THOSE DARING YOUNG MEN IN THEIR JAUNTY JALOPIES

In 1968 Searle was hired to create the title sequence for Ken Annakin's 'MONTE CARLO OR BUST!' - a follow up of sorts to 'THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES'- for which Searle had also created a memorable title sequence.

I'm grateful to Mr Searle for allowing me to photograph & present here pages from the original sketchbook he kept on the set of the film.  I'd presented a slideshow of these images at the various presentations I made on Searle's work in animation & film titles. Here for the first time on the blog you can browse through his sketches and notes made while following the production on location around Europe. . .

With his customary meticulous attention to detail Searle records the duration of his trip between the 25th July to the 10th August 1968.  The film was released the following year.

In the photo below Ronald is sketching at the Rome location accompanied by Monica and director Ken Annakin.  I presume the notebook he's holding is the same one I photographed 40 years later. He's probably making the sketch shown above.

Here we can see Searle starting to explore the action of the title sequence.

Searle produced the final titles with production outfit TRICKFILM, with whom he also created the title sequences for Ronald Neame's 1970 film SCROOGE.

The rest of the drawings in the sketchbook were published as a tie-in, illustrated book of the film. They include Searle's sketches of the principal actors including Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Eric Sykes, Tony Curtis and Gert Frobe.

The roving artist made sure he was on set for the scene where the girls stop to bathe in a river!

Searle even caught the screenwriter of the film, Jack Davies, on set.

You can read a well illustrated review of the film here.

Art of the Title on Searle here and the title sequence here.

Bamboo

Somebody wrote to me recently enquiring whether it was true that Searle drew with a 'bamboo pen'.
There's an interesting thread on Searle's use of the bamboo pen over at the Illustration Art blog, suggesting Searle first dicovered this tool as a prisoner of the Japanese during WW11.  The variety of mark-making in Searle's work indicates that he uses a variety of tools, nibs, fountain pens brushes etc.
Artists often wonder how did Searle achieve those marvellous results- what tool did he use? The answer is probably all of them.  In this photo below from the display case at the Cartoon Museum's Searle exhibition we can see the different media he used, including a bamboo pen, a variety of dip pens, the wood stain used as ink early on & the famous Mont Blanc fountain pen.

Ronald Searle at the Cartoon Museum, by Louis Hellman

The Achitects Journal 16 April, 2010 | By Louis Hellman
 

To mark Ronald Searle’s 90th birthday, the Cartoon Museum is showing a retrospective of his work. Here, Louis Hellman examines Searle’s portrayals of architecture and art

Cartoonists invariably need to include buildings or townscapes in their drawings and do it with varying degrees of understanding. Some, such as Giles or Steve Bell, generally get the details right, but how often have we seen particularly inaccurate representations of the Millennium Dome or the Gherkin?

Ronald Searle, arguably the greatest 20th-century English cartoonist and still going at 90, worked as an architectural draughtsman for the Royal Engineers at the outbreak of the Second World War. His depictions of buildings range from accurate representations to surreal fantasies and his architecture, whether real or invented, often complements the drawing style of his neo-rococo figures.

Searle was incarcerated in a Japanese prison camp during the war, where he drew the surrounding atrocities on scraps of paper scavenged by other prisoners. After the war, he achieved popularity with his creation of the subversive St Trinian’s schoolgirls, and he subsequently found international fame through illustration, graphic reportage and cover design.

Searle, the cartoonists’ cartoonist, has influenced practically everybody, whether they are aware of it or not. He developed his mature style in the 1950s along with his contemporaries Saul Steinberg, André François and George Grosz, with each of whom he has clear affinities. Searle’s brilliant impromptu draughtsmanship, always searching, unfolding, exploring and rooted in the 1950s and the English tradition, is deceptively whimsical at first sight. But the superficial attractiveness conceals the barb of satire or disapproval, in contrast to today’s more in-your-face satirists.

Born in Cambridge, Searle has lived in France since 1961, where he is appreciated, exhibited and recognised as an important artist. Rightly so.

Entrance to Old Medina, Casablanca, Morocco, January 1965This scene was painted for the US magazine Holiday and exhibited at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. It exemplifies Searle’s free pen-and-wash reportage approach, combining straight representations of buildings with caricatured people.

Al Fresco, 1977
Searle invents a spidery classicism as a setting for his rococo surrealism and naughty nudes in a superb composition. As Russell Davies observes in his 1990 biography of Searle: ‘Within even the craziest of his drawings, the beautiful correctness of observed reality still ruled. He was not making the world look funny, but experiencing it as funny; it was less a style than a psychological condition.’ Note the flicked blots, a technique possibly borrowed from upstart Ralph Steadman. Searle’s original 1950s style was clearly tempered by the new graphics.

New York, circa 1957When Searle first visited New York (he would later be published in the New Yorker) he stayed in a hotel next to the United Nations building.
His window offered fascinating views of nearby skyscrapers and what the locals got up to on the rooftops below. He produced a number of so-called ‘on the spot’ studies, which he claims ‘look elaborate but in fact they don’t take all that long to draw.’ Oh, really! But did those post-modern-ish blocks actually exist or were they Searlian inventions?

A Bigger Slash: Hommage to David Hockney, 1984This lithograph refers to David Hockney’s famous A Bigger Splash (1967), one of a series of poolside paintings executed when the artist lived in California. But is it a ‘hommage’ or a piss-take prequel? Are these other artists raining on Hockney’s paradise or members of the philistine public? And where has the diver come from? Best not to analyse, it’s just very funny.

The Ruhr, 1963Another example of Searle’s reportage drawings as he toured industrial Europe in the 1960s for Holiday and Fortune magazines. This awakened an early and prophetic environmental concern - the industrialist smells the flower, unaware that his enterprises are the cause of the destruction of nature. The cartoonist Marc Boxer criticised Searle in the 1970s for forsaking being funny for being ‘meaningful’ and preachy, and this cartoon might be trite by today’s standards. But, as ever, the drawing makes up for its period timidity. Has he got the German flag wrong though?

Los Angeles, 1957In 1957, Searle continued his association with the journalist and novelist Alex Atkinson with a series of features for Punch on America, a gentler version of the future collaboration between Hunter S Thompson and Ralph Steadman. It appeared in book form as USA for Beginners (by Rocking-Chair Across America). Here, Searle’s sweeping baroque lines conjure up a boulevard entirely composed of mortuaries of Las Vegas ostentation. The whole fantasy seems in the grip of some ghastly graphic growth hormone, including the carbuncular rococo automobile.

Louis Hellman has been contributing cartoons to the AJ since 1967

Roundup

Mr Searle never fails to astound me with his remarkable recall.  He sent me the following info on a recent obscure find:


"In your blog you reproduced a 1941 'South American' subject of mine. I can tell you that this was a bookplate for one of the officers of the American troopship USS Mount Vernon that was carrying us to Singapore. His name was Edmund L. Engel (ELE) and his wife's initials were LvBE. Very odd that a copy should turn up, after all these years, on e-bay. He, ELE, died many years ago. We correspondend after the war until his death."

The Daily Mail has an article calling for a knighthood for Searle.  The author feels like many of us that Searle's home country has long neglected honoring the man or his art.  Read it here.
The Daily Telegraph reports on the Searle archive going to Germany.

Valerie Grove's biography of Searle's first wife Kaye Webb was recently published.  Interesting summary of their time together in this review.
UK residents can listen to Grove discuss Kaye Webb's life here.

'Webb first encountered Ronald Searle when he sent cartoons to Lilliput. ("I liked his jokes," she said later. "And I loved his handwriting." Who could resist that inky Searle scrawl?) Searle spent most of the second World War in a brutal Japanese prison camp, and when he returned to England he finally met Webb in person. Webb had already been married twice, but she couldn't resist him. Grove's depiction of their initial romance is very touching, not least because the reader knows it would end so unhappily years later. They married in 1948, several months after Webb gave birth to their twin son and daughter.

The Searles spent the 1950s surrounded by the most exciting writers and artists of the day. Their striking modern house, filled with curiosities and Searle murals, was the setting for fantastic parties - the guests at one 1952 event included Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov, Clement Freud and Edward Ardizzone. But in 1961 Searle left his wife with no warning, leaving a note. As Grove shows, she never really got over him.'

Anna Carey in the Irish Times


Anita O Brien, curator of the London Cartoon Museum tells me: "Ronald has donated four originals to the Cartoon Museum collection together with prints of 'More News from Provence', and some Le Monde cartoons plus the collection of pens, pencils and papers which are on display. These are the four the trustees chose. Ronald thought it was a good choice."

(Thanks to Stephen Nadler & Anita O Brien)

Over at Cartoon Brew Amid Amidi has flagged up the CTN-X website where you can now watch my presentation on Searle's work in animation and film titles.  The link is here.

You can read another positive review of Valerie Grove's biography of Kaye Webb at the Daily Mail website.


Louis Hellman discusses architecture in Searle's drawings over at the Architects' Journal website.

PACT

An original Searle is up for auction on Ebay.  It's in aid of charity PACT ; Parents & Abucted Children Together.

This is the last week it's up for auction.  Place your bids here

(Courtesy of Brooke Baker)

Rowson on Searle

 On the 19th of May Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson will be discussing Searle's technique at the Cartoon Museum, London.  Further details here
Rowson presented the 2006 documentary Searle's Progress on BBC 4 where he analysed Searle's line & emulated his style.

Searle in Playboy magazine

 June 1955 issue, featuring images from 'Searle's sketchbook' from the Society of Illustrators Show. 

The December 1969 (vol.16, no.12) had a Searle pictorial "Homage to Toulouse Lautrec".

(Thanks to Uli & Brendan)

Contributions from readers

 Mike Leigh Daily Telegraph article online

Dennis Hall of Parrot Press Editions sent me this article he wrote on Searle for an arts magazine he contributes to- 'Parenthesis'.

I must start updating with some of the material generous folk have contributed lately.  First up cartoonist Leo Rios found a couple of original Searles in the local Museo della Caricatura in Tolentino, Italy.

'The Clergyman' (unsigned) above is from 'The Rake's Progress' (page 88)

'The Academician' is from Mr Rothman's New Guide to London (Rothmans Of Pall Mall London 1965)



From Chris Madden's blog 'a rarely seen early Searle on these pages. It was drawn when he was 18 years old.

 The picture dates back to Searle’s early years in Cambridge.  He wasn’t a student there – he just happened to live in the town (His father was a porter at Cambridge railway station at the time of his birth). He managed to get a job as a cartoonist on the local Cambridge paper and also indulged his interest in art by drawing portraits (not quite caricatures at this early stage) for the Cambridge University magazine The Granta.

 This portrait from the magazine’s edition of 2nd November 1938 is of Helen Gillett, who just happens to be my partner’s mother (which is why we’ve got an old copy of the publication in a drawer). She had her portrait done because she’d just become the captain of the women’s hockey team.'

Here's another early one that popped up on eBay recently-
I'm not sure what it's promoting but it looks South American . . .

Hot off the press

I've just received the latest Searle publications from the Parrot Press.  More Scraps is another collection of sketchbook drawings similar to the Predatory Bite of the Steel Nib.
The book comes in a slipcase folder with a second volume of drawings Searle made at the 1977 Watteau exhibition in Paris.
More info on the books here.

Upcoming Searle events at the Cartoon Museum

Booksellers Heywood Hill in London have a Searle window display.

(Thanks to Ed Roberts & Heywood Hill)

 

 

 (Brian Sibley found this in Private Eye)

 

Getting The Joke: Ronald Searle

Cartoonists from Gerald Scarfe to Steve Bell genuflect to the work of Ronald Searle. His illustrations have appeared in publications around the world, from Life to Le Monde. Yet in his native country, apart from by his fellow artists, he remains curiously undervalued. To mark his 90th birthday, a new exhibition (Ronald Searle: Graphic Master) at the Cartoon Museum sets the record straight.

Jack Watkins profiles ‘our greatest living cartoonist’.

In Russell Davies’s biography of Ronald Searle, he makes some barbed references to British journalists who seem to think that his subject’s work begins and ends with the St Trinian’s drawings and the film credits he drew for the cinema. The frustration is understandable. However, it’s unlikely that Davies will read this feature, and Searle himself now lives in Provence, so, with one last nervous scan of the horizon just to make sure, I think it’s safe to write that, for the great unwashed among us, it is through the TV re-runs of these films – and the equally delightful Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, and Monte Carlo or Bust – that Searle is chiefly familiar.
The fact is that the great man has resided in France for nearly fifty years, and while he is still highly regarded here by the artistic community – and received official recognition in the shape of a CBE in 2004 – his profile in Britain remains low, and the wider artistic merit of his work has, until now, been somewhat overlooked.
Searle turns 90 this month and his prolific career, which has already lasted some 75 years, is ongoing. Anita O’Brien, the curator of the Cartoon Museum’s retrospective exhibition, recently visited him in Provence, and saw in his meticulously organised studio a reflection of his approach to his work. His appetite for life, his remarkable curiosity, and the intelligence and wit that informs his drawings are all seemingly undimmed.
It’s not enough, of course, to say that all great artists have an immediately recognisable stamp; even mediocrity can wear a badge of identity. But a Searle picture is certainly unmistakeable. The human figures are bird-like – stork legs, beaky noses, and pop-eyes that are often shifty or bewildered – their distortions and wispy lines suiting the mood of feverish anarchy. They are drawings whose skill is perhaps concealed in a feeling of rapidity, an impression that they were quickly set down.
When Searle was eighteen he received a one-year scholarship to the Cambridge School of Art, enabling him to become a full-time art student. He later recalled: “It was drummed into us that we should not move, eat, drink or sleep without a sketchbook in the hand. Consequently the habit of looking and drawing became as natural as breathing.” Perhaps this fast sketching on the move so imprinted itself that it became his signature.
Searle had, in fact, been honing his distinctive style long before that. His background was modest. His father was a porter at Cambridge railway station and his mother took in lodgers to help pay the household bills. Young Ronald had a curious mind, however, devouring books on natural history and archaeology, and haunting the Cambridge museums. Here he encountered caricature art for the first time, in the work of the author and cartoonist Sir Max Beerbohm.
His interest grew in the great cartoonists and satire masters of the past, such as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank. The Cartoon Museum exhibition includes some examples of their output, as well as Searle’s medals dedicated to the ‘Fathers of Caricature’, designed for the French Mint in the 1970s and 1980s.
Leaving school at fifteen, he took a succession of low paid jobs in order to scrape together money for art classes, succeeded in having a series of weekly cartoons published in the local Cambridge Daily News, and nursed ambitions of a career in Fleet Street. He had an aunt who lived in Bromley, from where he would walk to the then centre of the newspaper industry to try to engender editor interest. “If I took the bus then I couldn’t eat,” he explained. Finally someone listened, and his first illustration in a national newspaper was featured in the Daily Express in 1939.
By now, though, the War had begun and Searle was to enlist with the Royal Engineers. He was stationed in Singapore, but that fell to the Japanese in 1942, and he spent the rest of the war as a prisoner, including time in the brutal Changi Prison and working as enforced labour on the Burma Railway. Among a long list of maladies, Searle suffered beri-beri, malaria, dysentery, boils, ulcers and insect bites – yet, heroically working by fire-light, made drawings of the grim realities of camp life. Some of these fragile ‘secret’ sketches, which he’d concealed from his gaolers by hiding them under the beds of friends dying of cholera, are present in the exhibition. The experience had transformed Searle’s artistic motivations, and suddenly he felt the need to draw “to justify the death of your friends.”
His first collection of St Trinian’s drawings came out in 1948. Enchanting as they and subsequent ones of the delinquent girls are, he also cast his net wider. His caricatures accompanied theatre reviews in Punch, and drawings on current affairs appeared simultaneously in the politically opposed Tribune and the Sunday Express. Searle covered the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for Life magazine in 1961, around which time he moved to Paris. His watercolours from his travels to places such as Morocco, and his story illustrations for books, show a marvelous sense of detail and atmosphere, and in France – where, up until 2008 he was still drawing a weekly political cartoon for Le Monde – Searle is accorded as a true artist.
It’s a measure of the feeling for him that many illustrators have penned words of appreciation for the 160 page catalogue that accompanies this exhibition. Gerald Scarfe writes of wanting to draw like him. “His pen was always searching, exploring very nook and cranny of his subject. His exciting, electric style fascinated me.” Posy Simmonds argues that he belongs with the masters such as Rowlandson and George Grosz. Perhaps Steve Bell, current upholder of the satirical line in The Guardian, puts it best: “To say he is an artist is no more than the truth, but he is more than that: he is our greatest living cartoonist with a lifelong dedication to his craft… His work is truly international, yet absolutely grounded in the English comic tradition.”

Optima magazine 5th March 2010

Ronald Searle: Graphic Master, Cartoon Museum, London

Reviewed by Tom Lubbock  The Independant  Thursday, 25 March 2010

Scratch, scribble, scrawny, scruffy, scrape, scrawl – Searle's lines often begin with scr-, conveying an abrasive feeling. He is also a comedian, and can fill up a body like a bag of sugar, a helpless sagging blob that swells and slops and spreads. This mixture became his signature mode, the savage and the genial together, and it hasn't failed him in almost seven decades. His retrospective at the Cartoon Museum, "Ronald Searle: Graphic Master", marks his 90th birthday.

His beginnings were first as a juvenile cartoonist, then an art student, then a Japanese POW. He took pen and paper to the verge of death. His image of an emaciated man – Prisoner dying of Cholera, Thailand 1943 – is one of the greatest drawings of the 20th century. And it might have promised a career in serious art. But Searle refused to stick to "seriousness". His most famous works of the 1950s are his illustrations of St Trinian's and St Custard's, where pain is sublimated into a schoolchild's wicked naughtiness. How could the same hand do both?

Another artist might have decided limitation was compulsory; Searle pursued ever more, and ever more confident, variety. The range is amazing: invention, observation, lightness, darkness. Look at the grim and sober reportage of Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, early 1960s. And then, pretty well simultaneously, there's a Punch cover; a picture of beautifully, innocently absurd birds, with stick-on fluff-ball popping eyes, and a man with a "lobster-claw" head, a long pointed nose one pincer, a long pointed chin the other.

People sometimes ask: can he or she draw? The implication is that there's a single secret. But Searle's performance shows how multiple the matter is. There are so many different ways of being accurate – and then, even more strangely, these different registers can interbreed. The Cartoon Museum is a small space. Its highlights are well chosen, and examples from the history of caricature are added, to show his ancestors. But ideally Searle's work would have a more complete survey, and with wider comparisons. Then we might wonder if there's any clear distinction between cartoon and art.

Meanwhile, we can talk about his diverse originalities. There are his wildly grotesque transformations of the human head and body, which have influenced Scarfe and Steadman. Or there are his smart conceptions, often in the form of art-about-art jokes. A Bigger Slash: Hommage à David Hockey has a row of scrawny naked gents, peeing up arcs of multi-coloured piss into a West Coast pool – an exact bit of visual-verbal wit. Or there's a genre that is almost unique to Searle's practice, caricatural documentary: the draughtsman-witness-journalist visits Las Vegas or East Berlin, takes scenes with his pen, acid but humorous. The sour face of the border guard can't quite conceal the smirk of Nigel Molesworth.

Searle can do so many things, and blend them. But if there is one thing that he does essentially, and all through, it is to animate. He fills his subjects with a life. He finds it and then exaggerates it. Keats, in a letter, writes: "I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a stoat or a field-mouse peeping out of the withered grass – the creature hath a purpose and its eyes are bright with it – I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along – to what? The creature hath a purpose and his eyes are bright with it."

This is Searle's vision – a counterweight, perhaps, to the early death he saw closely and narrowly escaped. He brings out the vitality, and not only in creatures, whether human or animal, but in furniture, cars, architecture. Whether it's a jalopy, a shark-finned gas-guzzler, a rickety shantytown or a cathedral, he finds the action in the shape. His world is gesture. His eyes are still bright with it.

Ronald Searle – a great affirmation of the human spirit

Ronald Searle encompassed both the tragic and the blissfully comic in his drawings, says Charles Spencer.

By Charles Spencer  The Daily Telegraph  22 Mar 2010

Marvellous: one of Ronald Searle's Molesworth illustrations

As a boy I was a huge fan of the Molesworth books, among them Down with Skool! and How to be Topp, written by Geoffrey Willans and illustrated, with grotesque relish, by Ronald Searle.
I loved them not only because they were funny and subversive, but because I was briefly sent to a hellish prep school myself, where the Dickensian headmaster, Mr Hancock, liked nothing better than putting small boys over his knee and giving them a ferocious spanking with an old gym shoe.

I assumed Searle was long dead, but, as any fule kno, he is alive and well and earlier this month celebrated his 90th birthday. He lives with his wife Monica in Haute-Provence, drinks champagne, or “engine oil” as he calls it, copiously, and is still working.
The Cartoon Museum in Little Russell Street, London WC1, is celebrating the great man, who is long overdue a knighthood, with a superb retrospective of his work over 75 years, beginning with his first cartoons as a teenager.
St Custard’s and St Trinian’s are both present and correct (“Hand up the girl who burnt down the East Wing last night”), but there are also many superb examples of his reportage. Chief among these are his visual record of his time as a Japanese prisoner of war after the fall of Singapore in 1942, including a period on the infamous Thai-Burma railway. His sketches, drawn secretly and hidden under the mattresses of dying men to prevent their discovery by Japanese guards, convey terrible suffering and cruelty with eloquence and economy. The study of a prisoner dying of cholera, in particular, strikes me as a masterpiece, seeming to catch the very moment when the last flicker of life departs the body.
The fact that after experiencing such horrors, Searle could produce work of such frivolity and fun is startling. Look out in particular for the picture of St Trinian’s girls dragging a lawn-roller in preparation for sports day that is clearly modelled on an earlier study of POWs hauling logs.
This is an exemplary exhibition, not only in the quality of the drawing, and the constant pleasures of Searle’s baroque imagination, but in its moving demonstration that the human spirit can survive the worst traumas mankind can inflict upon it.