(Excerpt from One Hundred Cartoons by Cesare
About the Pu...)
Excerpt from One Hundred Cartoons by Cesare
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Oscar Edward Cesare was a Swedish-born American cartoonist, artist, and journalist.
Background
Oscar Edward Cesare was born on October 7, 1883 in Linköping, Sweden. He was the second son and fourth child of the former Carolina Pehrsdotter, whose shoemaker husband, Carl Johan Caesar, used the common spelling of his last name. An enterprising as well as an artistic youth, Oscar was curious about the world that lay beyond his Methodist home in rural Scandinavia.
Education
After studying art in Paris, he immigrated to the United States in about 1901, following his older brother, Claes, who attended Cornell University. Oscar pursued art studies in Buffalo and then went to Chicago to report and draw for several newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, to which he contributed cartoons.
Career
After moving to New York, Cesare--he pronounced his name "See-sare"-- served in succession on the staffs of the World, the Sun, and the Evening Post. He was influenced by Gustave Dore and Honore Daumier and, in the United States, by Boardman Robinson. During the Theodore Roosevelt era, when his work was appearing in the Outlook and other magazines, he was established as a cartoonist of unusual pictorial strength and penetrating political insight. When World War I broke out, he moved into the front rank of illustrators, with a steady flow of striking, powerful drawings that delineated the conflict's cost in lives and resources. A collection of these works, largely from the New York Sun and Harper's Weekly, was published in 1916 with the title, One Hundred Cartoons by Cesare. Among them were three of his best-known drawings: "Dropping the Pilot", which showed President Wilson dumping Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan from the "Ship of State" into the sea, an adaptation of Tenniel's depiction in Punch of the kaiser dismissing Bismarck in 1890; an angry Atlas wresting the planet Earth from his shoulders and casting it from him; and a woman war victim, holding a small child before the guns of a battlefield in an appeal to "Cease Firing. " An early war drawing showed an awakening "Spirit of Vesuvius" asking, "What Is That Rumbling I Hear on Earth?" Cesare was especially skilled at drawing ships and producing seascapes, as, for example, the sinking of the Lusitania, while his scenes of winter at the front conveyed feelings of bitter cold and privation. Cesare began to draw for the New York Evening Post, then under the direction of Oswald Garrison Villard, whose pacific policies brought much criticism from the war's prosecutors. American cartoonists generally became "government cheerleaders" after the United States entered the war in 1917, but Cesare stood out against the trend. He held truth to be a wartime casualty and hit hard at military censorship. A 1918 Evening Post cartoon, combining humor and realism, pictured Trotsky, as the Brest-Litovsk peace negotiator for Russia, quaking at the edge of a crumbling precipice to which he had been pushed by a helmeted soldier, representing German armed might. His talents as a caricaturist, often of "magnificent insolence, " were well displayed in Clinton Gilbert's The Mirrors of Washington (1921), for which Cesare provided comic drawings of Wilson, Harding, Hoover, Hughes, Lodge, Borah, Root, Penrose, Baruch, and other political notables. For the Times Sunday magazine section he developed a feature that set him apart among journalists--the illustrated interview, with artist and reporter one and the same. The most celebrated of these picture-word interviews was one with Lenin at the Kremlin, arranged after weeks of effort. The interview, on October 13, 1922, was reported as a news event on the first page of the Times, October 15. It was published, with a large portrait drawing of Lenin on the magazine cover, on December 24. Thus, at a time when Lenin was variously listed as sick or dead, Cesare presented him as friendly and smiling, with an "animated face" that "lights up vividly, " and fully "absorbed in his work. " Among other world figures whom Cesare interviewed and sketched were Mussolini, Lloyd George, Joseph Conrad, Louis Bleriot, Orville Wright, and Sinclair Lewis. He was fond of the theater and sketched stage personalities such as Sarah Bernhardt, Ethel Barrymore, Alla Nazimova, Richard Mansfield, E. H. Sothern, and Arnold Daly. "A Baker's Dozen" of Democratic presidential hopefuls, as caricatured by Cesare, was published in the Forum for July 1924. A representative Cesare article, which he wrote as well as illustrated with seven head portraits, in World's Work, January 1927, was "Firebrands of Fascismo: Some Visits to the Men Who Marched on Rome. " He was attracted to Chinese art and adapted its broad strokes and firm outlines when they suited his subject. "Success, " a drawing of unusual force, in Harper's Weekly, May 23, 1914, showed a gaunt, puzzled John D. Rockefeller surveying the smoldering site of the Ludlow, massacre. His portrayals of so diverse a gallery as Uncle Sam, Kaiser Wilhelm II, the British lion, and the hooded skeleton of death all had qualities of their own. By 1940 his work had been printed in a wide range of leading magazines: The Review of Reviews, Collier's, Puck, Life, Nation's Business, Fortune, The Etcher. When he painted in color, most often on travels abroad when he had more leisure, he possessed "a magic touch in a wider field. " For pleasure he turned to etchings. Cesare died after a long illness at his home in Stamford, Connecticut, in his sixty-fifth year. His body was cremated. Although Cesare held "strong opinions, " usually not orthodox, he had "a singular charm of manner" that, in the editorial appraisal of the New York Times, "commanded the affection no less than the admiration of his colleagues of all trades and every rank. "
"Aside from a splendid technique, Cesare is possessed of a poetic fervor, imagination, and a keen feeling for beauty. . Because of his power as much as his fine restraint, Cesare may be said to be an aristocrat among American cartoonists. "
Connections
Cesare married Margaret Worth Porter, daughter of O. Henry, but the marriage was not a happy one and it lasted less than a year. They were divorced in 1916.
In1927, Cesare married Ann (Valentine) Kelley of Richmond, Va. They had one son, Valentine.