Banksy: An Artist Unmasked
By Alex Altman Monday, July 21, 2008 For years the graffiti artist known as Banksy has been the art world's Deep Throat: a hugely influential figure whose identity remained shrouded in mystery. Now, like Deep Throat, he has been given a name. Banksy is a 34-year-old native of Bristol, England, named Robin Gunningham, Britain's the Mail on Sunday reported on July 13. The thread that may have unraveled the mystery was a 2004 photograph taken in Jamaica, which many — including photographer Peter Dean Rickards — say is the only known picture of Banksy. (The artist's agent, Steve Lazarides, denied that the photo — which depicts a man in jeans and sneakers crouching above a can of spray paint — is of Banksy. A spokeswoman for the artist declined to confirm or deny the Mail's report.) Since striding onto the scene in the early 1990s, Banksy has vaulted from obscurity to international renown, all the while escaping detection. Among his catalog of greatest hits, Banksy has released an inflatable Guanténamo Bay prisoner doll at Disneyland, depicted England's Queen Elizabeth II as a chimpanzee, tagged the West Bank border fence and sneaked his own Mona Lisa — her inscrutable expression replaced by a yellow smiley face — into the Louvre. "He's kind of captured the zeitgeist," says Gareth Williams, a contemporary-art specialist at Bonhams auction house in London. "But he's done it in quite an accessible way, so it speaks to people." Even for a vandal, going mainstream has its perks: Banksy's handiwork has commanded millions of dollars at auction from acolytes like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. But anonymity has been as crucial a part of Banksy's mythology as irony and wit. "Anything that's ever been written about him centers around the anonymity — that he's this Batman, this cult figure," says Pedro Alonzo, who curated an exhibition in England to which Banksy contributed. But that doesn't necessarily mean being unmasked would hurt Banksy's popularity. The intrigue over his identity has been a "double-edged sword," Alonzo says, since it has occluded the messages bundled in his art. "His work is a call to action. It's about hierarchies of power, social injustice and paying attention to issues that aren't being addressed," he adds. "There could be a bright side to this — the attention being diverted from his identity [could allow] people to really look at his work and consider it." Says Williams: "I don't think the Banksy story ends here." |
Review/Art; With Caricatures, Doings of the French Revolution
By Michael Kimmelman Published: February 3, 1989 During the French Revolution, a Parisian could remain informed about the meaning of a recent decree or the significance of the latest beheading by wandering into a print shop or strolling through the garden of the Palais-Royal, where caricatures were sold. These 18th-century political cartoons were often hastily produced by anonymous artists and sometimes by artists of the first rank like Jacques-Louis David. Caricatures fueled the revolutionary struggle in a way that may be difficult to imagine today, but representatives of the Republican and the Royalist sides energetically vied through this meanest of artistic forms to shape French public opinion. This year marks the 200th anniversary of the start of the French Revolution, an event recognized in various exhibitions around the world, among them ''Politics and Polemics: French Caricature and the French Revolution, 1789-1799,'' which is now at the Grey Art Gallery of New York University. It was organized by James Cuno and Cynthia Burlingham of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, in conjunction with the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Thomas W. Sokolowski, the director of the Grey gallery, oversaw the exhibition's installation. The show focuses on the period from the destruction of the Bastille to the rise to power of Napoleon. With nearly 200 works, many of them mundane, this enormous display may well tire all but the most devoted student of the French Revolution. ''French Caricature'' is the sort of painstakingly scholarly exhibition - as much history lesson as art show - that makes a stronger case for itself in the catalogue than on the walls of a gallery. Still it rewards the casual viewer with several witty and clever images and a number of beautiful etchings and hand-colored prints. Caricature, as the exhibitors make clear, did not start in France with the destruction of the Bastille, but it was the circumstances surrounding the Revolution and the easing of censorship restrictions that allowed political cartoons to flourish, principally as an art circulated among the bourgeoisie. In previous decades, caricaturists turned a sarcastic eye toward subjects like the Jesuits, the English and, among lighter subjects, the predilection by aristocratic women of the mid-18th century for outlandish hair styles. In ''The Triumph of Coquetry,'' among several caricatures that serve as a kind of preamble to the main portion of the show, a joust has been staged between tottering women who must try to knock one another down before toppling over from the weight of their own coiffures. It was from these gently demeaning scenes that the heated imagery of revolutionary caricature was developed. Sometimes the artist's tactic was to charm, as with the transformation of an otherwise respectful portrait of Louis XVI through the addition on the King's head of a Phrygian cap. The approach was occasionally melancholic. A print by Jacques Marchand subtly depicts silhouettes of the King and Queen in the trunk of a weeping willow tree. But more often the caricaturist's intent was to outrage and mock, and apparently no scatological joke or humiliating alteration of a person's features was considered inappropriate. David turned out some of the crudest of all caricatures when not painting grand Neo-Classical portraits and images of the revolution and its aftermath. With a frankness and unabashedness that few political cartoonists today would dare to attempt, Republican caricaturists sought by all means at their disposal to break down respect for the monarchy and the clergy and to promote a heroic conception of the revolution. In this spirit, the Republican government commissioned propagandistic prints depicting liberty and equality as toga-clad gods and goddesses. As part of an effort to create a new pantheon of French heroes, caricaturists fashioned images of Marat. When in 1792 the Republicans decided to replace the Gregorian calendar, there followed a series of etchings in which buxom young women were put forth as personifications of the new months. And to generate support for Napoleon, printmakers drew admiring and imaginative allegories, like ''Bonaparte Crowned in Egypt by Victory'' (circa 1798), in which the general is flanked by Hercules and Minerva. Whatever effects these caricatures may have had in altering public views, the revolutionary-era works firmly established in France an artistic tradition that would prosper during the next few decades. ''French Caricature'' concludes with an 1804 lithograph by Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret of a crowd outside a Paris print shop specializing in caricatures. By the start of the 19th century, the audience for these works was clearly in place, and the stage was being set for Grandville and Daumier. |