Graphics: More than a Caricaturist

Since its debut during the newspaper strike of 1963, The New York Review of Books has depended chiefly on two artists—David Levine and J. J.

Grandville—to illustrate its long-winding reviews and political commentaries. Both often seem more trenchant than the text they accompany, and for Levine this has led to many an outside commission, including covers for TIME, Newsweek and New York. But his col league Grandville is a special case. He has been dead for over a hundred years. And besides, he was a Frenchman.

Grandville's caricatures, nonetheless, seem as pointed and contemporary as Levine's at their best. For a...