Cartoonists: Road Maps to Opinion

Adenauer was “a lemon on a flagpole,” Gandhi “a pyramid of homespun cloth topped with a dried prune,” George Bernard Shaw “the devil’s Santa Claus,” John D. Rockefeller “the mummy of Rameses II.” Churchill had a face “put together like early rose potatoes”; Franklin D. Roosevelt was “a fox grafted onto a lion” who “used his jaw as men use hands and elephants use trunks.” If the descriptions sound like notes for a cartoon to be drawn later, there is good reason. The words belong to Emery Kelen, a Hungarian-born caricaturist who has spent most of his life studying faces for some clue to the inner man. Along with Kelen’s deft pen portraits, his incisive word pictures appear in his book, Peace in Their Time (Knopf; $5.95).

As practiced by Kelen and his collaborator Alois Derso, the art of caricature survives today mainly in the work of newspaper editorial cartoonists, the best of whom—Bill Mauldin, Herblock, Paul Conrad of the Denver Post, Fritz Behrendt of Amsterdam’s Algemeen Handelsblad—can transcend mere exaggeration to reach with a few lines the essence of a subject’s character. “It is not simply a matter of drawing a big nose bigger and a floppy ear floppier,” Kelen writes. “It involves an evaluation of the inner man through his outward features. A caricature is an opinion.” For 40 years, from the League of Nations to the United Nations, Kelen scanned the world’s leaders like road maps—and usually their faces told him just where they were going.

Kelen’s eye was so sure that he often picked men out of a crowd before history did. In 1921, from a swarm of boisterous brown-shirted men in Munich, he sketched one whose face was all fascinating conflict. “Contrasts of weakness and strength were dramatic,” Kelen wrote. “The fragile centerpiece of the upper jaw was flanked by massive cheekbones and a baboon brow ridge, and was married to a sledgehammer lower jaw . . . timidity grafted to courage, sensitiveness to violence, and an abstract mind to muddleheaded mysticism.” Kelen’s subject: Rudolf Hess. Other notable Kelen portraits: » John Foster Dulles: “His eyes blinked intermittently like an electric bulb loose in its socket, and he made sucking motions with his mouth as if chewing thumbtacks.” » Russia’s Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko: “Bulbous nose, dolorous eyes, tight lips . . . like a punchinello whose feelings have been wounded.” » Adlai Stevenson: “The round head of a plump, warmhearted, paternal grandpa … a man who laughs easily while his eyes remain staring like a couple of Andromeda nebulae.” » Neville Chamberlain: “The Secre tary Bird, which you may watch at the zoo walking back and forth on stiff legs with an expression of honest purpose on its face.”

» Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.: “The president of the Hasty Pudding Club.” » Hitler: “Incongruities ran up and down the man. Hitler’s massive brow ridge was strikingly out of proportion to the sunken upper jaw which the little mustache was inadequate to coax out. His nose was crudely hacked out, unfinished, a vulgar proboscis.”

Caricaturist Kelen came to the U.S. in 1938 with his partner Derso. In former years the pair appeared in the old New York World, the Christian Science Monitor and other publications; Kelen still draws for a number of European papers. He and Derso have published a number of sketchbooks, including one on the 1945 conference that gave birth to the U.N. at the San Francisco Opera House; Harry Truman was portrayed as Lohengrin (see cut). In 1957 Kelen retired after nine years as television director of the United Nations, a post that hardly taxed the graphic powers he had trained for so long on the world’s cast of characters.