Broken Frontier

Now showing at London's Cartoon Museum, Bell Epoque is a retrospective exhibition of thirty years of the cartoonist's work:

"Steve Bell is regarded by many as the funniest, the rudest and the most astute political cartoonist working today. Bell’s attacking style has earned him the respect and admiration not only of his peers but even of commentators politically opposed to him – ‘the mad but brilliant Steve Bell’ (Charles Moore, The Spectator). His uninhibited inventiveness can at times be sexual or scatological, but it is always witty and finely honed. It may take the form of a counterblast of savage invective aimed at the rich and powerful, but it can also reflect the quiet suffering of ordinary people in images of restrained subtlety.

This exhibition includes over 200 leader cartoons, strip cartoons, and comic pages produced for the Guardian and other periodicals over the last 30 years. The works document many of the major events of our age: Thatcherism, the Falklands War, the Poll Tax, the death of Princess Diana, the rise of New Labour, the Iraq War and the ‘war on terror’, the international banking crisis and the coalition government.

Bell is hugely influential. His graphic devices have helped to define the popular view of many leading political figures. John Major will forever be remembered as a hapless Superman in Aertex underpants; George W. Bush as a hooting, knuckle-grazing chimp. Not content with viewing politicians on screen, Bell makes an annual pilgrimage to the party conferences to view his targets ‘in the flesh’. These often result in flashes of inspiration such as his discovery of Tony Blair’s ‘mad left eye’ and the super smoothness of David Cameron’s complexion, which led the artist to draw him with a condom over his head – a device which pleased Bell if not everyone else at the Guardian.

Unlike his colleagues on other papers, Bell faces not one but two deadlines a day, four days a week: the leader cartoon and his strip cartoon If… , where his surreal repertory company of penguins, sheep, a monkey, a whale and ‘Lord God Almighty’ perform alongside the Royal Family, corrupt police officers and inept and hypocritical politicians.

Bell has forged a dynamic style entirely his own, drawing upon the world of fine art – Bosch, Michelangelo, Turner, and the Pre-Raphaelites; the great British graphic tradition of Hogarth, Gillray, Cruikshank, Low and Searle; and the worlds of comics and animation – the Beano, Popeye and Robert Crumb.

His work has never shied away from difficult topics. Amidst the increasingly managed world of image politics and the ‘deliberate obfuscation’ of spin, he aims to break through the façade and expose the underlying truths. Each cartoon is a virtuosic performance in word and image, designed, he says, to ‘disturb’ and ‘intrigue’ his readers. Against the tidal wave of images threatening to overwhelm us, Bell believes in the enduring importance of cartooning as an art form and the power of a single still image to make people stop and think."

The exhibition runs until 24 July. For more information on the museum and this exhibition check out the website here.