Unauthorized Portraits - Softcover

Sorel, Edward

4.6

15 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375702040 ISBN 13: 9780375702044

Publisher: Knopf, 1998

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From one of America's most brilliant satirical artists: his best, his funniest, his most deliciously wicked and memorable caricatures of the past thirty years.

Here are history's great and near great--166 heroes, rogues, fools, and geniuses: from Moses leading his kvetching people ("Some miracle! If I don't get pneumonia, that'll be a miracle") through the parted Red Sea waters, to George Gershwin teaching Fred Astaire a dance step, to Madonna seen as a horseperson of the apocalypse ; from Brahms dozing off as Liszt plays, to Rodin auditioning models, and Reagan as Robin Hood, taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

Here are such fabulous targets for the satirist's pen as LBJ, Nixon and the Watergate Gang, a holstered Jimmy Carter at high noon in the hostage crisis, and a poignant Dan Quayle as the central figure in a comic strip about a man who wants a little respect.

And it's pure pleasure to watch Sorel portray Tom Wolfe in his famous white suit or Woody Allen and Mia Farrow caught in The Storm, or draw a bead on such superstars as Picasso and John Updike, Barbra Streisand, Colette, Truman Capote, and the entire cast of Casablanca. Each of the book's three sections--"History," "Entertainment and the Arts,"  "Politics" --has a wry autobiographical introduction, and every drawing has its own pithy, informative caption.

Here's wit aplenty, visual and verbal--a splendid satirical view of the wise, the beautiful, the clever, and the flawed, over the centuries, who loom large in our lives and in our imaginations.
From the Hardcover edition.

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Review:

Edward Sorel has been wielding his squiggle-prone, satirical pen for more than 40 years, poignarding the heroes, villains, and holy fools of history. Sometimes he looks far into the past for his subjects: we're not likely to see a more human image of Moses, parting the Red Sea for a horde of skeptical followers. ("If he's so smart," one complains, "why doesn't he make these dead fish disappear?") And his picture of a pouting Napoleon, who's just given Josephine her walking papers for failing to produce an heir, catches the man at a less-than-imperial moment. Yet Sorel is even better when it comes to modern times. Who else has gotten down the dime-store priapism of Hugh Hefner with such good humor? Sorel captures James Joyce's myopic intensity, Tom Wolfe's white-suited dandyism, and Lyndon Johnson at his grinning, victorious, ballot-stuffing best. Serving up our household gods in black and white or color, Unauthorized Portraits opens a window into contemporary culture, and a hugely entertaining one at that.

From the Publisher:

"All that reasonable people need to be told is that Edward Sorel keeps getting better and better. Good times have the perverse effect on Mr. Sorel of making him meaner and funnier, so let's hope they last forever."
-Wilfred Sheed

"Edward Sorel's visually literate book is a toe-curler of originality--a Swiftian appraisal of the insanity of our time."
-Al Hirschfeld

"One of the good things to say about this century is that it's had a number of great cartoonists to comment on our sins. Most of them are dead. Ed Sorel lives. We can count ourselves lucky."
-Jules Feiffer

"A book of exquisitely drawn judgments, some loving, others less forgiving, all cheerfully merciless. Sorel situates the soul somewhere between the hairline and the double chin. He's our Daumier, our Thomas Nast. If he is not run out of town, he will be audited."
-Ed Doctorow

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