The Headache, A Print after George Cruikshank
Not on view
In The Head Ache, President Barack Obama is assaulted by little devils who hammer and drill at his head and blow a trumpet in his ear. Chagoya based this humorous take on the president's tribulations in passing a plan to reform the nation's health care system on an 1819 etching by Cruikshank with the same title. The earlier Head Ache, paired with a print entitled The Cholic, was a straightforward depiction of a suffering man grasping a useless bottle of medicine. Here, the devils can be seen as the conservative media and Republican politicians who launched an assault against the president and his proposal. As he had done previously with etchings by Goya, Chagoya appropriated a print from the past to make a contemporary political statement. In a complex process that involved collaboration with three print shops and the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, Chagoya digitally reproduced the original but replaced the man's head in the British print with a drawn portrait of the president, which was then added by digital means to the etching plate.
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