Ronald Searle was always sui generis. Even in a national school so rich in outstanding cartoonists and caricaturists, there are few British practitioners who could claim such a degree of instant recognisability: Heath Robinson in the previous generation, Gerald Scarfe or Ralph Steadman perhaps in the subsequent. Compared with these, Searle, as Ronald Searle Remembered, the memorial show at the Chris Beetles Gallery reminds us, was an artist whose instant recognisability embraced an extraordinary variety of genres and moods.
That is not so easy as it sounds. Abbott and Holder recently introduced us to the watercolours of H. M. Bateman, painted on Malta and Gozo when he had virtually retired from his characteristic series of The Man Who . . . cartoons of solecism and embarrassment. With Bateman you would never guess that the two forms came from the same creative imagination. With Searle, even the first slight sketches surviving from his Cambridge School of Art beginnings hold clear premonitions of his mature style, while from the sometimes horrific drawings he made in Changi Japanese PoW camp during the war onwards, whatever he was illustrating, you would never be in the slightest doubt whose hand was wielding the pen or brush.
When he wanted to be, Searle was a highly effective colourist, yet the essence of his art was in black-and-white. Probably, even today, some 60 years after the event, the first images the name of Searle summons up will be of recklessly homicidal schoolgirls from St Trinian’s. Not only are the original cartoons still in print in various forms, but the classic films of the Fifties are readily accessible on DVD and have recently been succeeded by glossily updated remakes.
In these early days Searle was happy to illustrate the ideas of others, but the inspiration for the harpies of St Trinian’s was entirely his own, originating in his prewar Cambridge experiences and observations of local schoolgirls during his own childhood and that of his sister. The girls, with their prematurely mini-skirted school uniform tunics, sometimes revealing a glimpse of even more premature suspenders, are at once sexy and terrifying, the sexiness being emphasised in the film versions of their misbehaviour.
This kind of borderline outrageousness is characteristic of Searle’s work throughout his long life. (He was still drawing with the same acuteness and precision into his nineties.) He never seemed to be particularly interested in topical politics, though he could and would produce a creditable (or discreditable) likeness in that field if required to do so. On the other hand, he was fascinated (understandably as a longtime resident in France) by wines and their consumers, by sports at their wildest and weirdest, and by dogs, their lovers and haters. He was, of course, by no means unique among British cartoonists in these interests. But then, it was always his style rather than his subject matter that marked him out.
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His line gave the paradoxical effect of being at once tentative and confident. The elongated, pointed feet he gave his characters were fairly constant, part of the spiky yet meticulous way he handled his compositions. At a glance, one could believe that Searle was incredibly quick and and casual in the way he drew what he drew. This exhibition modifies any such opinion, showing many pages of preparatory sketches from his notebooks, which indicate a much longer process of drafting and redrafting. On this evidence, he was as successfully deceptive as Christopher Isherwood: like Isherwood he was much more hard-working than one would ever suspect in order to produce the easy, gently titillating effect he sought.
Again and again, the spectator catches his mind slipping easily into the content of a Searle cartoon without realising how complex and nuanced is what he is taking in with such apparent ease. Does that imply that Searle’s art is an essentially masculine art for a masculine public? Sometimes it has been taken to be so. It has even been accused of being broadly misogynist. Yet while some men find parts of it — especially those connected with rampaging schoolgirls — scarifying, women in general react precisely as he would have wished.
Ronald Searle Remembered is at the Chris Beetles Gallery (chrisbeetles.com) until June 9