“Infinite Jest” Exhibition at the Met

This one is for New Yorkers: “Infinite Jest” is an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of caricature and satire through the ages. It sounds like a great introduction to early cartoonists, and features all the heavyweights including Rowlandson, Gillray, Daumier and Goya. The show runs through March 4, 2012. The video preview and description below should whet your appetite:

The exhibition explores caricature and satire in its many forms from the Italian Renaissance to the present, drawn primarily from the rich collection of this material in the Museum’s Department of Drawings and Prints. The show includes drawings and prints by Leonardo da Vinci, Eugène Delacroix, Francisco de Goya, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Enrique Chagoya alongside works by artists more often associated with humor, such as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, Honoré Daumier, Al Hirschfeld, and David Levine. Many of these engaging caricatures and satires have never been exhibited and are little known except to specialists.

In its purest form, caricature–from the Italian carico and caricare, “to load” and “to exaggerate”–distorts human physical characteristics and can be combined with various kinds of satire to convey personal, social, or political meaning. Although caricature has probably existed since artists began to draw (ancient examples are known), the form took shape in Europe when Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of grotesque heads were copied by followers and distributed as prints.