George Wachsteter

Gore Vidal's 1957 Comedy, "A Visit to a Small Planet"

1957

Medium: Pen and Ink on Cardstock Signature: Signed Lower Left 13.25" x 10.50" image on 22.00" x 15.00" cardstock. Ink on Cardstock Caricature Promo for 1959 Broadway Play `The Gang`s All Here`, starring Melvyn Douglas...

Medium: Pen and Ink on Illustration Board Signature: Signed Lower Right Caricature by George Wachsteter (1911-2004) for would-be Broadway production of Paul Osborne`s `Maiden Voyage...

Medium: Pen and Ink on Illustration Board Signature: Signed Upper Right Caricature by George Wachsteter (1911-2004) for Broadway Comedy, `Uncle Willie` with Menasha Skulnik, Edith F...

Medium: Pen and Ink on Illustration Board Signature: Signed Lower Right Drawing by George Wachsteter (1911-2004) for 1948 Broadway revival of `Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II`s Show Boat`, starring Billy House as Cap`n Andy Hawks and Carol Bruce as Julie Dozier, City Center Theatre, directed by Hassard Short, produced by Richard Rodgers...

"At Home Abroad" 1935 Broadway Play NY Times Published Illustration 20th Century Al Hirschfeld (1903 - 2003) At Home Abroad 9 1/2 x 17 inches (sight) Ink on board Signed upper right...

American Art Deco 20th Century Modernism Social Realism WPA Era Scene Pin-Up Arthur Rosenman Ross (1913 - 1981) 'Edward, This Man Insulted Me. Do Something" Sight: 20 x 15 inches Wa...

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...

Barbara Shermund (1899-1978). Fancy Department Store Satirical Cartoon, ca. 1930's. Ink, watercolor and gouache on heavy illustration paper, panel measures 19 x 15 inches. Signed lower right. Very good condition. 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 home...