Richard Taylor

Art Lovers and Art Critics Analyzing Obscene Painting. Cartoon

Circa 1940s - 1950s

Put aside Richard Taylor's dry wit. Look at his masterfully rendered figures and brilliantly constructed compositions based on a two-point perspective. Clearly, he is an underrated and overlooked talent in the class of Charles Addams. Above all, Taylor, with his heavely-lidded-eyed figure, has a style of his own. An artist who has an instantly recognized style - unique to him/her is a rarity in today's artworld of derivative artists. "For Posing, My Terms Are a Dollar an Hour, Room, and Board", Playboy cartoon illustration...

Hight brow couple having relationship issues rendered in a black and white stylized Art Deco fashion. In pencil the caption reads "Are you willing to divorce your wife the minute sh...

Medium: Pen and Ink on Board Signature: Signed Lower Right A political cartoon of a man and a woman at a dinner table.

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...