Animation

On YouTube I found a couple of the animated spots Searle made in collaboration with UK animator Ivor Wood. They met in the 60s while both working at La Comète studio in Paris which led to a fruitful partnership over the years. Wood was known in the UK for stop-motion TV series such as Postman Pat but was also a classically trained draughtsman and was one of only a handful who could animate Searle's line. (In fact Ronald deemed Wood his favourite animator of his style)
A couple of years ago Ronald sent me a tape of all the spots they collaborated on.  I've added some screen shots and the relevant storyboards made by Searle.  Searle fans will recognise most of these ideas  re-work older print gags.

  
Ronald told me they pitched these as artistic spots between commercials- but of course not being commercial themselves the idea never found success with TV networks.

Here we see 'The Addict' animated-I'm not sure if the book was published first or whether the storyboards inspired the book?

I'd love to hear from anyone with more info on Searle and Wood's work at La Comete studio, Paris.

Deadline!

Ronald was fastidious about annotating and cataloguing his work.  Every original I've seen has been marked in pencil with subject or title, date and often the client. No other artist I've encountered has been so meticulous about recording their output-those charged with organizing his archive have most of the work done for them!

He kept a daily journal and was an inveterate correspondent, mostly by mail, then in later life with fax and email. During the 1950s to keep track of the insane, over-lapping deadlines for all the jobs he took on, he maintained carefully plotted charts.

The example below gives us an idea of just how many projects he had on the go at any one time- it never fails to surprise me how prolific Searle was!

'Nobody who visited the Bedford Gardens studio could fail to be impressed by Ronald's 'Deadlines' chart, a thing of terrible and complex beauty involving the interests of Punch, Tribune and the Sunday Express; Lilliput, where the Patrick Campbell series continued (there were Campbell books, too); a sequence of ephemeral magazines of the Left (Circus, Seven, Our Time), in which Paul Hogarth was involved; and any number of more or less specialist publications, from The Bookseller to W. H. Smith's trade circular.'      - Russell Davies

Searle's prolific output during the 50s was formidable but he couldn't take on every offer of work. The social circle he moved in at the time must have yielded countless commissions such as this one from actor Tristan Jellinek:

Dear Mr Jellinek

I'm sorry to be turning down your idea which would have been fun to do - but I'm so hopelessly tied-up with long term stuff that I daren't take another tempting job on!

But thank you for asking me.

Yours sincerely

Ronald Searle

(October 5, 1954)



Commissions like menu covers may seem trivial but were probably quick to do and paid relatively well. I've seen several Searle illustrated menus for private dinners and events.

Omar Khayyam Club menu cartoon drawn by Ronald Searle 1955 Poem by Jack Lambert

Front has a saucy Ronald Searle cartoon & poem signed within print with a poem. Rear page is a Poem by J. W. Lambert ( Jack Lambert who is listed as present).

The Omar Khayyám Club in London was established in 1892 by Frederic Hudson, Clement Shorter and George Whale.  Jack Walter Lambert (1917-86), literary and arts editor for the Sunday Times & author.

-Ebay

Digger's Story

David 'Digger' Barrett, Thai-Burma railway survivor, has passed away at the age of 90. His story is told in depth on Diggers Story and includes a section on Ronald Searle.  Digger possessed two drawings by Searle reflecting their experiences in the jungle.

Digger was an Australian like Searle's friend and life-saving jungle nurse Lofty Cannon 

See also 'Cache of wartime cartoons unearthed' 

Anatomies & Decapitations

After moving to Paris from London in 1961 Searle made a series of abstract expressionist works he titled 'Anatomies and Decapitations'. Of course it's impossible to speculate on the artist's state of mind but it was perhaps an effort to express the anguish over the situation he left behind -the decision to leave a faultered marriage with two children. The series could also have been a bid to achieve more respect from the art world as a 'serious' artist. It seems Searle wanted to be taken more seriously by the public and cultural arena after 15 years of  commercial success in England.  It's well known that Searle felt pigeon-holed at home and the 'Anatomies' could be seen as an attempt to re-invent himself.

UKJarry interprets the images thus: 'Largely unknown to the general public, Searle had been making extreme investigations into how far he could go in abstract representations of human beings. In 1962-63, he had worked on a series of ink and wash compositions he titled “Anatomies and Decapitations”. Exhibited in only a few galleries, they disturbed many of Searle’s firmest admirers and have never been published. They are the most abstract work Searle has ever done. 

They almost all either huge heads or a few distracted skeletal figures reminiscent of late period Picassos. Some are just splayed slashes of lines, others are circular or oval stains with blotches or sequences of scratches for features. A rejection of his apparently perfected professional style, they resemble nothing Searle had done before. Yet in each Searle is able to find a means of presenting a figure who looks beatific, moronic, anxious, prim, or explosive. It is tempting to detect the influence of Andre Francois in these works (as Francois’s work in“Punch” was a similarly intense influence on emerging graphic artists like Ralph Steadman, Gerald Scarfe, and Quentin Blake). 

In 1960, Searle’s Perpetua Press had published a collection of Francois’s work, “The Biting Eye”. Francois drawing style was scratchy, messy, blotchy. His deliberately rudimentary and scribbly figures were not the standard blocky cartoony figures. Despite being highly non-representative, Francois’s work captured something essential about humans and their behaviour. Likewise, “Anatomies and Decapitations” shows Searle discovering how he could convey complex emotions freed of the restraints of human particularity or the contexts of social customs. 

The first real product of these investigations intended for a popular audience was Searle’s Cats (1967). Searle had previously worked with animals, illustrating Geoffrey Willans’s The Dog’s Ear Book (1958), but those had been cartoonish animals, akin to the trotting figures of the Molesworth books, shaggy human actors in human situations with human responses. Searle’s cats would be much more abstract in composition. As Searle’s humans become less figuratively real, so he uses his cats to represent human states without relying on reductive realism. . . 

Devoid of any background, through the shape of the cats’ bodies and arrangement of the minimum of facial elements, Searle embodies mournful, complacent, persevering, avaricious, or aghast expressions to match his titles. Searle would later redraw many of the works in his first Cat book, but in the earliest edition, their origin in “Anatomies and Decapitations” is apparent. These were much messier creations in blobby inks, with rather splashy harsh gray washes like the blotchy faces of “Anatomies and Decapitations” spread out to occupy a theoretical cat-space with slashes for whiskers. . . 
The scenery of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen are typical of Searle but Searle’s figure of the Baron is an abstract bristling detonation of ink.For all that his facial features present a recognisable goggle-eyed, manic grinning buffoon, his body is an almost indecipherable sequence of blobs, dribbles, slashes and angles – yet evidently tightly conceived and executed since the figure is always consistently recognisable in each illustration.'

Searle confirmed to me that the style of 'Munchausen' was directly informed by the experimental 'Anatomies'

'In 1963, in New York's Bianchini Gallery, he launched a series of 73 ink, wash and watercolour 'Anatomies and Decapitations', anguished anatomical deconstructions never seen in Britain and still languishing in store.'    The Guardian 

'In 1962 he began work on his new satirical drawings, which were exhibited for the first time in the fall of 1963 in the Bianchini Gallery, New York. These ink-and-wash compositions, which are 291/8 X 20 1/2 inches in size and bear no titles, are the harvest of a long contemplative process: the mature commentary of an extremely sensitive observer upon human frailty in this day and age.'

Graphis magazine 109

Some of Searle's American audience viewed the series as a parade of Rorshach ink-blot tests, more suitable for psychological than artistic analysis, and it is true that difficulties with women are suggested by the occasional violence of the treatment.'    -Russell Davies

'
'Anatomies and Decapitations, premiered at the Bianchini Gallery, NYC, in October 1963, were never exhibited in England or collected in book form.  Over the previous couple of years, he had produced seventy-three of these large, disturbing explorations in ink, wash and watercolour, in which he was aiming to 'unmask' the human personality in a new way.'   -Russell Davies

'Some of his friends found the technique he adopted shocking, and stlll shake their heads over it. It is as if they feared the loss of control implicit in the runny textures, the sheet anatomical marshiness and capilloried bloat of these figures, which though evidently human - and even in odd cases mistakenly proud of it - look most alive when revelling in a sub-human grotesqueness. They are both dissolute and dissolving. Such frankly stated horrors of the body - the watery female body predominated in the collection - defeated many observers at the time. Graphis properly hailed the 'Anatomies' as 'un aspect nouveau de son art', but the accompanying essay by Ben Shahn, though eloquent, came in the nature of an endorsement of all Searle's gifts, rather than an excited reaction to this new form of comment. Perhaps even Searle himself was perplexed by what he had done.'   

-Russell Davies

'I know I am only on the fringe,' he wrote, when the exhibition was later transferred to Bremen, 'but for me it is the most exciting personal development in all the years I have spent exploring the medium of graphic art . . .It is the curse of the satirist that satire is basically a parasitical art-only thriving where there is weakness. The frailty of human character is the mushroom bed.' It seems a pity that these first fruits of his liberation from 'popular' fame did not meet a better fate'  

-Russell Davies

'The accompanying reproductions are a token of the large pen and wash drawings that have been done in the past year. I saw them in Paris last October and was completely set alight by them. The artist regards them as a culminating point of the years of exploring in graphic work from which they developed 'quite naturally and normally' (sic)! He says: 'I had been seeking a way of "anatomizing" the character and behaviour of people in our own curious and suspended times; after a period of fumbling I feel I am beginning to state a little of what those feelings are. 
'They are meant to be satirical and, in the best sense, rather uncompromising. As satire is basically a parasitical art- only thriving where there is weakness-the frailty of human character is my mushroom bed, or occasionally my mistletoe bough.' The artist's prose abounds in such visual imagery.

'In some cases, the drawings could be described not so much as "anatomies" as "decapitations". Size has a good deal to do with the strength of these drawings. Their slightly monumental scale enables them to speak a little louder than some of my other work. But whatever they say - I still like people!'

G.S. Whittet 'The Studio' magazine

A much softer, colour feminine anatomy appeared in 'Carnet de Croquis' published in 1992

Wine Speak

It's no secret that Ronald loved wine! In the Channel 4 news footage of him around his 90th birthday he delighted in admitting 'bubbles give me ideas" and I can attest from lunching with him that copious glasses, bottles even, were consumed.  A different bottle accompanied each course- a light rosé, champagne, a chilled red- it was a pleasure to see a connoisseur indulging his guests and a task to keep up!
On my last visit chez Searle I was amused to see his shopping list consisted of only one item. . .

Here's an interview from 2007 where Ronald indulges in some winespeak.  It's a revealing read; we see even in his eighties Ronald's joie de vivre was matched only by his prodigious work ethic and his distaste for wine snobbery and the Riviera set is hinted at too.

One of the world’s most brilliant cartoonists is also an impassioned wine lover. Jeff Cox meets a man who loves wine and hates pretensions.

'You may not recognise his name, but you’ll instantly recognise Ronald Searle’s wickedly energetic style. Scratch this cartoonist and you’ll also reveal one of the world’s most impassioned wine lovers.


Searle minces neither words nor images, but his barbs are so witty they cause as much delight to his audience as discomfort to his subjects. In the prologue to his 1983 book, The Illustrated Winespeak, he calls the majority of wine writers ‘that grotesque international band of snobbish inarticulate sponges, incapable of thinking beyond their incestuous little circles, [and who] do as much harm to the world of wine as they do to the language’. This fills me with confidence for our encounter.

If Searle comes equipped with sharp words and pens that bite hard, he’s earned the right to use them. He was born into a working class family in Cambridge in 1920, was drawing fairly well at five, and earning his living with his drawings at 15. Income from his drawings put him through art school. World War II intervened, and in October 1941, he shipped out for Singapore. One month later, Singapore fell to the Japanese and for almost the next four years, he managed to stay alive in a Japanese prison camp despite unimaginable horrors, beatings, malaria, beri beri, and a guard’s pickaxe in the back. (His memoir of the time, To the Kwai and Back, has just been reissued by Souvenir Press.) During those horrible years, he never stopped drawing.


‘When I returned to England in 1945, my first ambition was to indulge,’ he says. ‘Since then, I think I’ve eaten in virtually every restaurant of interest, standing, quality and value in London, Paris, Berlin and New York. After scanning some 60 years of wine lists at a certain level, it’s inevitable that some understanding of perfection in wine would brush off. I’ve drunk my way through some remarkable bottles and am still standing.’

Like all great artists, his work (pictured right) embodies the seemingly disparate qualities of careful control coupled with total freedom, never more evident than in his books on wine, Winespeak and Something in the Cellar... His quivering tipplers, buxom ladies and caricatures of wine drinkers are immersed not only in wine, but in explosions of mayhem, joy, and desperation. He pokes fun at everyone in the world of wine – straight to the nose of the pretentious. He achieves this with only one eye – his left. ‘And I am notoriously left-handed,’ he says. ‘With that hand I manipulate my steel-nibbed pens, my brushes and my sculpting tools.’


After many years living on the Left Bank in Paris, he and his wife Monica ‘settled in Provence some 30 or more years ago in a tiny village 2,000 feet up in the mountains – as far away as possible from the Cote d’Azur and its repellant so-called people.

‘Our village is almost entirely medieval, and our house has a vaulted cellar from the 11th or 12th century where the temperature remains constant throughout the year. The 400–500 bottles ranged in it contain little exotica. Deliberately. We can no longer face entertaining at home and stick to local restaurants. So the wines we have are for daily drinking. Of course there are a few great-year Yquems, some Krug, and Roederer Cristal. But most are for short-term enjoyment.


‘Here in the south we tend to drink cool. We have a lovely Rhône rosé that goes with anything: Domaine Remejeanne from Cadignac/Sabran.’ Other favourites he cites are Henri Bourgeois’ Sancerre rouge and blanc , plus his ‘remarkable’ Pouilly-Fumé.’

For someone aged 86, Searle’s workdays are long, a testimony to his love of drawing – or perhaps his inability not to draw. ‘I drink quite a lot of Champagne. My daily dose is an extremely delicate, delicious, quite cold Billecart-Salmon brut rosé around noon. Otherwise – as I am working more or less from 9am to 6.30pm – I don’t drink until dinner.’

His irreverent attitude towards wine and the people who love it is so refreshing that his friend of 20 years, John Goelet of Clos Du Val in the Napa Valley and Taltarni in Australia, uses Searle’s drawings in winery promotions and even on labels of special bottlings. ‘Sure,’ Searle says, ‘there are those who think wine is God-like and shouldn’t be sent up. But wine is all things to all men, and the basis is that of love of the grape.’


Asked to elaborate, he continues, ‘Every wine drinker has his own exclusive – and to him or her unique – insight into perfection in the bottle. It’s all very egotistic in that wine drinkers/snobs/connoisseurs are totally convinced that their special bottle is the One and Only, into which they have the insight.’




As a child in a modest family in East Anglia, wine was not in Searle’s world. But long ensconced in Provence, it is part of the rhythm of life. ‘In our small village, wine is drunk as an essential part of the meal, without pretension. At noon the village is silent. Everyone is at table: the masons, the gardeners, the workers in the fields, the labourers, the children, the postman, the drain cleaner. The chat, if any, is about food or crooked politicians. A table wine from the local minuscule ‘Superette’, a wild boar stew, bread, cheese – that’s it. Wine here – and probably all over the French countryside – is a part of life. And after all, isn’t that the root and the basics of the grape and the natural enjoyment of it?’


Tasting Notes


What did you drink last night? 
With the remains of a cold chicken and a tomato salad, half a bottle of Beaujolais (Juliénas 2002 from Domaine Gérard et Nathalie Margerand), sent by a friend.


What’s the most you’ve ever spent on a bottle? 
This family does not go in for exotica. The most it has ever spent was on two bottles of Yquem 1967 which, I am often told, was a year of years. It was also the year we were married. I can’t tell you how much was paid because it was a present from Monica.


What’s your Desert Island wine?
The above, naturally'

From Decanter

Cru Café Capetown, South Africa has a Searle 'WineSpeak' mural.  According to Grape 'the Castelein brothers went so far as to fly to France and pay handsomely to obtain the rights to display Ronald Searle's wonderfully abandoned and imbibing characters in their new Cru Café wine bar and restaurant.'

WOSA elaborates on the story: 'the artist is notoriously reclusive - and "dangerous with his pen" according to fellow artists and corporations foolish enough to commission work. He's fiercely private, "his bite and bark are equally ferocious", he doesn't use email or a cell but does have a post box in London - which is how the owners of Cru Café tracked him down to a village in Haute Provence.

Two South African restaurateurs, brothers Jacques and Tom Castelein (former owners of Tasca de Belem at the V&A Waterfront), were determined to exhibit Searle's caricatures - so Tom flew over to France to talk to him. Living up to his quirky reputation, Searle idiosyncratically granted reproduction rights in exchange for a rare vintage of Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1961 (with artwork by Georges Mathieu) - an appropriate deal for Cru Café, a wine bar named after a vineyard of superior quality. Tom flew back to London, sourced the wine, then, several thousand pounds the poorer, returned to France to present the highly-prized bottle to Searle. '

The Alexander Technique

Frederick Matthias Alexander (20 January 1869 – 10 October 1955) was an Australian actor who developed the educational process that is today called the Alexander Technique – a form of education that is applied to recognize and overcome reactive, habitual limitations in movement and thinking.
(Wikipedia)

Searle inscribed his portrait of Alexander "from the reconstituted artist, with thanks"-presumably alluding to the health problems incurred as a prisoner of the Japanese during WWII.  Ronald was asthmatic, smoked for years and had throat surgery late in life so perhaps Alexander's theories on respiration helped him?


'He teaches the way back to Health'


Half a century ago a hansom cab arrived in great haste at a house in Ashley Place, Victoria.  The driver had instructions from Sir Henry Irving to "fetch Mr. Alexander to the theatre immediately" as he was in need of help.
More than 25 years later George Bernard Shaw crept up the same steps suffering from angina.  (After three weeks he was again taking his jaunty way to the club for his morning swim!)
Some years before the war a newspaper report of an all-night sitting in the House of Lords ended by stating that at "4am the only person sitting up straight was the Earl of Lytton."  The next morning Lord Lytton sent the cutting to "F.M. with thanks."
There are enough of these stories, studded with illustrious names, to fill a book, but it wouldn't give frederick Matthias Alexander very much pleasure.
For he dislikes any suggestions that he is a healer, or a miracle man.  The statement that he 'cures' makes him angry and he accepts no patients, only 'pupils'.  He is, he says, an educator.
For sixty years he has been trying to pass on to mankind the lessons he has learnt on hos own body-discoveries which caused the American philosopher Professor JohnDewey to write, "It is a revolution in thought and action".

Ronald Searle & Kaye Webb quoted in The Alexander Technique As I See It By Patrick MacDonald-probably originally part of their 'People Worth Meeting' column for the Saturday News Chronicle (but not included in Looking At London)

Francesca Greenoak wrote this profile of Searle for the Alexander Journal in 2010.

This article was first published in the Alexander Journal 23, republished here with the kind permission of the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique (STAT).