Gerald Scarfe's portraits of politicians and other people in the public eye often seem to depict their subjects in an advanced stage of decomposition and seldom need a caption. His technique is typically to exaggerate a physical feature in such a way that it seems to express the awful depravity of the character he is portraying. In the 1960s and 1970s, a period of great influence for Scarfe, many of his most grotesque images appeared in Private Eye.An asthmatic, Scarfe suffered long periods of ill health in his childhood and youth, being bed-ridden for extended periods. It was then that he began to draw, and his characteristic style often suggests sickness and disease. After leaving university, he was briefly employed at an advertising agency before going freelance. His disenchanted style and subject matter struck a chord with the public during the post-Churchillian period when the ruling class was rapidly losing its mystique.
In 1966, his collection of drawings, Gerald Scarfe's People, revealed the impressive range of his subject matter and technique. Comparatively realistic portraits contrasted with grotesquely distorted images, and it was the latter which made him famous. His depictions of the novelist Somerset Maugham, or of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, have become more familiar than many orthodox portraits or photographs, such is the power of his pen line.
In the late 1960s, Scarfe began to develop his talents in the fields of animation and film direction, often for the BBC. As the age of satire began to yield to the blander spirit of the 1970s, his work became less narrowly targeted and anti-establishment. It was now clear that Scarfe was both an artist and a satirist, as he showed in his designs and animated sequences for the film Pink Floyd: The Wall (1981). He also moved into set design, creating sets and costumes for such projects as the Los Angeles Opera's production of The Magic Flute (1993).
In the late 1990s, Disney studios approached Scarfe to design and draw figures for the animated feature Hercules, which was released in 2000. In the same year, Scarfe was invited to exhibit works at the government's Millennium Dome. Scarfe is married to the actress Jane Asher and lives in London.
