Women's Eyes by Kees van Dongen and Russell Patterson

I wrote about Dutch Modernist painter Kees van Dongen (1877-1968) here, and American cartoonist Russell Patterson (1893-1977) here.

Some of their works exhibit a certain similarity. Namely, from time to time they depicted young women as having extremely mascaraed eyes. Patterson did this a lot more than did van Dongen because his job required cranking out a much larger volume of images.

Van Dongen got there first -- his mascaraed lovelies began to appear around 1910, whereas Patterson's were a Jazz Age and Depression-era thing. So: Did Patterson borrow from van Dongen? I do not know: probably no one does. But living and working in New York City starting in the mid-1920s, it's possible that he might have seen some van Dongen paintings or perhaps images of them in publications.

Let's take a look:

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Van Dongen: La femme en blanc - 1912

Van Dongen: The Blue Hat - 1910

Van Dongen: La Coquelicot - c. 1919

Patterson sketch

Patterson illustration

Patterson illustration

John Held, Jr.'s Woodcut Style

John Held, Jr. (1889-1958) was one of my favorite cartoonists when I was young. I even did a variation of his style while on the staff of my high school yearbook. In retrospect, Russell Patterson was his equal, perhaps his superior, in capturing the 1920s Jazz Age in cartoons.

Held's Wikipedia entry is here, and here is my 2014 post dealing with him.

As my post indicated, there was more to Held than 1920s flappers and sheiks. An aspect of his work that I find curious is the set of woodcut (and woodcut-like) cartoons he made for the New Yorker magazine and perhaps other venues. One curiosity is that the subject matter -- 1900-vintage, not sophisticated 1920s and 30s New York City settings -- always struck me as not in synch with the New Yorker's character. I suspect that the reasons they appeared at all was because (a) Held was famous, and (b) he and New Yorker editor Harold Ross were high school friends in Salt Lake City.

Held must have liked doing wood/linoleum cuts, and justified the historic subject matter as in keeping with the medium.  Also, there was strong contrast with the style of his cartoons dealing with current (Jazz Age) subjects.

And me? I do not like them. But maybe you might, so here are some examples:

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The set above includes the woodcut style and the cartoon style for which Held is famous.

Anna Held once famously had a milk bath.  This seems to be a scratchboard simulation of a woodcut (note his signature).

Held was Mormon.

Early New Yorker Magazine Ivy League Cartoonists

I do not read The New Yorker magazine. Never did. Though I might have, had I been alive during its  1925-1939 inception and heyday under founding editor Harold Ross (1892-1951).

As the link notes, Ross was born in Aspen, Colorado back when it was a mining town and not today's flash ski resort center. Yet he eventually edited what was considered New York's most sophisticated major magazine in his day.

Cartoons were probably as important as its written content in creating the publication's success, and I suspect that remains true.

Where did Ross' original cast of cartoonists come from? Some were self-taught. Others were products of art schools. And some of the most famous New Yorker cartoonists had attended Ivy League schools.

The previous link notes that the term "Ivy League" seems to have been coined in the 1930s. It became "official" in the sense that an American college football conference with that name and eight schools was established in the 1940s. Nowadays those eight colleges and universities are among the most prestigious in the United States. Best known are Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. In terms of excellence Penn and Columbia are in that mix with Dartmouth, Brown and Cornell not far behind. (Full disclosure: my Ph.D. degree is from Penn.)

What many readers need to know is that around 1930 the US population was far more concentrated in the Northeast than it is today. Therefore, the potential pool of New Yorker cartoonists was fairly close to New York City. Furthermore, until the 1960s, that part of the country -- the New England and Middle Atlantic regions -- did not have many large publicly-funded universities or even colleges. Higher education was largely done via private colleges and universities such as the Ivy League, the Seven Sisters (women's colleges) and the "Little Ivies" (smaller, but elite, schools). So when Ross hired cartoonists who had spent a year or more in college rather than an art school, the odds were that there would be some Ivy Leaguers in the mix.

Below are cartoons by prominent first-generation New Yorker cartoonists who had an Ivy League experience.

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Charles Addams
Charles Addams attended Penn for a while.

Peter Arno
Peter Arno spent a year at Yale. I wrote about him here.

Whitney Darrow, Jr.:  "...and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?...True or false?"
Whitney Darrow, Jr. was Princeton man. I wrote about him here.

Alan Dunn
Alan Dunn attended Columbia.  The chimp was the artist of the abstract painting above him.

Charles Saxon: "David never gives up.  I used to think that was a virtue."
So did Charles Saxon, who I wrote about here.

Gluyas Williams: INDUSTRIAL CRISIS ... The day a cake of soap sank at Procter & Gamble's"
Gluyas Williams went to Harvard. This joke needs an explanation for most readers. The Procter & Gamble company marketed a very popular bar soap named Ivory. For many years its advertising slogan included the phrases "99 44/100% Pure": "It floats."

Peter Arno, High Society Cartoonist

Above is a famous cartoon by Peter Arno -- Curtis Arnoux Peters, Jr. -- (1904-1968), whose work helped The New Yorker magazine survive its infancy and who was one of its mainstays for the rest of his career. Nevertheless, I suspect that his fame has been fading, like for most of his contemporaries on the magazine aside from Charles Addams. A generational thing, mostly, I imagine.

A brief Wikipedia entry on Arno is here, and here is a more extensive, but perhaps hard to access profile.

Arno was the son of a Wall Street lawyer who became a New York State Supreme Court judge (that's confusing because the top-level New York court is the Court of Appeals in Albany). His family life was highly stressful, his father nearly disowning him after his first and only year at Yale.

Following that, he tried to make a living in music and art, eventually selling a cartoon to the new New Yorker magazine. In this, he and the magazine soon became successful. Arno's subjects tended to be spoofs of New York's upper crust. At the same time, he was a part of that group's night club scene.

Artistically, his cartoons are strongly drawn with skillfully applied washes. Whereas it looks like they were simply dashed off, Arno actually put a good deal of work into them, sometimes making a number of images until he achieved what he wanted.

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In his studio.

Arno (at left) with super-debutante Brenda Frazier.

"Well, back to the old drawing board."
Another of Arno's most famous cartoons.

"We want to report a stolen car."

"Come along.  We're going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt."
This was from the mid-1930s when President Franklin Roosevelt was unpopular with many of the moneyed class. The Trans-Lux was a movie theatre that featured newsreels.

"I happen to be a MacNab, Miss.  I couldn't help noticing that you're wearing our tartan."

"Valerie won't be around for several days.  She backed into a sizzling platter."

"His spatter is wonderful, but his dribble lacks conviction."

Steeplechase and fox hunting might be confused here, but it's still amusing.

UPDATE: Notice how often Arno depicts eyes as being more vertical than horizontal. Effective for his cartoons. I wonder how he came up with this? Was it borrowed?

Whitney Darrow, Jr. of the New Yorker

Whitney Darrow, Jr. (1909-1999) was a mainstay cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine in its 1930s heyday and beyond. His Wikipedia entry notes that he was a Princeton University graduate who, unlike most other New Yorker cartoonists, wrote the captions to his work.

James Gurney posted about Darrow's method of producing a cartoon here. Rather than me discussing Darrow's work, do link to Gurney because he offers a lot of important information along with step-by step illustrations.

Examples of Darrow's work are shown below. I have no dates for them, but his style changed little over the years. And I've taken the liberty to explain some of the jokes because many viewers of this blog are not Americans and are likely to miss the humorous points.

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"Your father and I are now separated, Robert. After this you will please refer to him as 'that heel.'"

"I don't know what it is, Mr. Mardley, but there's something about this room that gives me the willies."
As an aside, the setting seems vaguely like my apartment.

"The gentleman wants to know if you'd care to join him in a little argument."
Most of Darrow's situations take place indoors, so he was careful to get the perspective and other details right.

"I paint what I see."

"I agree it's a monument to the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright but as a museum..."
This was from about 1959 after Wright's Guggenheim museum in New York opened. Its gallery is a descending spiral while the paintings are hung in true vertical/horizontal fashion. As Darrow points out, viewing is slightly disorienting.

"She's not really mine. I'm just watching her for a friend."

"Notice, class, how Angela circles, always keeping the desk between them..."
The setting is a business school class for secretaries (note the shorthand translations under the English words on the blackboard). The instructor is showing the girls how to avoid an amorous boss.

"And last but not least..."
Here the will of a deceased rich man is being read out: guess who might get the most money.

"What's the use of arguing, dear? Let him punch you in the jaw and get it over with."
New York traffic hasn't improved much since Darrow drew this in the late 1930s.

Garrett Price of the New Yorker

Garrett Price (1897–1979) is best known -- to me, at least -- for his New Yorker cartoons. His career was more varied than that, however. Besides cartoons, he illustrated books and for three years wrote and drew a comic strip. His Wikipedia entry is here, and here is a lengthy piece that goes into a good deal of detail regarding Price.

Successful though he was, Price's cartoon style strikes me as being more functional than distinctive. Fellow New Yorker cartoonists Charles Addams and Peter Arno, for example, had highly distinctive styles and became famous, unlike Price.

Examples of Price's work are below. Be aware that New Yorker cartoonists often (perhaps usually) did not come up with the ideas they illustrated: outsiders regularly submitted ideas to the editor.

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Life cover - 21 January 1926
Price did not work exclusively for The New Yorker.

Stage Magazine - May 1933

New Yorker

New Yorker
Judging by the woman's dress, this was a late 1920s cartoon.

New Yorker

New Yorker
The girl is nicely posed and drawn. Clearly Price often dialed down his illustration skills for his cartoon work, but not here.

New Yorker

New Yorker cover - 29 August 1925
A cover from the earliest days of The New Yorker. I suppose the joke is that the man is eating, whereas the flappers are having coffee or tea, but I could easily be wrong.

New Yorker cover - 12 July 1941
New Yorker covers often made no special point.

New Yorker cover - 30 August 1941
Here, six or so weeks later, Price worked in a more solid style.

New Yorker cover - 19 August 1951
This cover notes the opening of the United Nations Secretariat building.