Lee Lorenz, New Yorker Artist, And Former New Yorker Art & Cartoon Editor: 1932-2022

 

Very sad news tonight from Martha Lorenz, that her father, Lee Lorenz, The New Yorker‘s art editor from 1973 -1993, and cartoon editor from 1993 – 1997, passed away Thursday morning at his home in Connecticut. Lee contributed cartoons and covers to The New Yorker for fifty-seven years, from 1958 through 2015. 

Born in Hackensack, New Jersey, Lee attended Carnegie Tech, and The Pratt Institute. He began his professional cartooning career in 1956 when he sold a cartoon to Collier’s. The New Yorker awarded him an artist contract in 1958, the year he began contributing to the magazine. His first New Yorker cartoon was published March 8, 1958. His last (shown here), according to the magazine’s archive, appeared January 12, 2015.

 

Upon the retirement of James Geraghty, the magazine’s art editor from 1939-1973, William Shawn, the magazine’s editor, appointed Mr. Lorenz art editor. In a 2014 interview, Lee told me that he considered “finding new artists” the “most important part” of his job. History has shown that he did a spectacular job of doing just that, bringing fifty artists into the fold (including this one). Among the fifty: Jack Ziegler, Nurit Karlin, Roz Chast, Liza Donnelly, Peter Steiner, Edward Sorel, Bob Mankoff, Jules Feiffer, Frank Cotham, Mick Stevens, Michael Crawford, J.J. Sempe, John O’Brien, Bruce Eric Kaplan (BEK), Arnie Levin, Victoria Roberts, P.C. Vey, Barbara Smaller, Barry Blitt, Leo Cullum, and Bill Woodman.

Lee also edited the work of such veteran contributors as Saul Steinberg, Charles Addams, George Price, James Stevenson, Frank Modell, Warren Miller, George Booth, Sam Gross, Edward Frascino, William Hamilton, Ed Arno, Charles Barsotti, Robert Weber, Barney Tobey, William Steig, J. B. Handelsman, Charles Saxon, Joseph Mirachi, Charles E. Martin, Mischa Richter, Mort Gerberg, Ed Fisher, and Edward Koren. 

The large majority of the new wave was decidedly in favor of eschewing the use of outside writers, something Lee supported and encouraged. The practice, never fully embraced by the artists throughout the magazine’s history, began petering out in the mid-1950s. In Lee’s earliest years as art editor, it became nearly extinct. As he told Women’s Wear Daily in 1986: “To me, a cartoonist draws and writes. It’s a special art form that calls for a dovetailing of the artistic and the verbal.”

As an editor, Lee was mostly hands-off, letting the artists explore their worlds. When he did suggest a change, it was often couched as an observation. One of his remarks concerning a drawing of mine was: “That chair looks like it has a face.”  

 He was a master of the art of cartooning — his work gleefully covered cartoonland’s spectrum; each drawing was delivered with his trademark deceptively casual energetic brush work. Here’s one from the issue of October 3, 1977:

 

Not too many years ago I was asked to write a few sentences about Lee for an event honoring him. What I said was:

As editor, Lee showed the artists and their art an enormous amount of respect, and we in return were committed to giving him our very best work. An unwritten pact that raised the bar high for the art of New Yorker, and for The New Yorker itself.  

 — Above: From The New Yorker, January 4, 1982

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Updated at 9:00am, December 9,2022:

The New Yorker‘s editor, David Remnick, sent the following email to the magazine’s artists this morning:

Lee Lorenz, a beloved figure at The New Yorker, was the art editor here from 1973 to 1993 and then continued as cartoon editor until 1997. A couple of hours ago, I got word that Lee died this morning. He was born in Hackensack, New Jersey (a blessed town in which to be born), and had a long and distinguished career here. Lee’s style was in line with Peter Arno and many of the early New Yorker masters. His inky brushstroke was distinctive, his jokes extremely funny. As an editor, he brought in an astonishing array of new talent, artists who no longer took their gags from “ideas” people: the new wave was in the singer-songwriter mode, writing their own jokes and creating their own distinctive visual universes. Lee’s eye was such that he could go through an enormous pile of drawings and pick out a newcomer…like Roz Chast. As an editor, he was both discerning and kind. 

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More:

The New York Times obit by Sam Roberts (posted Dec. 10, 2022)

The Washington Post obit by Brian Murphy (posted Dec 10, 2022)

Liza Donnelly: “Losing A Great Editor”

Bob Eckstein (a Facebook post).

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 Lee Lorenz Cartoon Collections & More… 

Lee Lorenz. Here It Comes: A Cartoon Collection. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968.

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Lee Lorenz. Now Look What You’ve Done! New York: Pantheon, 1977.

Lee Lorenz. The Golden Age of Trash: Cartoons for the Eighties. San Francisco: Chronicle, 1987.

Lee Lorenz. Dinah’s Egg. New York: Simon and Schuster for Young Readers, 1990.

 

 

Lee Lorenz. The Art of the New Yorker, 1925-1995. New York: A. Knopf, 1995.

Books edited by Lee Lorenz: 

The Essential series, all published by Workman: Booth (pub: 1998), Barsotti (pub: 1998), Ziegler (pub: 2001).

The World of William Steig (Artisan, 1998). 

To see a number of Lee Lorenz’s approximately 1,800 New Yorker cartoons and 8 covers , link here to the magazine’s Cartoon Bank

Photo of Lee Lorenz: courtesy of Liza Donnelly