Banksy vs. McGill

One is a renegade exponent of graffiti & radical , trendy, achingly contemporary street-art, who has defaced walls on Israel’s West Bank & has had work purchased by Christian Aguilera, Kate Moss and many others . The other is Donald McGill – a mild-mannered one-footed gentleman who lived through both World Wars and amazed himself by creating a globally recognised genre of ‘Saucy Seaside Postcards’ on the back of one ‘Get Well’ card for an incapacitated nephew. But for such disparate personalities, their art followed a great many similar patterns.

Both, to differing degrees, retained an air of mystique & anonymity – Banksy infamously so & to a far, far greater & more intentional level – wilfully creating a “network of myths” surrounding his identity and facing accusations of not in fact being a individual artist but a brand name for a collective; becoming, as New Yorker magazine put it in 2007 “a household name (who’s) identity is subject of febrile speculation”. This has certainly been played up & even invited by him at times as a very successful ‘hook’ to heighten intrigue in his reclusive character & inevitably add an extra layer of captivation to his work – the nature of street art in itself requires & attracts “shadowy practitioners”. McGill, on the other hand, probably had less say in his unknown personality, living an unassuming life in London, unlinked on a daily basis with the fruits of his labour selling rapidly across the country – however, the same de-personalised & anonymous air was applicable & remarked upon by George Orwell in 1942 in a manner which could certainly have been written concerning Banksy “Who Donald McGill is, I do not know. He is apparently a trade name, for at least one series of post cards is issued simply as ‘The Donald McGill Comics’”

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The two artists also employ a signature style which is instantly recognisable & if not entirely unique, then very much something made their own. Banksy’s work has been described as deploying an “aesthetic clean & instantly readable” ; clean, stencilled , often black, white and grey, with uncomplicated visual elements used to convey an idea. He himself commented that above all else “efficiency is the key” to his style. which is universally renowned and his work is everywhere, from walls to t-shirts, mugs, books, CD covers & very possibly golf-umbrellas. “A Banksy” is immediately identifiable as such by anyone aware of modern pop art on even the most surface level and this was also applicable to McGill, who as Orwell commented in the same essay, maintained an individualistic “style of drawing which is recognizable at a glance” . The predictability & repeated motifs, colours & references produce for the viewer an “indefinable familiarity” with the seaside scenes and characters depicted – and this is also applicable to the world in which Banksy works , street art bound to be “visually repetitive” by the boundaries it is contained in. The audience’s pre-acquaintance with the format is part of the explanation for another striking similarity between the two artists in their respective periods – their enormous success.

In his heyday, McGill’s postcards were turning an unimaginable level of business – averaging sales of two million per year....in Blackpool alone! His most successful single card was “do you like Kipling...?” which shifted a remarkable six million copies worldwide. His art was such a hit with the public that he was described by Punch magazine as “the most popular, hence the most eminent, painter of the (20th) century”. This level of achievement & pre-eminence has been replicated by Banksy 70 years later, 250,000 copies were sold in the month of release for his “Wall & Piece” book in 2005. Unrelenting celebrity endorsement coupled with (albeit somewhat grudging at times) critical recognition from the legitimate art community led Ralph Taylor of Sotheby’s to declare Banksy , in equally glowing terms to Punch, as the “quickest growing artist of all-time”.

Comparisons can also be drawn in more stylistic terms. Both lean towards, in the main, unflattering & semi-grotesque portrayals of humdrum humans. To again draw from Orwell’s description of McGill’s work, he summarised it as being made-up of “figures with deliberately ugly faces...grinning & vacuous” - which could certainly be applied to a high proportion of Banksy’s work, the artist himself commenting “People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish. But that's only if it's done properly”. There is a constant current of vulgarity through both bodies of work, which has certainly contributed to the vast success and popularity with ‘the masses’ of both artists not being reflected in critical acclaim to anything like the same extent.

Another likeness between the two is in their political stances. As with their relative anonymities, this is far more easily associated with & straightforwardly detected through the modern-day artist’s work; anti-capitalist, anti-war, anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian without exception, arguably to the point of cliché. When attending an anti-war rally in 2003 he distributed leaflets declaring “I Don’t Believe in anything. I'm Just Here for the Violence”. With McGill, this attitude filtered through far more subtly and at first glance almost accidentally. On closer inspection however, it appears that the rebellious tone is not simply a happy co-incidence. McGill purposefully focused his First World War propaganda to be from the perspective of the combatants & families, as opposed to merely propagating the party-line; very few of his hundreds of designs from this period depict actual soldiers in battle. This was a conscious decision – and any illusions that he was unaware of the seditious undertones to his work are dismissed by his own ‘vulgarity ranking system’, rating his work as mild, medium and strong, the third category was deemed unfit for his own daughters – and inevitably was by far the best selling set.

As a matter of course, massively popular artists of any denomination disseminating a “seditious” message, whether craftily or brazenly will clash with authority at some point and this is another area with shared experience for the two artists. Banksy, despite being far & away the more controversy-courting of the two has actually gotten off rather lightly in this regard – no doubt benefitting from operating in a more permissive, liberal society – his troubles limited to a clash with the Keep Britain Tidy campaign & a bizarre tiff with an animal rights campaigner in 2003. By and large his outspoken stance has resulted in only furrowed brows & tut-tutting from government level and a long-running campaign by the right-wing Daily Mail to “unveil” his background. The same sadly could not be said for his predecessor. In 1951 the Conservatives under Winston Churchill won back power on a ticket to restore the war-time austerity that they felt had been eroded by the post-war Labour government’s more broad-minded & forward-looking term. As part of their conformity drive, numerous censorship committees were set-up and McGill’s racy postcards were selected as an area of grave concern. Quite shamefully, this resulted in him being forced to attend court as an 80 year old. After expressing his bafflement at the charges of ‘mental & moral corruption’ in a letter to the court (“I have carefully considered the cards complained of… and I set forth my observations in respect of each card with explanations to show my mental approach... ")he eventually appeared and was forced to plead guilty to Obscene Publication charges to avoid imprisonment – being fined £75 in total, with far greater financial consequences being incurred through destruction of postcards etc. Although not directly linked, one can only assume that he would have welcomed Banksy’s quote in 2002; “I wouldn't sell shit to Charles Saatchi. If I sell 55,000 books and however many screen prints, I don't need one man to tell me I'm an artist. It's hugely different if people buy it, rather than one fucking Tory punter does. No, I'd never sell anything to him“

One more area of similarity is in a shared willingness to reflect the zeitgeist in their work. Orwell’s description of McGill as realising that “any contemporary event, cult or activity has comic possibilities” is almost exactly transposed into Lauren Adams’ 2007 report of Banksy as “a broad social cartoonist...surfacing from time to time to prod popular consciousness” . This also flows into a readiness to self-reference – Banksy in the above cartoon which was auctioned (caption : I cant belieev you morons actually pay for this shit)& McGill in the pre-emptive (& self-fulfilling prophecy) censor bating sketch alongside.
To conclude, the most obvious and important link is in the essential frivolity of their work. Matthew Collings, writing a fairly scathing piece in The Times, described Banksy’s ideas as “having the values of a joke”, Morgan Falconer in the same paper heralding his “harmless... adolescent preoccupation with lampooning”. Stuart Maconie meanwhile summarized McGill’s work as “always saucy more than dirty...not dirty as they are almost child-like”. The ability of both to invite suggestion of a deeper meaning in an essentially throwaway image is strikingly apparent in these two quotes; “the drawing is often funnier than the joke beneath it” (Orwell, once more on McGill) and Banksy last month talking about his work and admitting that he’s “not sure what it means..... There’s less to it than meets the eye” – a parallel stance to McGill in 1954’s admittance that he often “had no intention of 'double meaning' and, in fact, a 'double meaning' was in some cases later pointed out to me”. So much weight & meaning is attributed to the work by the pre-convictions and mindset of the viewer that it becomes unheard of (especially in when assessing the more modern artist’s work) to suggest that they are essentially throw-away allusions more than deep insights – as Charlie Brooker expressed his distaste for Banksy being “often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots”.

I would say in neither case does this detriment the work as pure entertainment – “most of life is made up of trivia and there is nothing wrong with celebrating it” and to give the will-o-the-wisp, ever-elusive Banksy the last word; “even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make somebody smile while they're having a piss.".