Serious matters

‘Heath Robinson’s Helpful Solutions’ and ‘Metavisual Tachiste Abstract’

I went with high hopes to the Cartoon Museum. Actually, I think the appellation ‘museum’ rather grand for a couple of rooms off a back street in Bloomsbury, particularly when the real thing — the British Museum — is just round the corner. Still, I can applaud the vision which wants to make a museum for cartoons, even if the reality needs working on. You enter via a cartoon bookshop, i.e., a shop selling funny books, not a funny drawing of a bookshop, and at once humour breaks over you like a wave. Here’s a Donald McGill pen and ink and watercolour drawing from the 1940s of a youngish man having shellfish trouble. The caption ditty begins, ‘I can’t get my winkle out…’ Oh, we do like our double entendres at the saucy seaside. Various other artists crowd the walls, and there’s an historical survey of ‘Characters and Caricaturas’ from Hogarth to Scarfe.