Sketches of History and Folly

By JIM DWYER

Published: September 5, 2007

Starting today, many of the great cartoons of recent times are visiting New York for a five-week exhibition. For those who have not been paying attention, this presents an excellent chance to catch up on a quarter-century of world affairs and an eternity of human folly. Armed with sketch pads and banana peels, cartoonists have always stood ready for the high noons of history.

So in 1991, during the last minutes of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Nenashev drew a team of riot police, wielding water hoses and preparing to turn back a throng of demonstrators — except that all the people in the crowd were holding up houseplants.

And in a 1988 cartoon, two herdsmen sit on opposite sides of a fence, each consuming a meal of the other man’s livestock. The image could have been set anywhere people violate the commandment not to covet thy neighbor’s sheep, but it happens to have been drawn, prophetically, by Darko Pavic, identified as Yugoslavian, just a few years before the Yugoslav federation came asunder.

The Nenahsev and Pavic drawings are two of the 125 works on display in “Cutting Edges: Cartoon Art Defining the World” at the Society of Illustrators in Manhattan, a collection of cartoons that won prizes in an annual competition organized by the Aydin Dogan Foundation in Turkey.

Here in New York, where so much of the official art world seems to revolve around hoarding, and where entrance fees to big museums run to $20, the pleasures of the cartoon exhibit begin with the admission price. It’s free.

Better, still, though, is that cartoonists are among the world’s most reliable and democratic subversives. The famous picture of Marilyn Monroe, her dress boosted over her thighs by the draft from a subway grating, was redone by a Romanian artist to show a woman in a long black abaya, the traditional Islamic black overgarment, also sent swirling to immodest heights by the wind from a grate. A Ukrainian artist depicted a military officer bent over a table, straw in his nose, snorting a line of powder — gunpowder, it seems, from a bullet that is cracked open. A cartoon from Iran shows goose-stepping soldiers, heading off to war, followed by goose-stepping Christian monks.

To date, human history has yet to run short of material for cartoonists of any tongue, era or homeland.

Two ducks walking up the gangplank to Noah’s Ark glance backward to see a man and woman behind them, dragging a barbecue grill. The ducks, drawn by the Thai artist Thi-Wa-Wat Pattara Gulwanit, are aghast.

Anyone in the United States would instantly recognize the drowning person drawn by Aleksandr Sergeev, a Russian, even though all that can be seen of the person is a disembodied hand, thrust out of the water. As a black government car speeds past the river, another disembodied hand can be seen — this one thrust from the limousine window in the universal, and universally useless, wave of greeting from politicians.

Few of the cartoons in the exhibit have been seen in this country. Although the competition has drawn about 3,000 entries annually since it began in 1983, almost none have come from American artists, said Candan Fetvaci, general manager of the Dogan Foundation. “Russia — I mean the old Soviet countries — these people are very into this,” she said. “And Turkish artists, of course.”

In 2003, at the beginning of the Iraq war, Necdet Yilmaz, 37, a Turkish artist and a New Yorker who lives in Bellerose, Queens, drew a soldier stumbling over a rock almost entirely covered with sand. The buried rock is actually an Assyrian antiquity, a bas-relief sculpture showing soldiers in a chariot fighting with shields and bows.

“I was thinking about ancient Mesopotamia, a very bloody civilization about 6,000 years ago,” Mr. Yilmaz said. “A lot of war happened in that place. Right now, there is modern war there, on the same land.”

There is war, and then there is love, the work of the same glands. A couple embrace at the fulcrum of a seesaw, their passion holding them in perfect balance in the rendering by Mihai Ignat of Romania. And another man is held in balance by himself: Turkish artist Ali Sükrü Fidan shows him at the edge of a cliff. A suicide note has been placed on the ground. His shadow, however, clings desperately to a tree set back from the cliff edge. This cartoonist, and the others, hang in there.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com