BARBARA SHERMUND

Life Magazine Art Deco Showgirls Cartoon

1934

Elegant and glamorous fashion illustration from the 1920's, Original signed gouache painting on paper. Monogrammed V.S. lower right. Site: 10"x 7.75" Frame: 19.25"x 17"

Fantastic magazine cartoon illustration by American Artist, Leo Nowak (1907-2001). Ink, gouache and crayon in illustration paper, image measures 7.5 x 9.5 i...

Bill Crawford (1913-1982). Original illustration artwork depicting teams as they advance to the World Series. Depicted are representations of the St. Louis Cardinals and The Brooklyn...

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...

Framed Size 28.5 x 21 Jaro Fabry was a brilliant illustrator with a defined style of his own. There is not a brushstroke out of place in his works that appear loosely rendered. He is best known for his depiction of Golden Age of Hollywood...

This is a masterfully rendered and brilliantly designed scene from the Arabian Nights. page 33 from Random House. We are not sure if this is by Gustaf Tenggren. ( Gustaf Tenggren At...

This work is an exceptional example of Kádár's mature Cubist style. It's effortlessly designed around a complex composition of nude men and women tending to horses in a surreal landscape with Greek columns, friezes and marshmello clouds set against a rich blue saturated sky. Kádár was a Hungarian painter influenced by Der Blaue Reiter...

Gustaf Tenggren- Attributed This masterfully designed and graphic interpretation of the Arabian Nights saga features a monumental figural profile while small figures float above on a magic carpet. Gustaf Tenggren (American 1896-1970) Attributed - We are not certain if Tenggren did this work. There is stylistic evidence to support Tenggren. It's the brilliance factor of how he assembles all the elements of the work and composes it into a cogent and readable form. This says Tenggen. As a former New York advertising agency art director, I have seen artists work in different styles. Usually this is not the case but great artist can do it. Their styles can change but the brilliance remains. Untitled Untitled 1957 Gouache on illustration board - Unframed Not signed 9 x 7.25 live - 10.5 x 9.5 board Original book illustration...