Caricaturists: Making Faces at Sacred Cows

Irreverence toward the high and mighty was revived in the nightclubs and on TV by such iconoclasts as Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory and the late Lenny Bruce. In magazines, the door was opened by such immoderates as Ramparts and Evergreen. The result has been the rise of a new generation of political caricaturists who consider no public figure too sacred, no insult too excessive. The front lines are manned by established satirists like Jules Feiffer, David Levine and Ronald Searle. Behind them, a new platoon of caricaturists is fast moving up. And one of the best is a Manhattan commercial artist named Edward Sorel.

Sorel, now 39, is a Cooper Union alumnus who got out of school searching more for money than for meaning. This was so, he recalls, because he had been raised on “the cotton candy of the Eisenhower years.” His attitude toward art was “What’s in it for me, Jack?” The result was a stream of corporate and airline advertisements that continued even after Sorel became a freelancing satirist in 1960.

Following publication of two books of satire, How to Be President and Moon Missing, Sorel created “Sorel’s Bestiary” for Ramparts. Every month he classified by species one of the public figures he liked least, The late Francis Cardinal Spellman became a red bird called Spellmanus Bellicosus, riding a missile and clutching an olive branch in his teeth. Lyndon Johnson appeared as a crocodile. Truman Capote swam in a murky Central Park lake as a swellfish (libris vendor).

Matter of Taste. At Esquire, Sorel introduced another series known as “The Spokesman.” One such was Charles de Gaulle, dressed as a Puritan and carrying a Bible and a blunderbuss; the French President had opposed state payments for contraceptives on the ground that they would be used for pleasure rather than health. Last May, in the Atlantic, Sorel unleashed “Sorel’s Unfamiliar Quotations,” in which bulbous characters are linked with punnish captions. Under a sullen, bleary Frank Sinatra: “Mia culpa.”

Sorel is at his acid best with subjects he actively disdains or dislikes. “Caricaturing,” he explains, “is essentially therapy for me. It’s a way of taking away the feeling of impotence one has about a situation.” In their vitriol, Sorel’s pen-and-ink drawings lean somewhat on Levine. But in their artistic style —the absurd settings, the disproportionate figures—they trace back much more directly to Sir John Tenniel, the Victorian artist who illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Sorel’s fees now run as high as $1,700 for a two-page spread, but he has begun to brood again. Monthly magazines, he complains, have prepublication time lags that can damage a topical caricaturist. An Esquire article on Robert Kennedy, illustrated by Sorel, appeared after the Senator’s death. “It looked,” says Sorel, “like nothing but bad taste.”

Still, Sorel does not intend to stop doing what appeals to him artistically, emotionally or financially. “As a caricaturist,” he says, “I have a chance to make faces at some sacred cows.” Now that he is established, however, he would like to make the faces in a weekly satirical newspaper of his own.