Kimon
Evan Marengo
was
born in Egypt
in 1907. A talented cartoonist and illustrator, he studied at the
Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques (1929-1931) in France.
Taking the pen name Kem, he drew cartoons for Le
Petit Parisien and Le Canard Enchaine.
His work also began appearing in the Daily
Herald and
the Daily
Telegraph.
In 1939 he went to Oxford
University but during the Second World War
produced over 3,000 political cartoons and posters for the Ministry
of Information. He also wrote and illustrated eight booklets that
were dropped over occupied territory by the Royal
Air Force.
After the war Marengo returned
to Oxford where he began work on his Ph.D. thesis The
Cartoon as a Political Weapon in England: 1783-1832. Kimon
Evan Marengo died
in 1988.
Kimon Marengo,
The Progress of
Russian and German cooperation (1939)
(1)
Valerie Holman, History Today (March 2002)
Kern saw the cartoonist first and foremost as a political commentator
with a viewpoint of his own, comparing his art to that of a leader-writer
in the national press. Like the eighteenth-century satirical draughtsmen
whose prints he studied and collected, his chosen weapon was ridicule
rather than vilification, and many of his cartoons during the Second
World War show the follies and foibles of the Axis leaders. For example,
a single image conjures up the "progress of Russian and German
cooperation". With one boot between them, Hitler and Stalin's
three-legged race looks doomed from the start: one points forward
as the other turns back, their weapons more an encumbrance than a
threat, and their prancing at odds with the pitiful state of their
uniforms. This hapless, laughable, down-at-heel pair epitomise the
way in which Kern caricatured dictators and show why he was already
on the blacklist of both Hitler and Mussolini. Originally designed
as a poster and captioned in Arabic, this particular image was distributed
throughout the Middle East where
the image of Stalin was forced to undergo a major transformation after
Russia switched allegiance and became a key member of the Grand Alliance,
following the German invasion of Russia in June 1941 and the collapse
of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
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