Fantasy
Pliny described "panots", the Indians -"arnapravirani", whose ears were used as clothes; some African dwarfs used one ear as a mattress while the other as a blanket. Peter the Great collected fantastic wonders for Kunstkamera; European medieval artists drew and carved fantastic chimeras on the fronts of Gothic cathedrals or monsters on the seats. Great Bosch, Callot, Bruegel, and Goya were inspired by the works of medieval masters. Their humour was phantasmagoric, but verisimilar (see "The gardens of delight" by H. Bosch, "St. Anthony's Temptation" by Callot, "Graphics" by Bruegel, and "Caprichos" by Goya.). Their phantoms are clumsy and fancy, their laughter is partly amusing but philosophical in general.
There is a hypothesis that H. Bosch anticipated some technical inventions of the XXth centuries: a grasshopper - a tank; a bird - an airplane; a fish with feet - a submarine; thus, the artist stretched an invisible line from fantasy to fun. In modern illustrations to Bkhagavad-Gita one can see grotesque-comic elements, e.g. fantastic moments of transforming human beings into an animal, a tree, or an insect. Sometimes a science-fiction writers draw caricatures themselves ( A. Robidd, a French), but more often caricaturists humorously tried to foresee the future. ( B. Antonovsky's series of caricatures "A Working Day in 1994", published in 1924).
As a matter of fact, our future is always close to us: drawings of
extra-terrestrial beings on the rocks, on the walls of cult buildings, in
ancient manuscripts, in fairy tales, and in stories of modern contacts with
UFOs. Caricaturists make fun of these unbelievable stories and of ridiculous
films and hypothesis of science-fiction writers. The most frequent subjects
of caricatures are space flights, landing on some unknown planet, meeting
with aliens. They help make the outer space and the Earth closer to each
other. The caricaturists draw almost the same figure of an alien - a small
green bug-eyed being with small horns and a nose like a mushroom. All of
them are clumsy and often find themselves in ridiculous situations. A.
Bergson, a philosopher, once said, "The beginning of fun is in automatism;
when any living creature is turning into a soulless mechanism." In
caricatures mechanisms make friends and love, they marry and have children,
they are sad or happy, they travel and have fun. Humour, perhaps, is the
most human means of delivering information; on the eve of the XXIst century
it helps a person adapt to modern machines, take paradoxical theories and
unexplainable phenomena for granted.
In 1989 an exhibition of caricatures "Man and Space" was
held in Donetsk.
1. H. Bosch. "St. Anthony's Temptation" Detail.
1505-1506.
8. B. Antonovsky. "A Working Day in 1994".
Detail. "Smekhach". 1924.
7. M. Ernst. Drawing. Detail.
2. P. Bruegel. "Envy". From a series "Seven
Mortal Sins". Detail. 1557
4. E. T.-A. Hofmann. Horrible images born by
wild fantasy. 1811.
6. Lubok. Detail.
.3. F. Goya. "The deuce take him!" "Caprichos".
Detail.
9. S. Tunin.
5. Lubok "People and Beasts discovered by
Alexander the Great" Detail. Early XIXth century.
By Dmitry Moskin
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