"Gvignol Massaguer" 1922
$950
La Habana, Cuba
1922
12 1/2" x 9 1/4"
Text in Spanish
by Massaguer, C.W.
'Coleccion de Caricaturas' por Conrado Walter Massaguer
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Gvignol [Guignol] by Conrad [Conrado] Walter Massaguer 1922, First Edition; brown stiff paper wrappers with pictorial caricature of the artist pasted on front cover; endpapers, same as cover only a bit lighter in weight. Folio (24 x 31 1/2 cm) Publisher: "Engraved and printed by the Institute of Graphic Arts, Havana 1922". Massaguer is regarded as "The Norman Rockwell of Cuba" and the “Mark Twain of caricature”; he is one of the great caricaturists of Latin America. 37 full page black and white caricatures of important personalities of the 1920's including: Albert I, Alfonso XIII, George Bernard-Shaw, Sarah Bernhardt, Vicente Blasco-Ibánez, Eddy Cantor, Raoul Capablanca, Enrico Caruso, Charlie Chaplin, Georges Clemenceau, John Drew, Mischa Elman, Anatole France; the two-page centrefold of Alla Nazimova as Salome, Warren Harding, William Hart, Josef Hofmann, Kaiser Wilhelm and Crown Prince, Admiral Jellicoe, Marechal Joffre, Rudyard Kipling, David Lloyd-George, Paderewski, John D. Rockerfeller, Theodore Roosevelt, John Phillip Sousa, William H. Taft and Woodrow Wilson... plus others. Massaguer begins with two pages (in English) on the state of the art of caricature, identifying the best artists from their various countries. He dedicates a personal inscription on the last page, dated 1923 Conrado Walter Massaguer (1889-1965) was born in Cárdenas, Cuba. A self-taught artist, he published his works in Yucatan, contributing to magazines like La Campana and La Arcadia, as well as the local newspaper El Diario Yucateno. In 1908 he went to Havana, where he became a baseball cartoonist for the newspaper El Mundo. He also contributed to El Figaro, Cuba y América, El Tiempo, El Hogar and Letras. In 1910, he founded the Mercurio advertising agency with Laureano Rodríguez Castells. In 1913, he co-founded Gráfico with his brother, published until 1918. Later he also published Social in 1916 and Pulgarcito, a children's magazine. His brother also edited the weekly magazine Carteles. In 1922 he published in Cuba, Gvignol, [Guignol] a folio of 37 caricatures of well-known celebrities. He lived in New York for a while during the mid 1920s, w he contributed to Life, The New Yorker, Collier's, Vanity Fair, American Magazine, Red Book, Cosmopolitan, Literary Digest, Sunday World and Town and Country. In 1944 he was decorated with the rank of Knight of the National Order, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Commander of the National Order of the Red Cross and shortly after with the rank of Knight of the Finlay Order. During this last stage of his life he was a caricaturist for the newspaper Información from 1945 to 1949 and, from that year on, he collaborated with the newspaper El Mundo. In 1952 he accepted the position of public relations director of the Cuban Institute of Tourism and in 1956 he published his autobiography. He died in Havana on October 18th, 1965. Gvignol is extremely rare and apparently very few copies in collections— The Brooklyn Museum has a copy.