Marquand and "Monsters and Machines"

Marquand Library of Art & Archaeology was pleased to contribute three publications to this unique exhibit in the Ellen and Leonard Milberg Gallery.

For more information, see the official website that includes many fully digitized books and links to video presentations by the curators.

This exhibition 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. 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.

https://dpul.princeton.edu/monsters_and_machines