Gerald Scarfe was born in London. He was asthmatic as a child and spent much time drawing and reading. After a brief period at the Royal College of Art in London, he established himself as a satirical cartoonist, working for Punch magazine and Private Eye during the early sixties. He has had many exhibitions worldwide, including New York, Osaka, Montreal, Los Angeles, Sydney, Melbourne, Chicago and London, and 50 one-man shows. He has designed the sets and costumes for plays, operas and musicals in London, Houston, Los Angeles and Detroit. His film work includes designing and directing the animation for Pink Floyd's The Wall. Scarfe has written and directed many live action and documentary films for BBC and Channel 4 and has published many books of his work. His latest book, Monsters is published in September 2008. Gerald Scarfe has been political cartoonist for the London Sunday Times for 40 years, and has worked for The New Yorker magazine for 14 years. His work regularly appears in many periodicals.
See Scarfe's full biography at the bottom of this page

OTHERS ON SCARFE

Waldemar Januszczak in The Guardian:
Gerald Scarfe finds himself with what amounts to a licence to savage anything that moves in public circles.

Sandy Nairne, Director National Portrait Gallery
Gerald Scarfe has remained ebullient, sharp and brilliant by turns - a Cruikshank for our time.

George Melly
Gerald Scarfe, who always draws himself as a Catherine-wheel eyed, beetle-browed manic demonic with a sword-like ink-spattering pen, is in reality a quiet, well-mannered, almost excessively handsome man. Inside his head, however, his self-image certainly exists. How else to explain over forty years of graphic and sculptural ferocity unequalled since Gillray, and a metaphorical disgust for the grosser aspects of humanity which form a pictorial equivalent to the inspired nausea of Dean Swift?
Even so, Scarfe's creative anger is always put to use. His target is in the broadest sense political. Greed, hypocrisy, cruelty, power and exploitation are what trigger off his formidable imagination. He is an anarchist with a particular hatred for the political animal and for those authorities who are its toadies and lick-spittles. He has never compromised.
He is also a brilliant technician, his straight reportage is impeccable, and his tender but unsentimental drawings of the world's victims have demonstrated that he is not a simple nihilist, but an idealist whose frustration at how we never seem to learn anything has embittered to the point of near despair. Yet this is combined with complete professionalism and considerable courage.
He has visited every trouble-spot, sketch-book at the ready. He has wangled himself into the presence of the well-guarded and paranoid leaders of the world and drawn them with their pants down. For those future historians who wish to understand the horror of this troubled century, to bypass the official version of events, a study of Scarfe's work will prove invaluable. At times distorting his subjects' features to the point of incoherence, dragging out their brains, heart and entrails to demonstrate their corruption of spirit, he brings to mind that statement of the young and ardent Salvador Dali: "The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad".

Because he is a cartoonist, one who draws for the reproduction and frequently seeks his inspiration in a temporal event, Scarfe has seldom been taken seriously by the art critics (John Berger is one of the handful of perceptive exceptions). This is a serious injustice which I believe history will set right. After all, to have invented a unique style to express an inner vision, however disturbing, is what a great deal of art is about. He is in the company of Picasso and Francis Bacon. Daumier and Goya were his forerunners. If the definition of genius is to alter, to whatever degree, our perception of reality, Scarfe is a genius.
He has always been restless. He has been involved in drawing, lithography, designing opera sets and costumes, making flimsy almost auto-destructive sculpture, as well as some cast more permanently in plexi-glass, a self-driven workaholic thriving on difficulties, eager to improvise. It was inevitable eventually, given his nature and the effect that Disney had on all of us who grew up in the thirties and forties, that he should have turned to animation. The fact that as a technique it is painstaking and extremely slow, was an added temptation to one who has always worked instantly and rapidly. It presented what he most cherishes: a challenge.

Sir Peter Hall
Gerald Scarfe is a great stage designer - yet you could hardly call his talent neutral or ambiguous. He is, of course, a superb draughtsman in the English tradition. He has a line which is graceful, witty and eloquent. But underneath the humour, you always sense his ferocious dislike of stupidity, hypocrisy and rapaciousness - particularly the rapaciousness which demonstrates power. Sometimes his indictments make up a bestiary, in which the men and women who are his targets are the beast. But these beasts fight for domination, not survival. Like all great satirists, Gerald Scarfe is an idealist. If he didn't believe strongly, he would not castigate so passionately.
As a friend or as a fellow-worker in the theatre, he is wise, witty and gentle. But encouraged by the licence of ink, he can be a terrible scourge - particularly of public characters who pretend to be what they are not. All this puts him among the great English satirists, and hardly, one would have thought, fits him for the stage. But his art has grace, a wonderful sense of colour and a paradoxical ability to make ugly images quite beautiful. He takes reality and distorts it, but ends up with an image which is surreal - more real than reality, and therefore very potent in the theatre. Gerald Scarfe makes the theatre surreal again.

BIOGRAPHY - GERALD SCARFE

2008 Exhibition of political drawings at Portullis House, Westminster.
2008 Publication of book, Monsters
2008 Made CBE in Queen's Birthday Honours
2007 Made Hon.Dr Laws, University of Dundee
2006 Voted Cartoonist of the Year, British Press Awards
2006 Designs for Peter Schaufuss Ballet, Satisfaction, modern production based on Rolling Stones
2005 Exhibition at Fine Arts Society, London
2005 Book, Gerald Scarfe-Drawing Blood (published in November)
2004 Designer, animated sequence for American Dream for UK touring production of Miss Saigon
2003 BBC Film on Scarfe Gerald Scarfe: Drawing Blood
2003 Exhibition and book Heroes & Villains - Scarfe at the NPG
2002 Designer, The Nutcracker. English National Ballet
2001 One man show, Gerald Scarfe in Southwark.
2000 Costume designer, Peter & The Wolf, Holiday on Ice, Paris & world tour
2000 Designer of sculptures for Self-Portrait Zone, The Dome, Greenwich, London
1999 Exhibition of paintings and drawings titled Scarfe at the N.P.G. at the National Portrait Gallery, London
1998 Designer of sets and costumes for a new Opera, Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl, Los Angeles Opera
1998 Designed set of postage stamps of comedians for the Royal Mail
1997 South Bank Show special of Scarfe and his collaboration with Disney animators on Hercules for Independent Television
1997 Exhibition of the drawings for Hercules at the Z Gallery, New York
1997 (Jun-Nov) Exhibition - Gerald Scarfe Meets Walt Disney at the Museum of the Moving Image, South Bank, London
1997 Designed sets and costumes for The Magic Flute, Houston Opera House (remounted Los Angeles in 1998 and Seattle in 1999)
1994-7 Production Designer and visual creator of characters in Disney animation feature Hercules premiered in the USA in July 1997 and in the UK in October 1997
1993-4 Designed sets and costumes for Feydeau farce Le Dindon (An Absolute Turkey) (Laurence Olivier Award)
1992 Directed and presented Horst for BBC's Omnibus
1992 Directed and presented TV film Scarfe on Class
1992 Directed and presented TV film Scarfe in Paradise
1991 Directed and presented TV film Scarfe on Sex
1991 Directed and presented TV film Scarfe on Art
1987 Devised and directed autobiographical film Scarfe by Scarfe for BBCTV (BAFTA winner)
1986 Designed sets The Merry Wives of Windsor, Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis
1985 Designed sets and costumes for Orpheus in the Underworld ENO, London Coliseum, remounted: Detroit and Houston 1986, London, 1987, Los Angeles 1988
1985 Designed sets and costumes for Who's a Lucky Boy?, a musical by Alan Price, Royal Exchange, Manchester
1984 Designed animated sequences The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking
1983 Designed sets The Big One Dominion Theatre
1983 Exhibition - Gerald Scarfe at the Festival Hall.
1981 Designer of back projected sets No End of Blame, Royal Court Theatre
1978 Set and costume designer What the Butler Saw, by Joe Orton, Oxford Playhouse
1975-8 Designer and director of animation for Pink Floyd The Wall concerts and film
1974 Designer and director of animation for Pink Floyd live show Wish You Were Here
1972 Animated film for BBCTV - Long Drawn-Out Trip
1970-3 Exhibition Gerald Scarfe, Sculpture Pavilion d'Humour, Montreal
1970 Exhibition Gerald Scarfe, Osaka, Japan
1970 Exhibition Gerald Scarfe 60-70 Waddell Gallery, New York
1969 Exhibition Hung By Scarfe Sears Vincent Price Gallery, Chicago
1968 Exhibition US Election '68 Waddell Gallery, New York
1967 Costume designer Ubu Unchained Traverse Theatre
1967 Began long association with The Sunday Times as political cartoonist, also making on-the-spot war drawings in Vietnam, Northern Ireland and the Middle East.
1966 Worked for Time Magazine in New York, making reportage drawings and creating Time covers of the Beatles and many others.
1966 Joined the Daily Mail as political cartoonist.