bomb became the ultimate symbol of fear...
...The power to simplify complex issues without trivializing them Steven Heller is art director of The New York Times Book Review...
...Despite the differences in approaches, all of these statements speak the same language, exposing the absurdity and danger of the arms race and nuclear brinkmanship...
...Today, the ICBM and the MX are part of the cartoonist's repertoire, and the nightmarish mushroom cloud is as commonplace in art as it is unthinkable in life...
...Some of the artists employ familiar images to heighten recognition, while others invent new, more personal modes of presentation...
...The artists represented here, like scores of others in the book, gave generously of their talent and contributed their work to this first compilation of cartoons and illustrations dealing exclusively with the issue of nuclear disarmament...
...Some target political leaders because they see them as the devisors and administrators of suicidal policies, while others choose timeless imagery beyond the reach of temporal power...
...And later in the same decade, Jules Feiffer's prophetic cartoon exposes of the "clean-air" bomb heightened the collective anxiety of his readers...
...is the ultimate virtue of the cartoonist's art...
...Robert Osborn's cautionary picture book, War Is No Damn Good, published immediately after World War II, featured the first satiric personification of the modern bomb...
...Caustic humor is indispensable when we are compelled to deal with such devastating realities...
...He edited "War Heads: Cartoonists Draw the Line," published in February by Penguin Books...
...Satire is the artist's corrective for a society straying from the rational course...
...After the development and deployment of the atomic bomb in 1945, a chilling new assortment of images was added to an already universal graphic vocabulary...
Vol. 47 • April 1983 • No. 4
