Last week, there was an impromptu visit to the Spill’s headquarters by a quartet of New Yorker cartoonists. Not too long ago I would’ve led them to what my wife and I call the piano room (because there’s a piano in the room) where they would’ve seen four walls covered with framed cartoons by New Yorker artists (a sample directly below).
But sometime in the past few months all the work came down and the walls were painted. Not a single framed piece has been re-hung (it’s a where do we start? issue).
What framed pieces the visiting cartoonists could see — all hung in the living room, where I work — were drawings by James Thurber, Barbara Shermund, Helen Hokinson, and Alice Harvey. Feeling that my visitors would also enjoy seeing the work no longer hanging up, I began bringing drawings out of storage, a few at a time. Out came work by George Price, Lee Lorenz (shown below), Anatol Kovarsky, Richard Taylor, Arthur Getz, Garrett Price, Johan Bull, Peter Arno, Bill Woodman, Edward Sorel, Art Young, Warren Miller, Jack Ziegler, Charles Saxon, Nurit Karlin (to name but a few).
Each piece was generously welcomed by my visitors; each piece examined. This was a parade of styles, of “worlds” that defined The New Yorker cartoon culture for most of its timeline. At one point I brought out a drawing by Robert Weber — it was met with near applause (Weber’s work is considered by many as a peak of New Yorker cartoon artistry).
There’s just about nothing more pleasing than watching cartoonists look over work they admire — work that, in many cases, inspired them, and continues to inspire them. I’ve always thought of looking at such work as refueling. If you are a cartoonist looking at high bar work by high bar cartoonists, you might just feel a little bit of a boost from these giants next time you sit down in front of a blank piece of paper, or more commonly now, a blank screen.
Below: a beauty by Helen Hokinson. It appeared in The New Yorker, November 24, 1945
