| NOTA |
(★)(1.In April 1939, while still at art college, Ronald Searle volunteered for the army. In September 1939 he was called up and two years later he embarked for Singapore where, a month after his arrival, he found himself a prisoner of the Japanese. After fourteen months in a prisoner-of-war camp he was sent north -to a work camp on the Burma Railway. Half-starved, debilitated by exhaustion and disease, Searle and his comrades struggled to build a railway that has since been swallowed up by the jungle. In May 1944 he was sent to his last destination as a prisoner : Changi Gaol in Singapore, a prison constructed for 600 prisoners into which the Japanese crammed five thousand. Throughout his captivity Ronald Searle made drawings, determined -despite the risk- to record his experiences. He drew his fellow prisoners and his Japanese guards ; he sketched places and people glimpsed while on the move ; he recorded significent events -the triumphant Japanese entering Singapore, the notorious Selarang Incident, the planes dropping leaflets announcing the end of the war. Stained with the sweat and dirt of forty years ago, the drawings in this book are a remarkable record of one man´s war, what Ronald Searle calls ´the graffiti of a condemned man, intending to leave a rough witness of his passing through, but who found himself -to his surprise and delight- among the reprieved´. Published here for the first time, together with Ronald Searle´s own account of his captivity, these drawings will be recognized as one of the most important -and most moving- records of the Second World War. 2.Ronald Searle´s artistic career began in 1935 at the age of fifteen, as weekly cartoonist to the local paper in Cambrudge, where he was born. The money helped to pay for his studies at Cambridge School of Art, an institution he left with a precocious grasp of the thchnical problems of drawing. The war, and in particular his period of captivity from 1942 to 1945, provided him with the subject-matter he needed and the necessary impetus to apply what he had learned. When he emerged from the army at the age of twenty-six he was swiftly recognized as a remarkable draughtsman, with(not surprisingly) an almost oriental feeling for the purety of line. Popular success came as Searle, in an original and very personal way, merged his academic background with graphic satire and a sharp eye for the ridiculos. he gained international acclaim as a ´black´humorist with what Max Beerbohm called´a power to convert the macabre into the most pleasurable of frolics´, St.Trinian´s included. he has been a major influence on succeeding generations of graphic artists both in Europe and America, where, as Tom Wolfe recently wrote, he is considered a ´giant of the graphic netherworld´. Ronald Searle left England in 1961. After many years in Paris, he has spent the last decade in a mountain village in the foothills of the Alpes of Provence, with his wife Monica, who is also an artist. He still works eleven hours a day -and enjoys it.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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