"I don't go around looking for horrible things," says British caricaturist Gerald Scarfe, "but I see the qualities I abhor-selfishness, injustice-in everyone and everything." Scarfe, a 32-year-old Londoner, renders all the evil he sees with such consumate nastiness that his caricatures in pen and ink and Papier-mâché have outraged viewers on both sides of the Atlantic. Whether his subjects are American or British, priests or politicians, kings or fools, Scarfe treats them all the same-badly. He stretches the Vatican's position on birth control to produce a notably pregant Pope Paul. He sees Dr. Christian Barnard grinning after a successful transplant and substitutes tombstones for teeth.
"I dread violence," says Gerald Scarfe, "and draw it, I suppose, to exorcise my worst fears. I want to dig it out, expose and be rid of it." Scarfe is, in person, a quiet and surprisingly gentle man-but his eyes are eons older than his handsomely boyish face. His preoccupation with the darker side of life probably goes back to his childhood when he suffered from severe asthma and had to spend his first 18 years in and out of hospitals where death was a constant visitor. Even so, he recalls the year he worked as an artist in his uncle's advertising agency, "telling lies about products," as the worst of his life. Now that he is "telling the truth about people," he is haunted by violence. When BBC made a film about him recently, Scarfe chose violence as the theme and led the cameras into such apparent havens of innocence as a nursery school to illustrate hidden nuances. "I am looking for beautiful things," he says, "but I am a romantic. Everything falls below my expectations. Beautiful women turn out to be bitches, and the river is dangerous when you fall into it."
