Munch cartoon – the Scream

A cartoon featuring the Scream by Edvard Munch.
The cartoon is a comment on the way that art galleries and museums are becoming more accessible to the general public and are moving away from their aura of slightly intimidating elitism.
It is also about the way that art galleries and museums are deliberately targeting themselves at the Instagram generation, often arranging their works so that they are Instagram friendly and encouraging visitors to take photographs (which was very much frowned on in the past).
Here the art gallery has set up an interactive or audience participation display featuring a large-scale version of the Scream with a hole in it so that people can photograph each other as the person in the painting. Obviously the people will all have great fun pulling funny faces, often parodying or mimicking the facial expression in the Scream. Part of the joke in the cartoon is that the person being photographed has been asked the common request by the photographer to smile.

Cartoon drawn: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art080

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

Picasso painting a portrait.

The cartoon shows Picasso at work on an oil painting of a woman.
The painting is in one of Picasso’s most recognisable styles, in which the features of the person are very distorted.
Picasso is saying “This painting will make you so famous that you won’t be able to walk down the street without being recognised.”

First version drawn: 2007
This version: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art071

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

Contemporary art composed of Rorschach tests.

The cartoon shows three images of the same Rorschach inkblot test image displayed on an art gallery wall. Each image is given a different title based on different possibilities of what the inkblot suggests.

The cartoon is partly about the multiple interpretations that can be made of works of contemporary art.

First version drawn: 2017
This version: 2019

Cartoon reference number: art070

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

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.