Leslie Thrasher

No, I can never be Mrs. Hammerschlosser!, Liberty Magazine Cover January 22, 192

1927

Original cover for Liberty magazine, published November 2, 1929. Sandy hides behind the newspaper at the breakfast table as Lil suddenly asks “Who is Marianthe? You talked about her...

Original cover for Liberty magazine, published August 4, 1928. Having left her husband Sandy, Lil returns to the Morse family home with her two-month-old baby. Ma Morse worries abou...

“For the Love o’ Lil: The Picture Story of an American Family” In 1926, under his long-term contract to produce a cover per week for Liberty magazine, Leslie Thrasher introduced a s...

Original cover for Liberty magazine, published May 23, 1931. Lil and Sandy have their friends Mr. and Mrs. Saunders Shanks over to their house for a game of cards. After settling do...

Elite Discourse is a watercolor and ink drawing on ivory-colored paper, in the 1920s realized by Luigi Bompard (1879-1953). Hand-signed in pen on the lower margin. In good conditio...

An illustrator for Time, Life, Look, True, True West, Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, Readers Digest, and others, he also painted for adverti...

An illustrator for Time, Life, Look, True, True West, Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, Readers Digest, and others, he also painted for adverti...

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...