Tuesday Spill: Homecoming

Homecoming

Not too long ago (a week-and-a-half at most) Liza Donnelly and I drove into Manhattan and picked up a carload of original cartoon art that had been exhibited at The Society of Illustrators (“Drawn From The New Yorker: A Centennial Celebration”).This event — the exhibit and the retrieval of the work — was a Liza Donnelly operation. I was along mostly as wheel man. Our car was stuffed with large boxes — precious cargo. A number of the originals belong to generous collectors who loaned their work to the exhibit (and we thank them once again for sharing these fabulous pieces! We’ll be getting their work back to them soon).

It’s been a whole lot of fun going through the boxes, taking out pieces, then rehanging them (below: these walls were empty until just a few days ago).

I missed the cartoons while they were away — I’ve always gotten an inspirational boost looking at them. But the greater reward was knowing that so many folks enjoyed seeing them exhibited on the SOI’s walls. It’s interesting thinking about that now — the various responses to the artists’ work (and thus to the artists themselves). Some of the cartoonists whose work was exhibited have drifted into obscurity after so many years following their their time at The New Yorker. With the exhibit, they and their work, got to take another bow.

Here’s just one drawing that returned home. It’s one of my all-time favorites. The artist is Alice Harvey, who contributed to the magazine from 1925 through 1943 (below it: a close-up look of how it appeared as published in The New Yorker, March 20, 1926, and below that, how it looked on the page).

I wish I could’ve asked Ms. Harvey What’s with the very tall column? Most any other cartoonist wouldn’t have gone that far out of the “box”; did she know (or hope) that the magazine’s layout department would accommodate the column? That the magazine did go along with that hilarious element, making text subservient to the drawing, says a lot about the respect accorded cartoons (and cartoonists) in the earliest days of the magazine.

_____________________

Alice Harvey Born 1894, Austin, Illinois. Died, 1983. New Yorker work: Oct. 17th, 1925 – May 1, 1943. An illustration by Ms. Harvey accompanied Ellin Mackay’s celebrated November 28, 1925 New Yorker article, “Why We Go To Cabarets” — the piece often credited with helping boost the fledgling New Yorker’s circulation.