Wolinski was born in French Tunisia on June 28, 1934, to a Tunisian Jewish mother and a Polish Jewish father. "I spent my formative years in Tunisia. But my antecedents are foreign--my father was a Polish Jew, my mother's roots were Italian," he said. He moved to Paris in 1952 to study architecture, but chucked it for cartooning, submitting his work to satirical monthly Hara Kiri, subtitled `Journal bete et mechant' (`Stupid and vicious magazine'), willing patrons of Wolinski's bigamous interests -sex and politics. A commentator wrote of his work in the 1960s and `70s: "He talks of sex in a political way , and of politics in a pornographic way ."
"That is no longer true," Wolinski had said. "The climate back then was one of social and moral claustrophobia, with ironcast gender roles. My cartoons were an intellectual reprisal to that straitjacketing. So I portrayed women provocatively -asking for pleasure and dominant. After all, a country whose women are free is a free country . That's the sign of a real democracy."
Artists like Wolinski and his companions, Francoise Cavanna and Jean MarcReiser (co-founders of Hara Kiri, the forerunner of Charlie) broke ideological bread together, and in the manner of their art, told acid truths about the France of their day ."In the 1950s and `60s you had the pleasure of shocking people, wresting a reaction. Our job is precisely that -to stir the hornet's nest," he said. Wolinski believed if the obscenity in his cartoons appeared to have dulled later, it wasn't that his pen had blunted but that the contemporary viewer was better read in sex. "Sex is commonplace today . When pornography is so blatant on TV , erotic cartoons lose their flavour and intent -they become impotent," he said.
Wolinski had been called names--vulgar, sex obsessed and was charged with mauvais gout (bad taste). "Yes, I'm obsessed with sex, and so are my friends. I've made love with many women...'" he said."Made love to," admonished a hanger-on in the background.
He launched his fusillade of political cartoons in May 1968, when the tinderbox of France's student revolution erupted. "Somebody asked me for a political drawing one day, and I was surprised to open Action (a daily) one morning, and find my cartoon there," he said. Wolinski also channeled his ire at the establishment into the graphic magazine he co-founded, L'Enrage.
From the 1970s, as France pedal-pushed capitalism, Wolinski's left-wing commentaries took flight to publications like Le Journal du Dimanche, L'umanite, Paris Match and Charlie Hebdo among others."I could draw anything I wanted. Before this thin-skinned age, you could joke about religion and paedophilia," he said. With freedom came threats, but mild ones. "Complaints were filed against me on and off," he said, "Ten years ago, the Front National party graffiti-ed the exterior of my apartment. But nothing more severe." In 2005, Jacques Chirac conferred on him the Legion d'Honneur.
George's oeuvre expanded later to include travel sketches of Cambodia, Kabul, Cuba and Thailand. His curiosity about India was differently constituted. He wondered why newspapers here carried old cartoons like Peanuts. "Why is there no new, young material?" he asked, and then, "Do you have pornography on TV here like they do in France?" And then one last question: "Are you free for dinner?"
http://ift.tt/1mySRmh Wolinski,charlie hebdo,Alliance Francaise de Bombay
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