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A Higher Pile

Raemaekers, Louis, 1917, Chromolithograph
A Higher Pile
A Higher Pile
A Higher Pile
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Category
Library Item
Item no
32879
Title
A Higher Pile
Description
The accompanying text reads,
"Father, we must have a higher pile to see Verdun."

M. Raemaekers is at his finest, we think, when his satire cleaves his dreadful subject as a keen hatchet cleaves the bone. The English people, who dread irony, in which the French genius excels, have produced no satirists since the days of Gillray and Rowlandson, who indeed played humorously with their subjects rather than flayed human nature by exposing its vice and frailty. No doubt the members of the City of London Corporation who refused to hang the drawing for the cartoon, "If it were only a dream," would recoil at the sight of this pyramid of crushed, mangled human bodies, feeling obscurely that the satire, if turned the other way, might rebound on others than the enemy. But satire is at its highest when it leaves us least complacent. Swift and Saltykov would have heard of one another's genius, and no doubt posterity will draw a broad moral from Raemaeker's art. ..."
Artist / maker
Date
1917
Size
38.0 x 28.0 cm
Location
Art and Design Library
Copyright
Louis Raemaekaers' drawings are reproduced by kind permission of the Louis Raemaekers Foundation.