"Civilization's Scourge"

This selection focuses on the bestiary’s particular vigor in the visual satire of the period from the onset of World War I through the end of the Cold War —what historian Eric Hobsbawm called “the age of extremes” — a time of ideologically-fueled hostilities of unprecedented scale and destructive consequence that eventually brought humanity to the brink of self-annihilation.

This artificial collection consists of one thousand original drawings, including a significant number by Charles Lewis Bartholomew, Otho Cushing, Homer C. Davenport, John Tinney McCutcheon, and Frank Arthur Nankivell. Other artists that are well represented include Louis Glackens, Harold Imbrie, Udo J. Keppler, Norman Ritchie, and Fred O. Seibel.

Several Princeton collections have strong holdings in comic art, cartoons, and pictorial satire. The Graphic Arts Collection has several thousand caricatures in the form of prints or drawings, mainly in the Dickson Q. Brown '95 Collection of Thomas Rowlandson and the Richard W. Meirs '88 Collection of George Cruikshank.

The Graphic Arts Collection holds prints, drawings, photographs, paintings, sculpture, and printed ephemera along with an international book collection specializing in fine press,