When: closing January 6 2019
Humor has been a subject of art for centuries, but it turns out, a lot of the laughs don't age well. The wall notes promise jocular subjects from Leonardo to R. Crumb, which is quite a timeline. There are more prints and drawings in this show than paintings and sculpture, which makes sense. I can't think of a humorous sculpture, although there must be some. Paintings are also not usually funny. The notes posit that this is because humor is, by its nature, subversive, and therefore, more likely to have been created quickly and out of the eye of the powerful it was lampooning. Hence, the quick sketches, rather than the painstaking marble.
Other than the origin of the "Ship of Fools" idea (I confess, I was reminded of Gary Larson's "Car of Idiots") and the focus on the hypocrisy between those espousing high ideals in public and not living up to them in private, I found the early works to be a bit too heavy on the excretory and alcoholic aspects to be really funny. I was delighted to see an Albrecht Durer book illustration, so it wasn't all lost on me.
I also liked the anamorphose - a distorted drawing that can only be seen in a cylindrical mirror. Who came up with this idea? Why? If I didn't actually laugh at the cleverness of this genre, I at least smirked a bit.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, political satire makes its appearance, which obviously continues to this day. There was mention made of the late 1700s fascination with finding the "perfect view," which, of course, reminded me of Mansfield Park. Modern day satire included not only Andy Warhol (see the Nixon as Wicked Witch of the West pictured here) and the Guerrilla Girls, with their emphasis on the lack of women artists in pretty much every art museum in the world.
Verdict: An interesting show, with some good pieces, but it's not the laugh riot you might think from the title.
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