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William Drenttel
Essays | Biography | Contact

Archive: November 2005


David Hughes: Caricaturist of Our Time
"Gulf War," illustration by David Hughes, Observer Magazine, 1991.

In the 1970s, I worked at the Forum Gallery in New York City. My job was to sort through hundreds of unattributed portraits by David Levine — the caricaturist for the New York Review of Books. The gallery wanted to sell them as drawings, and I was charged with determining who, exactly, was being satirized in each drawing — Roland Barthes or Czeslaw Milosz or Leonid Brezhnev. Once I had put a name to a face (not always an easy chore), I came to see that these finely-wrought ink drawings went right to the soul of the subject. The head was enlarged to the body, a particular trope of caricature...

READ MORE | COMMENTS (8)
William Drenttel is a designer and publisher, and editorial director of Design Observer. He is a partner at Winterhouse, a design consultancy focused on social change, online media and educational institutions, and a senior faculty fellow at the Yale School of Management.


Recent Video


National Design Award Trophy

National Design Award Trophy

 In October 2011, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum unveiled a new trophy for the National Design Awards. Originally designed as an asterisk in silicon carbide by Winterhouse in 2000, the new glass trophy is by Corning GlassLab.


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