Manuel Gasser – “Graphis” nr. 176, 1975

One of the media of expression employed by Mihaesco is a technique which we might call imitation collage..."

Eugène Mihaesco’s work illustrates the new tendency which replaced the satirical rendering of politicians or of representatives of a given party or class by graphic comments that neatly capture the state of our modern world or illuminate matters of social, economic, cultural or even philosophic importance (…) The new style has been greatly furthered by an American institution, the so-called Op-Ed (opposite editorial) page of the prestigious American newspaper The New York Times (…) One of the media of expression employed by Mihaesco is a technique which we might call imitation collage. He draws objects and figures, which look as though we had seen them somewhere before, as though they had been borrowed unchanged from magazines or shop catalogues dating from the nineteenth century. In reality they are all his own inventions, but they derive a new dimension from their mimicry of the woodcuts and prints that have come down to us out of a dusty and now rather curious-seeming past (…) The printing requirements of the Op-Ed page of The New York Times imposed special demands on collaborators: all drawings must be pure black and white. Mihaesco has here made a virtue of necessity. He has succeeded in handling his pen-and-ink technique so skillfully that surfaces which in reality are pure black convey the impression, when reproduced, of being in a delicate grey (…) The principal virtue of Mihaesco’s drawings remains his striking ability to translate a complex train of thought into a picture with such succinct precision, and at the same time to strike familiar chords that many of us have cherished from days of our childhood.