The Monday Tilley Watch Takes A Glancing Look At The Art & Artists Of The Latest Issue Of The New Yorker
The Cover: Ukraine-centric
The Cartoonists And Cartoons:
Thirteen cartoons, fourteen cartoonists (Ed Steed takes care of the “spots” in this issue). The Spill counts duos as one cartoonist. There’s one duo in the issue (that we know of): Liza Donnelly and Carl Kissin. One newbie, Jerald Lewis, who is the 6th new cartoonist added to the magazine’s stable this year, and the 106th added since Emma Allen became the magazine’s cartoon editor in May of 2017. The longest active contributing cartoonist in the issue is this cartoonist (my work first appeared in the issue of December 26, 1977, with Whitney Darrow, Jr. as the artist working off my idea. My first published New Yorker drawing appeared in the issue of April 17, 1978).
Listing the key word(s) and/or what’s referenced in an issue’s cartoons is, for me, fun for fun’s sake, although I suppose you could go down the “snapshot in time” route. Are there “evergreens” here? Will the references in some of the drawings be lost on future New Yorker readers, say in fifty years? To drag out a saying from the not too distant past: It’s All Good.
Suits: Wordle(?)/Relationship; Sipress: Aesop’s “The Tortoise and the Hare”; Donnelly/Kissin: The Olympics/Relationship; Chast: Horror Movies/Babies; Dai: Intern/Witch’s Brew; Vey: Health Insurance/Police; K.:Boxing/Parenting; Glenn: E-mail/Household Chore; Finck: Musician/Music Biz; Rosen: Aging/”Names”; Tom: Working At Home; Maslin: Astronomy; Lewis: Relationship/Patreon.
The Rea Irvin Talk Watch:
Back in the Spring of 2017, the above 92 year old iconic Talk Of The Town design by Rea Irvin was replaced by — gasp! — a redraw. Hope springs eternal that the above returns sooner than later. Read about it here.
Rea Irvin (pictured above. Self portrait above from Meet the Artist) *Born, San Francisco, 1881; died in the Virgin Islands,1972. Irvin was the cover artist for the New Yorker’s first issue, February 21, 1925. He was the magazine’s first art and only art supervisor (some refer to him as its first art editor) holding the position from 1925 until 1939 when James Geraghty assumed the title of art editor. Irvin then became art director and remained in that position until William Shawn officially succeeded Harold Ross in early 1952. Irvin’s last original work for the magazine was the magazine’s cover of July 12, 1958. The February 21, 1925 Eustace Tilley cover had been reproduced every year on the magazine’s anniversary until 1994, when R. Crumb’s Tilley-inspired cover appeared. Tilley has since reappeared, with other artists substituting from time-to-time.