Raymond Burki was a political cartoonist, caricaturist and illustrator from the Swiss Canton of Vaud. Born in Epalinges, he was an apprentice in a shop for photo retouching and photogravure in Lausanne, before working in Paris for one year. He returned to his former boss upon his return to his home country, and stayed there from 1971 to 1978. His first drawing appeared in La Tribune Le Matin in July 1976, and he began making contributions to 24 Heures shortly afterwards.
The new Austrian Government takes the oath. Jörg Haider is not listed, but his Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) has several key ministries. Note that an "autruche" is an ostrich in French and that L'Autriche is the French name for Austria.
He turned to fulltime cartooning in 1978 and remained the regular cartoonist for this Swiss newspaper for 38 years, until his retirement in September 2014. The paper's publisher also released annual collections of his work from 2000 to 2014. Burki furthermore made witty drawings for the magazine Bilan and in Die Sonntagszeitung. Over the course of his career, he has published about 8,000 drawings, and received many awards for his work, both in Switzerland and in France. His style is characterized by a thin line and an almost complete absence of text. As a caricaturist, his preferred targets were mostly women and politicians, but rarely with malice. Raymond Burki passed away in the night of 28 and 29 December 2016, following a long battle with cancer.
