Chon Day

What is the Meaning of it All ? - New Yorker Cartoon

1970

Biology students make an unexpected visit to a neighborhood brothel for sexual services. The establishment where sex workers are available for hire to service the Professor is now ap...

Interpretation 1: An utterly exhausted man collapses face-first into a diner's countertop. His face and the countertop become one. Seemingly oblivious to the acute nature of the man's condition, the night server gleefully offers him coffee instead of more appropriate help. Interpretation 2: The night server/psycho killer pours unsuspecting customer poisoned coffee and then taunts his lifeless body in a victorious tone. Like Charles Addams...

The world’s most miserable man is served up bad news. Depressed and down on his luck, he receives news of only a brief respite to crawl out of his inky black abyss of misery. The ca...

"Harry has no interest in mundane pleasures." Enter the mind of a mid-century American/ Canadian Artist. The theme of Artist and Model has been used for centuries, but Richard Denison Taylor ( R. Taylor ) clearly has his own humorous style. The Taylor girl is easily recognizable by her oversized, heavy-lidded oval eyes and curvaceous body shape. Taylor is in the Charles Addams...

Barbara Shermund (1899-1978). Society Satirical Cartoon, ca. 1940s. Gouache on heavy illustration paper, image measures 17 x 14 inches; 23 x 20 inches in matting. Signed lower left. Very good condition but matting panel should be replaced. Unframed. Provenance: Ethel Maud Mott Herman, artist (1883-1984), West Orange NJ. For two decades, she drew almost 600 cartoons for The New Yorker with female characters that commented on life with wit, intelligence and irony. In the mid-1920s, Harold Ross, the founder of a new magazine called The New Yorker, was looking for cartoonists who could create sardonic, highbrow illustrations accompanied by witty captions that would function as social critiques. He found that talent in Barbara Shermund. For about two decades, until the 1940s, Shermund helped Ross and his first art editor, Rea Irvin, realize their vision by contributing almost 600 cartoons and sassy captions with a fresh, feminist voice. Her cartoons commented on life with wit, intelligence and irony, using female characters who critiqued the patriarchy and celebrated speakeasies, cafes, spunky women and leisure. They spoke directly to flapper women of the era who defied convention with a new sense of political, social and economic independence. “Shermund’s women spoke their minds about sex, marriage and society; smoked cigarettes and drank; and poked fun at everything in an era when it was not common to see young women doing so,” Caitlin A. McGurk wrote in 2020 for the Art Students League. In one Shermund cartoon, published in The New Yorker in 1928, two forlorn women sit and chat on couches. “Yeah,” one says, “I guess the best thing to do is to just get married and forget about love.” “While for many, the idea of a New Yorker cartoon conjures a highbrow, dry non sequitur — often more alienating than familiar — Shermund’s cartoons are the antithesis,” wrote McGurk, who is an associate curator and assistant professor at Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. “They are about human nature, relationships, youth and age.” (McGurk is writing a book about Shermund. And yet by the 1940s and ’50s, as America’s postwar focus shifted to domestic life, Shermund’s feminist voice and cool critique of society fell out of vogue. Her last cartoon appeared in The New Yorker in 1944, and much of her life and career after that remains unclear. No major newspaper wrote about her death in 1978 — The New York Times was on strike then, along with The Daily News and The New York Post — and her ashes sat in a New Jersey funeral...

Cartoon sketch, ca. 1955. Pencil on paper, sheet measures 8.5 x 11 inches. Unsigned with editor's notations. From a group of sketches meant to be preliminary drafts for editor appro...

Cartoon sketch, ca. 1955. Pencil on paper, sheet measures 8.5 x 11 inches. Unsigned with editor's notations. From a group of sketches meant to be preliminary drafts for editor appro...

Ernest Howard Shepard (British, 1879–1976) Laying Breaks on a London Street, an Illustration for Punch Magazine Inkpen and body colour Signed ‘Ernest H. Shepard’ (lower left) 8 1/8 x...