HE WORKS IN SATIRE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 101, 30 May 1941, Page 9

HE WORKS IN SATIRE

NE of the curiosities of the New C Zealand scene is surely the pre- _ valence of cartoonists. Dyspeptic observers from overseas are not backward in saying that we are a smug, self-satisfied little community, "rather reminiscent of Victorian England," and this criticism has been backed up from time to time by home-grown critics who see more to admire in the big world outside. But the existence and power of our cartoonists seems to cut across that argument. Would a smug community tolerate so many of them? David Low and Minhinnick, to name only the two most outstanding, were bred in New Zealand. : Into such a field (fertile or infertile, according to your point of view), there has recently come a young Dutch artist, Theo Schoon, whose satirical pencil and brush are now at work on our social ‘scene. Schoon’s arrival is one of the minor accidents of war. He was born on one

of the distant plantations of the Dutch East Indies, where his father was a Government official. He went to high school in Holland, and in the ordinary course of events, his people would have retired to their homeland. However, they felt that the trend of events throughout the world presaged war, and two or three years ago, they decided to retire to New Zealand. Their son followed them, learning his first English from a shipmate on the way, and for the past year or two he has been a student at the Canterbury School of Art. Study in Holland and France Actually, that was his second art school. After a year at Amsterdam University, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts at Rotterdam, then worked in France, absorbing what Paris had to offer through contact with other artists, before returning to the Dutch East Indies, where he worked and travelled all over the islands. He produced a number of posters and travel guides for the big Dutch shipping companies, and he has turned out paintings of Balinese girl dancers, temples, and tropic villages. But all this beauty could not touch his inner consciousness; it was not connected with the great events of the world to-day. Satire is His Medium Not that he is interested in politics as such. Unlike our native cartoonists, he is not interested in personalities, or in. puzzling out the rights afid wrongs of a particular issue. Instead of a personality, he sees a person who is a prototype of a group, and instead of an advocated remedy for one ill, he shows the problem that mankind has to solve. Some, perhaps, would solve the prob-

lems of the world by war, some by science, some by politics; Schoon is not concerned how the problems are solved -he is content to focus interest on the problem. Inevitably, therefore, his art develops more and more into the field of satire. Every drawing is a psychological study. Many elements have gone into his training and preparation, and they appear in his work. He has been influenced by the spirit of the modern French cartoonists, and by a study of the classical caricaturists. From the Japanese he has learnt the power of expression in line. But from the English humorists, such as the Punch artists,

his stubborn Dutch solidity has gained little-he says he can’t get into the spirit of this type of humour. Perhaps that is the prerogative of Englishmen. He works a good deal in conté, although he suits the medium to the purpose, regarding black and white as the strongest medium aycartoonist can use. Some of his cartoons have appeared in Man, the Australian monthly; others, dealing simply but powerfully with such problems as crime, propaganda, capital and labour, bureaucracy, supersitition, and high society, have been submitted to the world’s leading publications. Schoon regards himself as an artist working in satire.