Borrowed Caprice, Donkey-Head Included, Filed as Author

The whole thing fits in two hands—sixteen centimeters and change, a sheet you could tuck inside a hymnal—and that smallness is the first joke, because everything crowded onto it is borrowed at full scale. There he stands, our donkey-headed dandy in his ruffled Spanish jacket, sniffing a flower with the tenderness of a man who has never once suspected his own ears. The pen line is genuinely lovely here, quick and sure, the wash laid down in warm brown veils that let the hovering moths dissolve into the gray behind him. One admires the economy. One admires it a little less on noticing that the economy is itself inherited—the beast-vanity emblem, the veiled sepia atmosphere, the hunched creatures pressed to the margins, all lifted intact from a printed series of caprices already famous by the time this hand took them up. The animal-headed satire recalls the long-matured Toba-e brush caricature of Edo, where such a conceit had centuries to ripen; here it arrives pre-ripened, purchased whole.

And then the caption, in that careful cursive along the lower edge—Entre los suyos, "among his own"—set exactly where the master's plates set theirs, in the same wistful moralizing register, as if the format were a birthright rather than a template. It is charming, the way a nephew signing the family name in the family hand is charming; the fondness is real, and it is the fondness that stings. Nothing on the page is quite secured on its own terms: not the emblem, not the technique, not even the joke about belonging, which belongs to someone else. What the paperwork does next is the quiet part. A fund buys the sheet in 1939, a mount is cut, a stamp goes in the corner, and the flat little word Artist is entered against a page that is, lovingly and top to bottom, a copy of a voice. The mat likely cost more than the ink did. I do think he'd have liked being kept. — PS