BARBARA SHERMUND

Life Magazine Satirical Society Cartoon Illustration

1940s

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...

Beautiful painting depicts a young black man holding skull and flip phone. Gouache on illustration board, image measuring 8 x 10 inches; 16 x 20 inches framed. Signed lower left.

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...

Fabulous illustration depicts a costume for Broadway production. Gouache on illustration board, image measures 10.5 x 16.5 inches; 15 x 22 inches framed. Excellent condition in ori...

Timur Akhriev's (US and EU based) "Worship" is an original, handmade oil painting that depicts a lone nude female figure kneeling on a bed of lily pads with pink flowers and bent over as if worshiping, with deteriorating structures in the background and a seagull flying overhead. Born in Vladikavkaz, the territory where Southern Russia meets Chechnya in 1983, Timur lived with his family until moving from the region during the conflict of 1991. After moving to St. Petersburg Timur began attending the St. Petersburg Iagonson Fine Art School at the age of twelve, where many of the professors studied at the Repin Academy of Fine Arts. After graduation in 2002, Timur immigrated to Chattanooga Tennessee...

"The Long Way Home" by Thane Gorek (United States) is a handmade landscape oil painting that is framed and ready to hang. Thane Gorek is an artist working in Northern Colorado. He s...

A. E. Halliwell (1905-1987) Holidays on the Continent Gouache 19 x 13 cm Stamped to reverse, A E Halliwell Gunnersbury Gardens. c.1930 Provenance: Family of the artist A.E. Halliwel...

A. E. Halliwell (1905-1987) Easter Excursions from London Gouache 26 x 15 cm c.1930 Provenance: Family of the artist A.E. Halliwell (1905–1986) was a British artist, illustrator, a...