Taking another look through a Life Magazine (dated December 7, 1942) that contains a great article on holiday New Yorker art (“Cartoon Books: “New Yorker” Art Fills New Albums”), I was reminded of this headline that accompanies a double page spread of Charles Addams’ art:
Unfortunately I can’t show you the entire piece (you can see the issue’s contents by linking here) nor can I show you the Addams drawings (I can tell you that there are fifteen drawings shown, including this one). But the point of this Addams entry is not so much particular drawings in an article as the “no words at all” business. In Addams’ Dick Cavett appearance (mentioned on this site just the other day) he told Mr. Cavett he preferred caption-less drawings. With a time span of thirty-six years between this issue of Life and the Cavett show, Addams remained consistent in his belief.
It’s understandable why Addams would like caption-less; for the artist, it’s a joy to develop a drawing that carries the load, sans caption (I may have accomplished it no more than a dozen times in my nearly fifty years at the magazine). For the reader, there’s a really nice payoff at the tail end of the few seconds spent looking around a caption-less drawing — a silent moment that ends in “getting” the idea.
–left: Addams’ self-portrait on the cover of Brendan Gill’s “Here At The New Yorker”
Addams is not considered a master of one or the other, but of both — he excelled in caption-less and captioned drawings. For an artist who contributed well over a thousand drawings to The New Yorker, this was an unusual feat.
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Article Of Interest…The Daily Heller: “New Yorker Cartoonists Finally Show Their Faces”
From The Daily Heller, November 26, 2024, this Q&A piece with At Wit’s End photographer, Alen MacWeeney, and myself.
From the intro by Mr. Heller:
“Cartoon, like radio, is a medium where the artists are invisible “voices.”
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At Wit’s End: Cartoonists Of The New Yorker is just out. Available wherever books are sold.