Time of the Assassins

Cartooning, says Robert Osborn, "is a nice, pleasant, enjoyable profession." Presumably this is because, before the bile can accumulate, Osborn has worked it off in a few devastating slashes of pen on paper. He got the stored-up frustrations and anger of World War II off his chest with a 1946 book War Is No Damn Good!; his 1960 book The Vulgarians took a snickersnee to the mediocrity of mass society.

But what happens when a catastrophe overwhelms the cartoonist's ability to poniard a convenient victim on pen point? In Osborn's case, the assassination of John F. Kennedy left him nearly unable to draw. After a while, the cartoonist wrote his dealer, Edith Halpert, "I began to lay down my resentment of the disordered, disoriented, dislocated, DISJOINTED being--not so much Oswald as against the fragmented, illogical destroyers of man's best hopes."

Few artists who have painted Kennedy subject matter in the past year have accomplished anything more than timeliness. Social realism hardly makes the convincing picture that it did in the 1930s. But through Osborn's 27 chalk, collage and charcoal drawings in Manhattan's Downtown Gallery runs a brooding fury that links the cartoonist with the socially satirical art of Goya, Daumier and Ben Shahn. Side by side with looming figures symbolizing naked, illogical violence are Osborn's equally savage commentaries on the other nameless assassins responsible for the murders of Lieut. Colonel Lemuel Penn and the four children dynamited in an Alabama church.

Imagery runs to bats as a hovering menace, and angry thunderheads. A repeated gesture shows man against himself, his arms raised threateningly over his own head. But Osborn's most powerful image is also the simplest. In his Homage to Medgar Evers, the Mississippi N.A.A.C.P. leader shot in the back, a human figure is recognizable in a miasma of charcoal only because one fiery tracer plunges down a pathway of death and blows out his life.

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