George Wachsteter

Ned Sparks & Joan Blondell in "Gold Diggers of 1933" (2)

1933

Medium: Pen & Ink, Colored Pencil and Cut Paper on Onionsk Signature: Signed Lower Right Caricature by George Wachsteter (1911-2004) for CBS-TV comedy `The Ann Sothern Show` (1958-1961) starring Sothern as Katy O`Connor, assistant manager of the swank NYC hotel...

Medium: Pen and Ink on Illustration Board Signature: Unsigned Caricatures by George Wachsteter (1911-2004) of ZaSu Pitts in `Cordelia` & Eva Le Gallienne h...

Medium: Pen and Ink on Illustration Board Signature: Signed Lower Right This piece is on 15.00" x 20.00" illustration board, with an image that measures to 11.50" x 14.00." Some soiling, editor's notations. Drawing by George Wachsteter (1911-2004) for 1947 Broadway show `Man and Superman` by George Bernard Shaw, starring Maurice Evans...

Medium: Pen and Ink on Cardstock Signature: Signed Lower Center Double Set of Caricatures by George Wachsteter (1911-2004) for 1957 Off-Broadway Hit Revivals `The Three Penny Opera` & `The Iceman Cometh`, at the Theatre de Lys & Circle in the Square...

The Couple is a pen Drawing realized by Mino Maccari (1924-1989) in 1935 ca. Hand-signed on the lower margin. Good condition. Mino Maccari (Siena, 1924-Rome, June 16, 1989) was a...

Cinema is an Original Watercolor realized by Gérard Lauzier (1932-2008). Good condition and vivid colors. No signature. Gérard Lauzier (30 November 1932 – 6 December 2008) was a French comics...

The Couple is a drawing realized by RIV (Carlo Rivalta) in the early 20th Century. Ink and pencil on paper. In Six Frame Stories with hand-written notes Good conditions with sligh...

Barbara Shermund (1899-1978). Showgirls Cartoon for Life Magazine, 1934. Ink, watercolor and gouache on heavy illustration paper, matting window measures 16.5 x 13 inches; sheet measures 19 x 15 inches; Matting panel measures 20 x 23 inches. Signed lower right. Very good condition with discoloration and toning in margins. 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...