M. Sasek
M. Sasek has been going about the world drawing the great cities, drawing in each case, quite candidly, the things that the tourist might see or be shown...Edinburgh is a good subject, for it is a peculiarly civic city ('civic' is their favourite word), milling with monuments, its history is much commemorated and has a way of swallowing up the present situation; it certainly does so in the many books about the place, all of which somehow or other have a stoutly antiquarian air. Sasek's drawings run to caricature, but their observation of Edinburgh is accurate and acute, though it's an Edinburgh shorn unaccountably of its New Town. The wind and weather, the stone (both sorts of Edinburgh rock are included) of turret and tenement, are commemorated in a sheaf of wry and amiable pictures which have all the right greys and angularities. The sketch of Jenners Store, flanked by one of the Princes Street's abundant commissionaires, is a piece of architectural satire not unworthy of the doyens,[Saul] Steinberg and [Osbert] Lancaster. He is not afraid to follow out his jokes and fantasies: the tartan tripes of the bagpipes are hung about his pages to great effect...
Text from Karl Miller, M. Sasek, New Statesman, Vol. lxi, No. 1573, May 5, 1961, p.724.
