The Forms of Caricature: Physiognomy and Political Bias

The analysis oftechniques of caricature as a system of communication for transmitting information about pictorial subjects has in the past remained primarily the province of artists and their historians, for example, Ashbee (1928), Lynch (1927), Berger (1952), and Rother (1966).More recently, however, perceptual psychologists interested in the history and function of art have turned their attention to the psychological mechanisms which must underlie the successful perception of the caricatured subject.Gombrich (1961) has stressed the role of the creative imagination of the observer in the successful perception of caricatures, while E. J.