EIBF: Gerald Scarfe

Best known as a political cartoonist, Gerald Scarfe is really a very accomplished artist in many genres. Happily wired up to a PowerPoint show, Scarfe was able to show images that made up a retrospective of his career. His early days in advertising, his work for Pink Floyd and Disney, and of course, his political cartoons, were all here. As good as the cartoons were, they were improved further by Scarfe’s dry wit as he described them. So we saw Gordon Brown, who had described himself as Heathcliff, in “Dithering Heights”, George Bush as a chimp, and Iain Duncan Smith without any face at all – Scarfe described him as difficult because he had no personality to latch on to. He mentioned that he was often asked whether he had any political heroes, and said that Mandela came to mind immediately, and that he had high hopes for Obama – but also showed a cartoon with a Superman-Obama crashing into a wall called ‘Health Care reform’. Scarfe saved his best line for last. He talked about the time he met Tony Blair, who said he didn’t find Scarfe’s cartoons too harsh. The reply? “I’ll have to try harder then”. [Nat Smith]