Monsters and Machines

The bestiary is most often associated with the medieval period, when artists and authors commonly presented images of real and mythical animals as embodiments of different types of moral nobility or degradation, drawing on the iconographies of Judeo-Christian scripture, Greco-Roman classical antiquity, and the mythological and folkloric traditions of other world regions. These images persisted in caricature art of the ensuing centuries and eventually found new vitality in the nineteenth and twentieth-century graphic languages of the broadside, the poster, and the illustrated periodical.

The twentieth century was in some sense a prolonged global existential battle over the human identity. This exhibition looks at works of weaponized visual humor created by and aimed at different populations in different world areas. Through an assemblage of images where satirical targets’ moral subhumanity is represented in hybrid human-animal or human-machine monstrosities, we examine a seemingly universal impulse to dehumanize adversaries by excluding them from a human dignity shared by the artist and intended viewer. A DPUL online exhibition was also built as a companion to “Monsters and Machines: Caricature, Visual Satire, and the Twentieth-Century Bestiary,” - an 2024 exhibition in the Ellen and Leonard Milberg Gallery at Firestone Library. Curated by Thomas Keenan, Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies Librarian; Lidia Santarelli, Librarian for History, NYU; Alain St. Pierre, Librarian for History, History of Science, and African Studies; and Deborah Schlein, Near Eastern Studies Librarian.

Many of the images and materials from this exhibition show various groups and peoples represented in xenophobic, racist, sexist, homophobic, fatphobic and otherwise bigoted ways. These approaches to representation were often used to express the opinions of the artist, majority group, institutions, or groups in power. Viewers may therefore encounter imagery that is offensive. Additionally, some of these caricatures show death and violence. The aim in including these materials in this exhibition is not to offend, but to educate about the attitudes and political and social conditions of the time period. Princeton University Library openly rejects oppressive views reflected in these materials.