Sept. 30, 2024
America, as a giant Uncle Sam, chews Japan, represented by a man with stereotyped East Asian features wearing a hat with the imperial seal of Japan, a chrysanthemum. The latter’s stature diminishes Japan’s power and illustrates him as a pest to be dealt with. Turkey had severed ties with Japan the same month this issue was published. The caricaturist sees the United States as an imposing and invincible giant and as an ally, eating its enemies during the war.

America, as a giant Uncle Sam, chews Japan, represented by a man with stereotyped East Asian features wearing a hat with the imperial seal of Japan, a chrysanthemum. The latter’s stature diminishes Japan’s power and illustrates him as a pest to be dealt with. Turkey had severed ties with Japan the same month this issue was published. The caricaturist sees the United States as an imposing and invincible giant and as an ally, eating its enemies during the war.

The following is the second in a series of inside looks at the current exhibition in Princeton University Library's Ellen and Leonard Milberg Gallery in Firestone Library - “Monsters and Machines: Caricature, Visual Satire, and the Twentieth-Century Bestiary.”

“Monsters & Machines: Caricature, Visual Satire, and the Twentieth-Century Bestiary” examines the global use of bestiary in visual satire during the period from the beginning of World War I through the end of the Cold War. The exhibition is curated by a team of PUL librarians: Thomas Keenan, Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Librarian; Lidia Santarelli, (formerly) Metadata Librarian, Modern Greek Specialty; Deborah Schlein, Near Eastern Studies Librarian; and Alain St. Pierre, Librarian for History, History of Science, and African Studies.

Human figures of gigantic scale are deployed often in 20th century visual satire to represent self-aggrandizing hubris and overreach – an immoral, perverse transgression of the proper limits of an individual human being. In some cases, these outsize monsters are also shown devouring or threatening to devour other human beings of normal dimensions. These images, many of which take aim at dictators or other tyrannical figures, resonate with and often derive from scriptural, folkloric, and mythological traditions, including, for instance, the giants of Greek mythology who challenged the gods and the Old Testament giant King Nimrod who challenged the divine order by building the Tower of Babel in an effort to reach the heavens. The horrors wrought under tyrannical autocrats around and after World War II make the giant a crucial figure of the imaginary of 20th-century visual satire.

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The exhibition is open and free to the public during Milberg Gallery hours of operation, September 12 through December 8, 2024.

Discover more through the accompanying digital exhibit.

Media Contact: Stephanie Oster, Library Publicity Manager