Latest Additions To The Spill Library:
Two volumes of bound New Yorkers recently arrived here. I’m slowly filling in the early 1970s bound issues (there are plenty of loose issues in the library). This time period is especially of interest to me because these were the issues I studied, as a high school student, as they arrived in the mail. It’s enjoyable going through them once again, seeing old friends that left an impression, such as George Booth’s September 30th, 1974, “…lone grape…”— a drawing shown to everyone’s delight on the “Dick Cavett Show” New Yorker panel of cartoonists broadcast in March of 1978 (the cartoonists on the panel: Frank Modell, Charles Addams, Lee Lorenz, and Mr. Booth). But there are many many other drawings I didn’t recall while looking through the volumes this week. Back in the early 70s I looked at each drawing as if I was studying for an exam. These early 70s drawings helped me along, educating me weekly.
I have to add that coming upon each issue’s cover in these bound volumes is also a blast. If there was a Golden Age of New Yorker covers (as there was a Golden Age of New Yorker drawings), the 70s were easily within that era. Two that I’ve shown above are among many personal favorites. Some Spill readers may recall that the cover above on the left, by Jean-Paul Suares, dated September 21, 1974, appeared on (and in) Seasons At The New Yorker, a wonderful collection of cover art published in 1984.
The strength of the magazine’s Golden Age art (cover art and art, including cartoons, within the magazine) was due to the magazine’s editorial arrangement for fifty-three years*; from 1939 through part of 1992 there was one editor in charge of all the magazine’s art. That art editor, along their respective senior editor who had the final word (Geraghty with Harold Ross, then William Shawn, and Lorenz with Shawn) developed a synchronicity that produced issue after issue that felt, in a way, as a piece, both in text and art.
*More Reading:
The Art Meeting: A Potted History (originally posted on Ink Spill, February 18, 2012)
It’s tempting to believe that the structure of The New Yorker’s Art Department arrived fully formed in 1924 when Harold Ross, with his wife Jane Grant began pulling together his dream magazine. But of course, such was not the case.
What we know for certain is that once the first issue was out, Ross and several of his newly hired employees began meeting every Tuesday afternoon to discuss the incoming art submissions. The very first art meetings consisted of Ross, his Art Director, Rea Irvin, Ross’s secretary, Helen Mears, and Philip Wylie, the magazine’s first utility man. In no short order, Ralph Ingersoll, hired in June of ’25 joined the art meeting, and later still, Katharine White (then Katharine Angell), hired in August of ’25, began sitting in.
From James Thurber’s account in The Years With Ross we get a good idea of what took place at the meeting, which began right after lunch and ended at 6 pm:
In the center of a long table in the art meeting room a drawing board was set up to display the week’s submissions…Ross sat on the edge of a chair several feet away from the table, leaning forward, the fingers of his left hand spread upon his chest, his right hand holding a white knitting needle which he used for a pointer…Ross rarely laughed outright at anything. His face would light up, or his torso would undergo a spasm of amusement, but he was not at the art meeting for pleasure.
William Maxwell, who joined The New Yorker’s staff in 1936, told the Paris Review in its Fall 1982 issue:
Occasionally Mrs. White would say that the picture might be saved if it had a better caption, and it would be returned to the artist or sent to E. B. White, who was a whiz at this… Rea Irvin smoked a cigar and was interested only when a drawing by Gluyas Williams appeared on the stand.
And from Dale Kramer’s Ross and The New Yorker:
When a picture amused him Irvin’s eyes brightened, he chuckled, and often, because none of the others understood art techniques, gave a little lecture. There would be a discussion and a decision. If the decision was to buy, a price was settled on. When a picture failed by a narrow margin the artist was given a chance to make changes and resubmit it. Irvin suggested improvements that might be made, and Wylie passed them on to the artists.
In a letter to Thurber biographer, Harrison Kinney, Rogers Whitaker, a New Yorker contributor from 1926 – 1981, described the scene in the magazine’s offices once the art meeting ended:
The place was especially a mess after the weekly art meeting. The artists, who waited for the verdicts, scrambled for desk space where they could retouch their cartoons and spots according to what Wylie, or Katharine Angell, told them Ross wanted done.
Wylie was one of many artist “hand-holders” – the bridge between the editors and the artists. Some others who held this position were Thurber (briefly, in 1927), Wolcott Gibbs, Scudder Middleton, and William Maxwell. According to Maxwell, Katharine White’s hand-holding duties were eventually narrowed to just Hokinson and Peter Arno, the magazine’s prized artists.
Lee Lorenz wrote in his Art of The New Yorker that, in the earliest years, the look of the magazine:
had been accomplished without either an art editor in the usual sense or the support of anything one could reasonably call an art department.
That changed in 1939 when former gagman, James Geraghty was hired. As with so much distant New Yorker history, there’s some fuzziness concerning exactly what Geraghty was hired to do. Geraghty, in his unpublished memoir, wrote that he took the job “without any inkling” of what was required of him. There’ve been suggestions in numerous accounts of New Yorker history, that Geraghty was hired as yet another in the lengthening line of artist hand-holders, in this case, succeeding William Maxwell, who was increasingly pre-occupied with his own writing as well as his editorial duties under Katharine White.
Geraghty, in his memoir, recalled his first art meeting and the awkwardness of sitting next to Rea Irvin: two men seemingly sharing one (as yet unofficial, unnamed) position: Art Editor. While E.B. White and others continued to “tinker” with captions, Geraghty began spending one day a week working exclusively on captions. He also adopted the idea that he was the Artists’ “representative” at meetings, following Ross’s assurance that Geraghty was being paid “to keep the damned artists happy.”
With these new components, the art meeting committee model stayed in place until the death of Ross in December of 1951. When William Shawn officially succeeded Ross in January of 1952, he pared the meeting to two participants: Shawn, and Geraghty.
With Geraghty’s retirement in 1973, and Lee Lorenz’s appointment as Art Editor, the art meetings continued with Lorenz and Shawn. Shawn’s successor, Robert Gottlieb and then Tina Brown, subdivided the Art Department, creating a Cartoon Editor, an Art Editor (for covers) and an Illustration Editor
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The Tilley Watch Online, November 18-22, 2024
An end of the week listing of New Yorker artists whose work has appeared on newyorker.com features
Daily Cartoon: Marie Pax (as of this time, an online only contributor), Tommy Siegel, Ben Schwartz, Brendan Loper, Tom Toro.
Culture Desk: A Visit To Planet Koren by Paul Karasik
Barry Blitt’s Kvetchbook: “Donald And Elon Pull Strings”