Studio: international art (77.1919)

“HEAD OF NORMAN ANGELI.
BY EDMUND X. KAPP

NOTES ON SOME DRAWINGS BY
EDMUND KAPP. BY J. B. MANSON.

R. EDMUND X. KAPP is commonly
called a caricaturist. I would rather
describe him as a sort of distillateur of the
perfume of personality. He extracts by a
process of critical analysis—operating spon-
taneously, but not always entirely sympa-
thetically—the quintessential expression of
persons. He colours his extracts to please
his fancy or to emphasise certain qualities
in his subject; thus he makes Mr. Vaughan
Williams appear as a lily of the fields or
Mr. C. F. G. Masterman as the microbe of
intellectual dyspepsia. 000
Mostly he is an artist; occasionally he
is something less ; but always he is a good
psychologist, more by sympathetic appre-
hension than by reason. He has, it would
seem by nature, a right of entry into the
minds of certain people; he reveals what
he finds there in a manner sometimes quite
shameless. He seeks the man behind the
mask, the person behind the pose; and
no man is a hero to his caricaturist—he is
simply fair game. A popular politician,
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for example, may be a humbug (although
that is very unlikely), and if he is, his cari-
caturist soon knows it. Moreover, a
caricaturist is, in the nature of things, an
artistically ill-mannered individual. It is
his business to be personal. His work
involves the taking of liberties with all
sorts of people, from the highest to the
lowest—from Mr. G. B. Shaw to Mr.
F. E. Smith. He plays tricks with their
features, leaving them sometimes without
a leg to stand on or even a nose to blow.
Only his methods can justify his manners,
and Mr. Kapp's methods are varied and
nearly always good. He has dreadful
opportunities for the paying off of old
scores. An attack of dyspepsia may cause
him to shatter a man's reputation for
beauty ; but if he is genuinely an artist he
resists temptation—which in other direc-
tions cannot be said to be a failing among
artists. In his recent exhibition at the
“ Little Art Rooms " in Duke Street, Adel-
phi, he did, in one particular drawing,
express his lack of admiration for that bril-
liant politician, Mr. McKenna, with rather
annihilating effect. But if Mr. McKenna