Event Of Interest: 14 New Yorker Artists At Read360
The folks shown below will gather in NYC on May 1st.
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Two Pages
Looking through a recent addition to the Spill library, a bound volume of New Yorkers from the Fall of 1985 through mid-February 1986, I came across these two pages in the issue of January 21 ’86. I (of course!) always pause to take in cartoons, but these two pages caused a full stop, and inspired a few thoughts.
I applaud the great New Yorker artists whose work we see: Lee Lorenz, and Arnie Levin. But applause also for Mr. Lorenz in his capacity as Art Editor, and William Shawn as Editor for bringing this work to the magazine’s pages, and for the make-up department that decided how the work should look on the magazine’s pages.
I’m not a deep dive person, graphically speaking — all I know is that these two drawings work beautifully, solo, and opposite each other. Lorenz’s businessman’s rock solid figure, with the spot-on caption is classic Lorenz. I spent a lot of time as a fledgling New Yorker contributor developing my own businessman based on Lorenz’s. Of the many businessmen cartoons by so many New Yorker cartoonists, Lorenz’s occupy the top berth.
Levin’s drawing style (on the Thurber branch of The New Yorker’s Cartoonist Tree) is perfection; the caption-less multiple part drawing is something he did so well, so many times in the magazine (my guess: his interest in animation played a role in his command of sequential drawings).
I should add that these two pages are not unusual from that time period. I could’ve randomly picked out any issue and found this kind of work, shown on the page in this considered way.
Lorenz & Levin on the A-Z
Lee Lorenz (Photograph taken 1995 by Liza Donnelly) *Born 1932, Hackensack, NJ. Lorenz was the art editor of The New Yorker from 1973 to 1993 and its cartoon editor until 1997. During his tenure, a new wave of New Yorker cartoonists began appearing in the magazine — cartoonists who no longer depended on idea men. Cartoon collections: Here It Comes (Bobbs-Merrrill Co., Inc. 1968) ; Now Look What You’ve Done! (Pantheon, 1977) ; The Golden Age of Trash ( Chronicle Books, 1987); The Essential series, all published by Workman: : Booth (pub: 1998), Barsotti ( pub: 1998), Ziegler (pub: 2001), The Art of The New Yorker 1925 -1995, (Knopf, 1995), The World of William Steig (Artisan, 1998). New Yorker work: 1958 –.
Arnie Levin Born 1938, Brooklyn, NY. Collection: I’ll Skip the Appetizer — I Ate the Flowers (Plume, 1980). New Yorker work: 1974 –.