Bar in North Berlin at the corner of Mullerstrasse and Transvaalstrasse August 9, 1959
As an artist reporter, Searle travelled to all sorts of places, and
he could sketch anywhere — even from the rowdy pit at the ringside of a
wrestling match.
This drawing of men drinking at a bar in Berlin
is wonderful. I love the composition of it, how the scene is broken up
by the figure in the foreground, and the way he creates an atmosphere
yet is so economical with his line. I don’t suppose people posed for
him, but if so it doesn’t matter because he got them as they really
were. That is why he was such a sophisticated drawer, and why his hand
is so recognisable.
Of course, one has seen his drawings all over
the show, in all kinds of different contexts: books, Lemon Heart rum
advertisements, animated stuff. It’s all part of a huge Searle memory.
I’m so imbued with Ronald Searle. And I think if you really flushed out
everybody who made that claim — including me and John Lennon — it would
be a very long list.
Street Sweeper
Searle observed and drew at the same time, so this sketch of a street sweeper in Paddington would have been made as he stood there on the pavement watching this man at work. I don’t remember a device like that so it must be from the Forties or Fifties. It’s not just people that Searle takes pleasure in, but the items people wore and used. It’s a joy of things. I can tell how much Searle enjoys each piece of the street sweeper’s barrow – and the wheels! The objects become an extension of the personalities.
The Obsolete
Generation (From Holiday magazine December 1963)
It is the
poetry of life and a sense of the profundity of human experience that
is expressed through Searle’s line. This scene comes under the heading
of caricature, but actually it suggests something else: the sense of
time passing, of doom, of lives. Of course, they’re sitting on a
mortuary advertisement on the back of the bench, which reinforces all of
that. It is a sympathetic and passionate observation of life.
Searle was a very versatile artist: he could do satire, for example his series The Rake’s Progress (1955) after the paintings by 18th-century artist William Hogarth; he did some quite finished portraits of famous people; he was also the theatre critic for Punch for 13 years. But to me, what’s important is his incredible observation of reality, and his ability to get people, to capture a character. That’s what fascinates me the most. As a filmmaker, that’s what it’s all about.
Coney Island
(Sketch for Punch magazine July 24, 1957)
Look at the
feet. Those are the famous Ronald Searle feet and shoes. You can
instantly see the quality of his pen line – so perceptive, so human.
Searle has this great freedom and he’s not affected. He allows himself —
as I think all great art does — to improve within the moment. He’s not
worried about “making mistakes”. They can be such a gas.
It’s
part of the texture of the thing. He’s concerned with its living,
organic, spontaneous truth. It really is exciting the accuracy,
originality and delight with which he looks at the real world and makes
us look at the real world.
Kallithea Camp Athens 1959
(from: Refugees)
As a film-maker, I find this drawing
clever and exciting. Taken from a series of illustrations Searle did for
a book called Refugees, 1960 to “promote awareness” of the state of
world refugees, it’s a compassionate response to somebody’s pain and the
dreadfulness of their condition. What’s great is the tension between
the detail of the environment and the character. Learning about Searle
at art school taught me that you have to have a clear overview or sense
of the structure of a scene before you can work into the detail. Here,
you get a tangible sense of the environment – bleakness, coldness, the
poverty of it – and yet the tiny figure of the woman is such a strong
presence. The detail of the character, the trees, is very clever. Each
little thing balances the whole into a moment-to-moment filigree.