Sharpened Pencils
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday December 16, 2000
STATUES: Decorative, Household, Commemorative and Practical
By George Molnar
Duffy & Snellgrove, 184pp, $25
IN THEIR IMAGE: Contemporary Australian Cartoonists
By Ann Turner
National Library of Australia, 228pp, $30.95
George Molnar once claimed he stumbled accidentally into political cartooning. This must have been about 1952 when he first joined the Herald. But those who remember his cartoons might have difficulty in imagining George stumbling. He was the most nimble and elegant of stylists. His black and white drawings (always lots of white, balanced perfectly with just the right amount of black) were from a European tradition and counterpoised the more rough-and-tumble Anglo-Australian tradition.
Born in Hungary, Molnar had arrived in Sydney in 1939 as an architect. He was to keep his ``day job" as lecturer in architecture at the University of Sydney while he ``moonlighted" for the Herald for 32 years. Not surprisingly, art and architecture were often the subject of his cartoons. One of his most memorable images, published in 1973, depicted Joern Utzon walking down the stairs outside his Opera House. The caption read: ``Yesterday upon the stair/ I met a man who wasn't there/ He wasn't there again today ..." it doesn't get more prescient than that.
In 1954, Molnar published his first book, Statues. This was followed by Insubstantial Pageant, Postcards, Molnar at Large and Moral Tales. But it is Statues that is the standout volume. The original English publication is, as the antiquarian booksellers say, ``scarce" and it is a canny move for Duffy & Snellgrove to have reprinted it. This reprint includes previously unpublished illustrations that were found, after Molnar's death in 1998, in a manuscript titled More Statues.
The introduction to this edition is written by Geoffrey Atherden, who studied architecture under Molnar. The teacher's influence probably revealed itself in other ways, since Atherden abandoned architecture and ended up scripting the sitcom Mother and Son (which has a comparable economy of style) and, more recently, the acclaimed political comedy Grass Roots.
I was influenced by Molnar when, as a teenager, my parents gave me a copy of Statues. I clandestinely chalked them onto blackboards around my high school, especially any of his statues of nude women. A few years later I was given a go at doing political cartoons, surviving, panic-filled, for six editions on the now defunct tabloid Daily Mirror. (Coming up with my own original, political ideas proved far more difficult than merely copying a master.)
Which brings me to In Their Image, which looks at questions such as how do political cartoonists get started and how do they do it successfully every day, year after year? Ann Turner's book is a compilation of autobiographical pieces by 21 of Australia's cartoonists. The entries are based on interviews Turner did for the National Library of Australia oral history collection. These interviews have been shaped into essays, each illustrated by a few cartoons selected by the artists. The transition from the oral to the written word is pretty flawless and there are some lovely results (the narratives of Patrick Cook and Bill Leak are particularly entertaining).
Given that there are only about a dozen major newspapers nationally, cartooning jobs are hard to come by. Alan Moir, who followed Molnar onto the Herald in the 1980s, writes that the problem with cartooning is that you have to wait for someone to ``drop off their stool". But opportunities can come in other ways. In 1973, Moir had sent some political cartoons to The Bulletin. At this time, the magazine was about to start publishing Larry Pickering, but was keeping it a secret, telling readers that the new cartoonist was to be a surprise. But Pickering then opted for another paper and Moir found himself to be the ``surprise" cartoonist.
Where does the skill come from? It doesn't seem to run in families. Class doesn't seem to be a major factor, since backgrounds range from Cathy Wilcox's Killara stability to that of Michael Leunig and Ron Tandberg whose fathers both worked for the same meatworks.
Most of these cartoonists scribbled at school. Sean Leahy of The West Australian was still at school when he started with the newspaper and used to turn up at the office in his school uniform. A few flirted with architecture, others with advertising or began work as press artists. Bruce Petty, who is generally revered by the other cartoonists, recalls working for a publishing company, illustrating ``hands holding secateurs clipping roses and how to repair the brake drum on your Austin A40".
Academic art training is rare among this group. This may fit with the idea expressed by Michael Atchison (Adelaide's The Advertiser) that 95 per cent of a cartoon lies in the idea and 5 per cent in the drawing. Geoff Pryor of The Canberra Times figured out early that he could ``probably handle the drawing" but, he wondered, ``could I keep coming up with ideas?"
Clearly, all the artists in this book have managed to do so. There are no magic formulas for how they do it, but the encouraging thing is that the key ingredient for their inspiration seems to be plain old perseverance.
The other factor to emerge is the way that these cartoonists recognise the talent in others and are extremely generous towards anyone with this talent, despite the fact that it comes in so many different styles. Virtually all of them tell a story about being encouraged by someone else in the book.
If you think there is a budding political cartoonist in your family, buy them both of these books.
© 2000 Sydney Morning Herald