More than a Caricaturist

Friday, Aug. 30, 1968
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When tragedy broke up his happy family life, first with the death of two young sons, then his wife, Grandville's art took a grotesque turn. He started sketching his dreams and nightmares, as Baudelaire decribed it, "with all the precision of a stenographer writing down an orator's speech." In 1847, his third son died. Brokenhearted, Grandville died a short time later.

But in the work of those last years, Grandville established a claim as an ancestor of surrealism. He experimented with mirror-image distortions and drew pictures of huge, unattached eyeballs. He split faces in two to suggest the war between the conscious and the sub conscious long before the terms were commonly known. Baudelaire was the first to see that Grandville was more than a caricaturist. "When I open the door of Grandville's works," he wrote in 1857, "I feel a certain uneasiness, as though I were entering an apartment where disorder was systematically organized. There are some superficial spirits who are amused by Grandville; for my part, I find him terrifying."