The peerless Ronald Searle has died in his sleep in France at the age of 91. Best known for a manically gothic style that invigorated his illustrations of the frantically anarchic schoolgirls of St. Trinian’s, the grinning, lustful oenophiles in The Illustrated Winespeak, the Molesworth series, The Rake’s Progress, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen, and his prolific magazine work, Searle’s subjects always seemed to be on the verge of exploding off the page. It was, in a phrase, a lively and comic style, which seems somewhat ironic, given that during World War II, Searle spent three years suffering as a prisoner of the Japanese Imperial Army. Captured during the fall of Singapore in 1942, Searle was among 3270 men selected to work on the Burma-Siam railway, the experience which provided the real-life basis for TheBridge on the River Kwai. “My friends and I, we all signed up together,” he told an interviewer. “We had grown up together, we went to school together … Basically all the people we loved and knew and grew up with simply became fertiliser for the nearest bamboo.” Underfed and undernourished, suffering from tropical diseases and other infections, and subjected to harsh labor and sadistic brutality, Searle not only survived, but he bore witness to the horrific experience with a group
of sketches of his comrades and captors. The miracle is that both the artist and his works survived; the double miracle is that the artist managed to return with a joie de vivre and a comic zest that constituted a triumph of his spirit. I would like to have known him.

Yesterday I finally took myself out of the running to become the last person in the greater metropolitan area to visit the High Line, the terrific elevated urban park built on the elevated rail bed that runs through Chelsea on Manhattan’s far west side. I will now add my puny voice to the great chorus singing the park’s praise–it’s terrific! Fun, stimulating, perspetive-shaking–I can’t wait to go back.

I had the great good fortune to be visiting the office of my accountant near Madison Square yesterday, which gave me the opportunity to see this wondrous sculpture sitting in the middle of the lawn. It is called Echo, and it is by the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa. Forty feet tall, and sprinkled in marble dust, the giant head seems to float like an apparition against the surrounding trees and limestone buildings. My poor photo doesn’t do it justice–it’s beautiful, mystical, like a dream.

It’s rare to get a phone call from a fan; it’s totally unprecedented when the caller is Mort Kunstler, one of the premier artists of Civil War themes, and one of the premier illustrators of his era. Kunstler has been reading the Disunion series in the Times, and much to my delight, offered me a guided tour of his Civil War paintings now on exhibit at the Nassau Country Museum of Art. What a treat! To hear Mort talk about his method of selecting subjects, his approach, and his technique and attention to detail was illuminating, to say the least, and to hear him talk about the earlier stages of his career, when he was illustrating magazines and movie posters, was just a delight. Here’s something I did not realize: although Mort has been painting Civil War scenes for twenty years, relatively little of his work depicts battle scenes; a surprising large portion shows moments of emotion, and a lot of paintings are quite romantic. A majority of his work shows southern themes, but that is not a reflection of his personal sympathies as much as commerce: there are more buyers down south. Mort’s approach, meanwhile, is quite simple: “I just like to paint pictures,” he told me. “I don’t care of what.” The exhibit continues through January 9th.

On a visit to National Geographic‘s website, I found this incredible photograph of volcanic lightning taken by Italian photographer and scientist Marco Fulle as flew over Iceland’s erupting Eyjafjallajökull volcano last April. Who could imagine such terrible beauty?

I came upon a portfolio of collages by Fred Tomaselli in the December issue of Harper’s yesterday, and man, they blew me away! He has a whole series of these headline-based paintings, and I think they are just fab. He is my new favorite artist.

The Two Great Classes, by Winslow Homer for Harper’s Weekly, Thanksgiving 1860

My latest assignment has me working for Mr. Joe Plumeri, the chairman and CEO of the Willis Company. Have you ever heard of Willis? Neither had I, until this relationship began. Turns out Willis is a venerable British insurance company, now approximately 175 years old. Mr. Plumeri is an astute and charismatic businessman from the wilds of Trenton, New Jersey. He brought me over to London for three days to absorb what I could by attending a group of town hall meetings Joe would be conducting with Willis’ employees.

Day One passed like a whirlwind. Arriving around noon at the splendid Willis Building, located on Lime Street opposite the really ugly Lloyd’s of London building and near the wonderful Gherkin, I got a quick tour of the premises, including a visit to the rooftop and the splendid view it affords.  After that, I did my best to stay out of the way of the folks in the Communications Department, who had their hands full without babysitting a guest. Later, however, I got to sit in with two sessions with Joe, during which he explained that the company’s earnings were especially impressive given the hardships the difficult economic climate imposed. In the evening,  I had a great time. Josh King and Nick Balamaci and I went to dinner at La Pont de la Tour, a terrific restaurant located on Bankside just east of the Tower Bridge. They are a couple of smart and witty fellows, and we had a great time after dinner, crossing Tower Bridge and examining the husk of the venerable, amazing, now abandoned Willis Building on Trinity Square, before retiring to our rooms at Willis House.

The next day I attended two more town hall sessions. I suppose the experience must be something like Dead Heads used to be able to go through, when they could compare concerts, and savor how Jerry Garcia would play a solo during Sugar Magnolia at one show but save it for Truckin’ at another. Relieved of duty at around 3:30, I headed back to Bankside and the Tate Modern, which was having an exhibition called Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. There were at lot of incredible photos on display, including images by Walker Evans, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank and Weegie. But the exhibit was intellectually flabby. The cohering idea, as articulated by the curator, Sandra S. Phillips, in a filmed introduction, was that these were images taken by “the invasive eye,” but that seems to be a notion at once flabby and liquid. In what way is Abraham Zapruder‘s film of John F. Kennedy assassination invasive? How is a picture of a person riding a public subway invasive? Voyeurism seems obviously invasive, but when a nude person poses for the camera, as many, many subjects in this exhibition did, does their exhibitionism not change the level of voyeurism? A lot of questions seem to revolve around an idea of rights that the exhibition did not explore; for example, does not the notion of `invasive’ change when a person falls into the territory of news. A lot of the time I was thinking that it wasn’t the camera or the taking of the photograph that was invasive, but the construct of art, the freezing of the moment to invite interpretation, that was the invasive act. Plus the surveillance portion of the show was a drag and provoked no ideas of interest. Still, it was cool to see the pix. After that, I tramped back to Willis House, stopping off for a bite under an old covered mall called Leadenhall Market, dating from the mid-19th century, where a bar band was playing sixties songs and patrons were dancing in the street.  Hearing These Boots Were Made for Walking and especially Don’t You Just Know It put me in a particularly cheerful mood.

On Saturday I got up early and did the public tour of The Palace of Westminister, also known as Parliament. It was fabulous; if there was a downside, it was the crisp 75 minute tour did not permit lingering, and man, if anything deserved lingering, it was the incredible art that hangs in the joint. Most breathtaking were the two giant (45′ x 12′) frescoes in the Royal Gallery by Daniel Maclise, The Death of Nelson and The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher. The heroic paintings are just brilliant, but tragically, humidity from the Thames caused the colors to deteriorate, and now the pictures are almost monochrome. It was a great treat to stand on the backbench of the government’s side in Parliament. After that, I hiked down down Millbank for a about a mile to the Tate Britain, to see a merry exhibit called Rude Brittania, which showcased Britian’s splendid satirical and comic artists. I was delighted to see work by William Hogarth, the great Regency satirists Thomas Rowlandson and my main man James Gillray, the Victorian George Cruikshank, Ralph Steadman and the great Gerald Scarfe. I got a particular kick seeing the hilarious puppet of Margaret Thatcher that was used on Splitting Images. The exhibit was great fun, and after that I wandered around the rest of the museum for a while and absorbed a nice fat blast of culture. Then it was back to the airport and into the clutches of American Airlines, for a long, cramped, punishing eight hour flight home, whose tortures were relived only by a very pleasant chat with my seat mate, a young schoolteacher from Rockland, Illinois, named Sara, who was returning home from a month in Spain–a month that included the once-in-a-lifetime night she spent in Saville watching Las Rojas capture La Copa Mondial, and joining he celebration that followed. What a night that must have been!

Jane Fonda, 28 years old, in a photograph taken by Dennis Hopper, at Malibu in 1965. Thanks to Vanityfair.com.

David Levine, the peerless caricaturist, died yesterday at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Here’s Bruce Weber, writing in the Times:

David Levine, whose macro-headed, somberly expressive, astringently probing and hardly ever flattering caricatures of intellectuals and athletes, politicians and potentates were the visual trademark of The New York Review of Books for nearly half a century, died Tuesday in Manhattan. . . . Mr. Levine’s drawings never seemed whimsical, like those of Al Hirschfeld. They didn’t celebrate neurotic self-consciousness, like Jules Feiffer’s. He wasn’t attracted to the macabre, the way Edward Gorey was. His work didn’t possess the arch social consciousness of Edward Sorel’s. Nor was he interested, as Roz Chast is, in the humorous absurdity of quotidian modern life. But in both style and mood, Mr. Levine was as distinct an artist and commentator as any of his well-known contemporaries. His work was not only witty but serious, not only biting but deeply informed, and artful in a painterly sense as well as a literate one; he was, in fact, beyond his pen and ink drawings, an accomplished painter. Those qualities led many to suggest that he was the heir of the 19th-century masters of the illustration, Honoré Daumier and Thomas Nast.

Especially in his political work, his portraits betrayed the mind of an artist concerned, worriedly concerned, about the world in which he lived. Among his most famous images were those of President Lyndon B. Johnson pulling up his shirt to reveal that the scar from his gallbladder operation was in the precise shape of the boundaries of Vietnam, and of Henry Kissinger having sex on the couch with a female body whose head was in the shape of a globe, depicting, Mr. Levine explained later, what Mr. Kissinger had done to the world. He drew Richard M. Nixon, his favorite subject, 66 times. . . .With those images and others — Yasir Arafat and Ariel Sharon in a David-and-Goliath parable; or Alan Greenspan, with scales of justice, balancing people and dollar bills, hanging from his downturned lips; or Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. carrying a gavel the size of a sledgehammer — Mr. Levine’s drawings sent out angry distress signals that the world was too much a puppet in the hands of too few puppeteers. “I would say that political satire saved the nation from going to hell,” he said in an interview in 2008. . . . Even when he wasn’t out to make a political point, however, his portraits — often densely inked, heavy in shadows cast by outsize noses on enormous, eccentrically shaped heads, and replete with exaggeratedly bad haircuts, 5 o’clock shadows, ill-conceived mustaches and other grooming foibles — tended to make the famous seem peculiar-looking in order to take them down a peg. “They were extraordinary drawings with extraordinary perception,” Jules Feiffer said in a recent interview about the work of Mr. Levine, who was his friend. He added: “In the second half of the 20th century he was the most important political caricaturist. When he began, there was very little political caricature, very little literary caricature. He revived the art.”