It's hard to imagine what may have prompted Ronald Searle to create The Mysterious Object, a satiric 1978 lithograph produced in an edition of 99. The object in question receives much concerned attention from a growing crowd consisting entirely of perplexed elderly men dressed in business suits. The image, then, could simply be a critique of the excesses of capitalism. The implied lack of humanity could conceivably have been informed by Searle's horrific experiences after the fall of Singapore as a Japanese prisoner of war. Perhaps it is more a sympathetic response to 1960s counterculture. More specifically, it could be recalling the manner in which the apes approached the strange monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Whatever its origin may have been, there is no danger of this darkly comic image losing its relevance or its sting any time soon.
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| Ronald Searle The Mysterious Object Edition of 99, 1978 |
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