Serious matters

Spectator, The, Jul 14, 2007 by Lambirth, Andrew

The Cartoon Museum, 35 Little Russell Street, London WC1, until 7 October The Redfern Gallery, 20 Cork Street, London W1, until 26 July

I went with high hopes to the Cartoon Museum. Actually, I think the appellation 'museum' rather grand for a couple of rooms off a back street in Bloomsbury, particularly when the real thing -- the British Museum -- is just round the corner. Still, I can applaud the vision which wants to make a museum for cartoons, even if the reality needs working on. You enter via a cartoon bookshop, i. e. , a shop selling funny books, not a funny drawing of a bookshop, and at once humour breaks over you like a wave.

Here's a Donald McGill pen and ink and watercolour drawing from the 1940s of a youngish man having shellfish trouble. The caption ditty begins, 'I can't get my winkle out. . . ' Oh, we do like our double entendres at the saucy seaside. Various other artists crowd the walls, and there's an historical survey of 'Characters and Caricaturas' from Hogarth to Scarfe. Among the treasures of this display are Gillray, Rowlandson and John Tenniel, George du Maurier and Phil May, my old favourite Charles Keene, Max Beerbohm and an early Ralph Steadman -- a brilliant pointilliste pastiche of flowerpower in the park. But I've come to see Heath Robinson, who currently has a special section devoted to his work.

Last year the Cartoon Museum was given 230 Heath Robinson drawings and illustrations, a number of which are exhibited for the first time here. This show packs into a small space more than 100 drawings, so closely hung on partition walls that the labelling frequently gets confused. This is not the way to look at Heath Robinson, whose intricacies of design are the chief source of humour in his work. In fact, the best approach might be to buy the catalogue, which contains an informative text by Simon Heneage and is lavishly illustrated (£14.95 in paperback), and take it home for a good read. Then, when you've absorbed the gist of Robinson's manner and method, return to the Museum to study the details of its application, its subtleties and enjoyably deadpan style. Certainly, it's not easy to concentrate on 'reading' his drawings in this crowded setting, particularly to the accompaniment of an 'oompah' tape loop which goes with a dim video of some chaps playing about with a Heath Robinsonstyle contraption.

Sadly, this irritating aural distraction made me cut short my visit. Why, oh why do so many museums make the mistake of trying too hard? Is such a soundtrack thought to promote jollity in a gallery already devoted to humour? Don't the organisers realise that laughter is a serious business? No one knew this better than that great master of paradox, G.K. Chesterton, who was an early influence on Heath Robinson, along with Lewis Carroll and W.S. Gilbert. I was charmed to find a drawing by G.K. himself at the opening of the Heath Robinson display, even if it was a rather strange apparition of a hucksterish Merman done in coloured chalks. Actually, this showman sets the tone for the exhibition: straight-faced absurdity and the gentle sending-up of pomposity. Heath Robinson's dramatis personae are the sort of solemn innocents who'd have delighted the heart of Chesterton.

William Heath Robinson (1872-1944) was born into a family of artist-draughtsmen: his grandfather was an engraver, and his father and his two older brothers were illustrators. Apparently, cartooning was his third choice after landscape painting (a lifelong pursuit) and book illustration, but something in his character responded to the misuse of sense and logic he was soon able to depict so hilariously. He became adept at lampooning the fussiness of people who took themselves too seriously, and by 1919 (particularly after his immensely popular war work) he was a household name. Try summarising a Heath Robinson tableau. A man, who seems to have broken through thick ice in order to stand waist-deep in freezing water, is holding up a tree trunk in the topmost fork of which is another man, who is holding together a broken bridge so that a horse and cart containing a family going home for Christmas, laden with food and presents, is able to cross. It takes quite a few words to express the subject of this watercolour, published in December 1925 in Hutchinson's Magazine, and yet to convey none of the humour. Heath Robinson's genius lies in the poignant orchestration of the ridiculous, and in the inscrutable humour of the incongruous.

A very different kind of exhibition is in Cork Street at the moment, a rerun of an avant-garde painting survey, 50 years after its initial appearance. Metavisual Tachiste Abstract at the Redfern recreates the issues and cross-currents of that potent intersection of abstraction and figuration which then so preoccupied artists. (Tachisme is the European form of Abstract Expressionism, usually denoting a soft and sensual markmaking. Metavisual is a rather meaningless buzzword. ) On show are works by all but two of the original 37 participating artists, most of them dating from the early Fifties, and a number being the actual works exhibited in 1957. What is the relevance of such a collection of disparate styles and visions today?