The Tilley Watch Online, July 8-12, 2024
An end of the week listing of New Yorker artists whose work has appeared on newyorker.com features
The Daily Cartoon: Ellis Rosen, Ali Solomon, Adam Douglas Thompson, Ivan Ehlers, Sarah Kempa.
Shouts & Murmurs: Eugenia Viti, Adam Douglas Thompson.
Sketchbook: Sofia Warren
Link to The New Yorker‘s Humor & Cartoons section
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Charles Saxon’s First & Last New Yorker Covers
Mr. Saxon was a powerhouse New Yorker cartoonist, one of the handful who managed to produce single panel drawings and spreads and covers, as well as producing a ton of work for the advertising world (in his New York Times obit, we are told that “so ubiquitous was his advertising work in the late 1970s that one edition of The Wall Street Journal featured ads by Mr. Saxon for three different companies.”). He contributed an outstanding 93* covers and 725** drawings for The New Yorker over a career of forty-five years).
For today, we’ll just take a look at his very first New Yorker cover, published December 19, 1959, and his very last, published September 26, 1988. I have to admit that if I was looking at a page of New Yorker covers (such as I just was) I wouldn’t have recognized his first cover as a Saxon piece. It looks a whole lot more like something Garrett Price would’ve done. But that aside, I love the mood Saxon captured, and how he captured it.
His last cover, published less than three months before he died (December 6, 1988) is the opposite of the first, IDing-wise. There was no one else in the magazines’s stable drawing people like that (Robert Weber would be the closest, but his style had such a definitive set of characteristics one would never confuse the two artists). Saxon had occasionally mixed his cartoon figures with a more elaborate — more “serious”(?) drawing style. It’s on display here: the cartoon man sitting on the steps of a beautifully rendered building. Those statues remind me a bit of Ed Sorel’s work.
*The New Yorker‘s database # of covers differs from The New York Times # by one cover. The database awards Saxon one more cover.
** The New Yorker‘s database# of drawings (714) differs from The New York Times #(725).
Whichever #s are accurate (it’s possible both are off) it still adds up to an impressive body of work.