Gahan Wilson

House Arrest - Conceptual Art for The New Yorker

1997

Gahan Wilson's artistic output of original ideas, masterfully executed, seems endless. He has a conceptual style that, like Charles Addams, delves into the macabre. Yet, one immedia...

Welcome to Gahan Wilson's magnificently morbid mind, where viewing his cartoons/illustrations gives the viewer the creeps. In this work, a husband designs...

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...

Gahan Wilson is a conceptual artist before he is a cartoonist, but this concept is invisible to most in the art world. "I Think it's Time I Told You My Little Secret!" pen, ink, and ...

William Anthony, (1934 - 2022) Gilles, 1982 Matted 17 X 15 (not framed,) sheet is 9.5 X 12.5, drawing is a bit smaller. American painter, illustrator and draftsman William Anthony was born 1934 in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Getting his undergraduate degree in history and serving as a senior editor for campus humor magazine The Yale Record. While majoring in history at Yale University, Anthony attended a few art courses, one of which was taught by Josef Albers. He also attended the Art Students' League in 1958 and 1961. After graduating from Yale, he joined his family in California, where he attended the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1962, Anthony taught figure drawing at a commercial art school in San Francisco, where he developed a method of drawing that resulted in his book A New Approach to Figure Drawing. Two years later he moved to New York City. From 1977 to 1978, Anthony made a series of drawings for Andy Warhol magazine...

Ed Fisher (1926-2013) Original Cartoon From "The New Yorker" Circa 2009 Graphite on Paper 9" x 12.5" unframed 12" x 16" framed

Caricature etching by American artist Charles Bragg. A jury of different caricatures sits unamused before a smiling attorney. The Defense Rests Charles Bragg, American (1931–2017) ...

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...