Kazimir Malevich cartoon – black square jigsaw puzzle.

A cartoon about art merchandising – the sort of novelty item you can purchase in art gallery and museum gift shops.
Art galleries and museums generate quite a lot of much needed income through merchandising and gift shops (and cafés).
Here the merchandise is a jigsaw puzzle.
It is a jigsaw of Kazimir Malevich’s seminal work of modern art Black Square.
The joke is, of course, that a black square would make for an extremely difficult jigsaw puzzle – it’s bad enough doing the skies in relatively easy ones. So the jigsaw puzzle is in some ways a work of art in its own right.

This version: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art064

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.

An artist and his muse.

A cartoon showing an artist taking a break from his creative process.
While he’s relaxing a small figure representing his muse wafts in from his studio. He tries to ignore it.

This is a cartoon about the way that the urge to create and the impulse to work can be a bit of a curse for people of a highly creative personality type. Their thought processes just never give the a break.
A cartoon about creativit and inspiration.

Cartoon first drawn: 2007
This version: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art066

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.

A contemporary artwork composed of an ophthalmologist’s eye test chart.

The cartoon shows visitors to an art gallery looking at a piece of contemporary artwork that takes the form of an optician’s eye test.
They are looking intensely at the artwork in order to try to ‘read’ it in an attempt to understand its meaning. The man is saying that he understands it up to a certain point, that point being where the letters on the eye chart become too small for him to read.
The cartoon is about how to look at art. The artwork could be titled Ways of Seeing.

This version: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art062

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.

An art gallery removing classical portraits to replace them with contemporary celebrity selfies.

This cartoon is about contemporary celebrity culture, and its possible impact on art galleries and museums.
In the cartoon the portraits of historically important figures are being removed in order to make way for selfies of social media celebrities of the Instagram generation.
Part of the concept behind the cartoon is the potential debasement of culture due to commercial pressures in order to attract a new audience, on the basis that larger audiences attract more funding or income for art establishments.

Drawn: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art059

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.

Contemporary art cartoon – the primacy of concept over aesthetics and execution.

This cartoon is about the way that the contemporary art world sometimes regards the intellectual concept behind a work of art as being in some ways more important than the physical quality and aesthetics of the artwork. The work can sometimes only be appreciated if the concepts behind the work are understood.

Drawn: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art058

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.

Accessing the market value of contemporary art.

The cartoon shows a contemporary art dealer assessing the value of an artwork.
He is saying that if it is priced too low it may reflect badly on the work, while a high price would make the work seem like a more desirable purchase for an art collector.

Drawn: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art054

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.

Pretension in the art world.

The cartoon shows a visitor to an art gallery giving the reasons why he likes a particular piece of contemporary artwork.
The main reason he likes it is because liking it makes him feel superior to people who don’t like it.
The artwork in the cartoon is a typical trope of a challenging piece of contemporary sculpture, in that it appears to be craftless, ugly and a bit revolting.
A cartoon about pretension, snobbery and elitism in the art world.

Cartoon drawn: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art051

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.

A cartoon showing a contemporary sculpture.

The sculpture is titled Bogey Man.
It is composed of plaster, glue and bogeys.

The cartoon is about the way that some contemporary art is deliberately disgusting or repulsive.

Cartoon drawn: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art027

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.

The emperor’s new clothes – contemporary art cartoon.

The cartoon shows visitors to an art gallery admiring a contemporary work of ark that features a blank canvas.
The artwork is called the Emperor’s new clothes.
The visitors are admiring the detail in the work (even though there’s nothing there).

The cartoon is a comment on the way that people sometimes put on a front to appear to understand concepts and ideas in order to avoid being thought of as stupid or out of touch.

Original version drawn: 2006
This version drawn: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art018

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.

A cartoon about contemporary art that’s difficult to understand.

The cartoon features someone who pretends to understand a piece of contemporary art that has a deliberately obscure meaning, when in fact he doesn’t.

Cartoon drawn: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art029

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.

A cartoon about the rise in entertainment-related installations in art galleries.

Over recent years I’ve visited various art galleries where some of the exhibits have resembled fun fair or playground structures.
Examples are the helter-skelter slides and swings that have been installed in Tate Modern at various times.
This cartoon features fun fair dodgems.

Cartoon drawn: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art039

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.

Artist’s self-portrait cartoon

Cartoon showing an artist’s final self-portrait.

The self-portrait is the artist’s cremated ashes.
It’s an artwork about mortality.

Cartoon drawn: 2018

Cartoon reference number: art011

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.

Cubism cartoon.

A private view in a contemporary art gallery.
One of the quests is introduced as a cubist He’s a cube.

Cartoon drawn: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art036

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.

Cartoon showing an art snob looking in distain at some people he judges as less cultured.

A cartoon about elitism in the arts and the snobbery of artistic and aesthetic taste.

Drawn: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art008

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.

A Pop Art cartoon, showing a black and white striped canvas in the style of Bridget Riley.

The painting is of a product bar code.
The idea is that although the canvas looks like a piece of abstract art it is in fact a painting of a real object as represented by its bar code.

The cartoon is partly a comment on the digitisation of the physical world.
A cartoon about pop art, op art, modern art, Bridget Riley, digitization, artistic representation.

Original cartoon drawn: 2012
This version: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art033

This cartoon features in my book of cartoons about art.
See the book here.