James Thurber, Writer and Nearly-Blind Part-Time Cartoonist

James Grover Thurber (1894-1961) called his New Yorker cartoons "doodles." Which they were, in the sense that he was essentially a writer who did cartooning on the side. Plus, he was going blind.

Some biographical information is here, and details along with informed speculation regarding his eye condition is here.

Thurber had one eye injured by an arrow in an accident when he was a boy. That eye had to be removed. His other eye developed problems and his vision began to deteriorate as he entered his forties. Eventually he was declared legally blind.

I don't have dates for the cartoons displayed below. By their appearance, I assume that they were mostly drawn before his eye condition had progressed very far.

Bottom line regarding Thurber: He should not be judged using professional criteria.

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"He doesn't know anything except facts."

"I have a Neurosis."

"Where did you get those big brown eyes and that tiny mind?"

"Well it makes a difference to me."

"What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?"

"Is this man annoying you, dear?"

"You said a moment ago that everybody you look at seems to be a rabbit.  Now just what do you mean by that, Mrs. Sprague?"

Anatol Kovarsky's Cartoons About Art

Anatol Kovarsky (1919-2016) was born in post-revolutionary Russia, lived in Poland and France until 1941, then was able to escape to the USA. He became a cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine, later concentrating on painting. Some biographical information can be found here, though you will have to scroll down to find it.

Given The New Yorker's method of supplying cartoon ideas to its cartoonists, it can be difficult to be sure which ideas came from the artist and which from others. That said, Kovarsky cartoons had a unique "feel" to them, so I suspect many or even most ideas were his own.

Art was a major subject for him. Below are examples.

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Now for two cartoons that might be considered politically questionable nowadays ... enjoy!

Robert Weber, New Yorker Cartoonist

Robert Maxwell Weber (1924-2016) was a New Yorker magazine cartoonist for many years, though his professional career began as a fashion illustrator -- unusual for a cartoonist. He probably didn't realize at the time what a wise career move that was, because fashion illustration began to give way to photography in the 1960s whereas the New Yorker continues to feature cartoons.

For more information on Weber you might link here and here.

Weber's style was sketchy, and done often using charcoal sometimes supported by wash. I suppose he might be rated as an above-average New Yorker cartoonist (its cartoons were well above the general average). But he did not achieve the fame of members of the previous New Yorker generation such as Charles Addams and Peter Arno.

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"In a way I am kind of famous.  But you've probably never heard of me unless you happen to travel in actuarial circles."
I happen to be a demographer, a distant cousin of actuarial work. Makes me wonder how famous I am.

"These projected figures are a figment of our imagination.  We hope you like them."
As the author of a book on population forecasting, this cartoon also hits home.

"You've been very bad, so we're sending you back to New York."
Oh so true.

"Billy is turning out to be quite the little artist."

"Do you mind if I say something helpful about your personality?"

"I'm back.  The Brie's not ripe."

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?