During the Second Boer War the prestige of the British Empire sank to an all-time low. The main reason was the establishment of concentration camps in South Africa as a measure against the guerrilla war led by the local farmers against the Empire. Over 26,000 Boers, mainly women and children, died of hunger and diseases due to the catastrophic conditions of their detention. In September 1901, Jean Veber dedicated a whole issue of the French satirical magazine “Assiette au Beurre” to this topic. The depiction of the British King Edward VII as a butthead led to some diplomatic quarrels and censorship measures. On the German side,in the course of the two world wars, this issue was repeatedly used as propaganda material against England. A slightly modified reprint was published by the Nazi publishing house “Verlag für Militärgeschichte” in 1941, the same year in which the so-called “final solution”, the Holocaust, was decided.
Alexander Roob’s “History of Press Graphics. 1819-1921. The Age of Graphic Journalism” is out now. (Taschen Cologne, Hardcover, 24.6 x 37.2 cm). In over 600 pages, this far-reaching compendium presents press illustration and graphic journalism as a distinct and unique genre and a laboratory for developing avant-garde aesthetics. The images are largely taken from the […]
What sails here under the flag of caricature is nothing other than an early form of blunt and bleak social realism. The group makes a powerful and monumental impression, misery in the dimension of a history picture, and that’s exactly how it was meant to be. The publisher of La Caricature, Charles Philipon, like most […]
The Ichts / The Sator Arepo mechanism / Two Evas The Ichts When looking through these magic books, one is quickly confronted with the question of whether there was a system here that was comprehensible and decipherable, at least in parts, or whether it was an entirely idiosyncratic construct, a blooming nonsense, a crazy simulation […]