McClelland Barclay

"Darling, Darling!" Original Magazine Story Illustration for Cosmopolitan

1935

Signed "James Montgomery Flagg" Lower Right by Artist "'I've found a woman to sew on buttons,' he said politely. 'Have I?' he inquired of Nancy. 'Big Boy, you have.'" Illustration ...

Story illustration for “Amos Tries it Tudor” by Sewell Ford for Cosmopolitan magazine, published January 1924, page 35. The image shows an elegant woman holding a fan. Medium: Ink ...

Medium: Oil on Canvas Signature: Signed Lower Right Contact for exact dimensions. Cover of Pictorial Review Magazine, December 1932. The woman in the illustration was modeled by th...

Signed "George Garland" Lower Left by Artist "To melt this frigid beauty required the services of an expert, someone with a wicked-and-compelling-way with women." Illustration for "...

A handsome man and a beautiful woman are depicted in a rapturous pose. Their bodies are intertwined with each other and with the surrounding floral elements. This masterfully render...

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). 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...