Showing posts with label New Yorker rough. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Yorker rough. Show all posts

Saturday, February 14, 2026

Blog Post No. 5200: A Charles Addams Movie Theater Scream

Original Charles Addams art published in The New Yorker issue of February 8, 1947 shows a theater full of moviegoers and their shared reaction to a big screen scream.

Charles Addams
Original art
The New Yorker, February 8, 1947, p. 27


Seventy years after publication, the artwork to this classic cartoon was sold at Swann Auction Galleries in the Illustration Art sale:
Charles Addams
Swann Galleries listing of December 14, 2017
Swann, it will be noted, did not provide the publication date in The New Yorker, or even the year. They did document the drawing's appearances in three Addams collections, but the 1947 book is correctly titled Addams and Evil.

Charles Addams
Swann Galleries item description

With such a classic original selling for $31,200 (including the 30% buyer's premium), well above the 2017 presale estimate of $12,000 to $18,000, one might wonder what an Addams rough drawing of the same subject might be worth in today's market. Well, thanks to Swann Galleries's recent Illustration Art sale, we actually can provide the answer. An unusually detailed pencil study from a Vermont collection went up on the auction block in December of 2025. Perhaps the owners were aware that Swann had sold the original finished drawing eight years earlier.

Charles Addams
Preliminary art
The New Yorker, February 8, 1947, p. 27

Charles Addams
Swann Galleries listing of December 4, 2025

Despite the above, the correct date of publication in The New Yorker is February 8, 1947, as I've already indicated.


Note that in the intervening years, Swann's top buyer's premium has come down from 30% to 27%. There's something to be said for competition. Still, $9,525 with said premium is a remarkable price for a New Yorker rough. Indeed, many Addams New Yorker originals in this blog's archives have sold for less than that. Today, though, Addams's work continues to appreciate and that seems to be carrying over even to the roughs.


Here's the relevant page from Addams and Evil (1947):

https://dn790006.ca.archive.org/0/items/HumorMagazines/Addams%20And%20Evil%20(1947).pdf



And here's a grouping showing how the drawing appeared in rough form, in the original art, and finally in the pages of The New Yorker:
Charles Addams
Preliminary art
The New Yorker, February 8, 1947, p. 27

Charles Addams
Original art
The New Yorker, February 8, 1947, p. 27

Charles Addams
The New Yorker, February 8, 1947, p. 27

With a spot drawing by Morris Neuwirth and a cartoon by Charles Addams


* * *

I have a fair degree of confidence that the spot artist on the page opposite the Addams drawing is Morris Neuwirth (1912-1985) and that the toll lanes depicted here relate to something built by Robert Moses.  Some of Neuwirth's work is held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Stop Pay Toll
Morris Neuwirth
The New Yorker, February 8, 1947, p. 26



The Attempted Bloggery Centennial Posts 💯
Blog Post No. 100
Blog Post No. 200:  A Shaggy Dog Story




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Friday, June 30, 2023

Peter Arno: Romancing the Natives

On June 15, Swann Galleries sold two preliminary drawings by The New Yorker's Peter Arno. Neither is signed, but both are unmistakably the master's work. Swann's listing states, "He probably submitted them to the editors as initial ideas for cartoons, but apparently never followed through on them." Except that he did follow through, at least on one of them.

Arno's first sketch in the listing has an oval border and depicts a fully dressed white man in the embrace of two young Polynesian women wearing only grass skirts and flowers in their hair. They are reclining very publicly in an elevated hut, his pith helmet resting on the floor in front of the young women. Their arms are wrapped around him affectionately. A group of native men observe the scene in consternation. One, mostly out of the frame, is pointing out the objectionable behavior.

This sketch has no caption but was apparently meant to find humor in the jealousy of the men. The idea evolved, perhaps with editorial assistance, and went in a somewhat different direction when it was published in 1938 in The New Yorker. The man is now addressed by one of his fellow explorers with, "But, Professor, remember the thousands of little school children who gave their pennies to send us on this expedition." Visually, Arno's instincts did not serve him well here. He abandoned the depiction of tenderness that made the preliminary sketch so memorable and further objectified the women, who are now African and fully naked except for their neck rings.
"But, Professor, remember the thousands of little school children
who gave their pennies to send us on this expedition."
Peter Arno
The New Yorker, October 8, 1938, p. 16 



This sort of gag cartoon was a popular trope which today strikes us as sexist and racist, but was widely accepted in American print media in the 1930s. The drawing was collected in 1945 in The Peter Arno Pocket Book without an apparent second thought.
"But, Professor, remember the thousands of little school
children who gave their pennies to
send us on this expedition."
Peter Arno
The Peter Arno Pocket Book (1945)



The second Arno rough shows three performers backstage at a vaudeville or variety show peeking through the curtains, probably with varying degrees of anxiety, at a laughing audience. It might have been a study for a New Yorker spot, or a cover, or perhaps a cartoon. It does not have, or seem to require, a caption. Arno may or may not have worked this idea up further. 



Both drawings together had a presale estimate of $600 to $900. They sold for a hammer price of $500, or for $625 with the buyer's premium.
Peter Arno
Swann Galleries, June 15, 2023


Incidentally, on the page opposite Arno's cartoon in The New Yorker is an outstanding short piece, "The Letters of James Thurber." You can read it in its entirety right here and, no doubt, guess the identity of the author who here goes by Anon.
A cartoon by Peter Arno and "The Letters of James Thurber" by "Anon"



July 12, 2024 Update:  Peter Arno's original art has come to light.

"But, Professor, remember the thousands of children who gave their pennies to send us on this expedition."
Peter Arno
Original art
The New Yorker, October 8, 1938, p. 16 


The typed caption is affixed to the art.



Note:  Unpublished work by Peter Arno isn't so easy to come by but for anyone who does, you're looking at a blog that can publicize it.




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Saturday, February 4, 2023

Charles Addams: In the Psychologist's Waiting Room

An original, unsigned, rough drawing executed in Conté crayon and pencil by Charles Addams (1912–1988) is available from Argosy Books of Manhattan. It is set in the waiting room of a psychologist's office. The cartoon is apparently from 1959 according to the listing and was almost certainly submitted to The New Yorker. Today, the drawing will cost you $1750, although a more appropriate price might be $1812.




In the lower right corner, Addams considered setting this gag inside the psychologist's office with the requisite couch:


Charles Addams
Argosy Books listing accessed February 3, 2023


On his Ink Spill blog today, New Yorker cartoonist and historian Michael Maslin identified the finished drawing in the issue of April 20, 1981. Argosy's 1959 date for the rough is almost certainly erroneous. The seated man in the waiting room has been reworked into the seated psychologist. The framed diploma is much more at home in the office than the waiting room. The coat rack, and hence the Napoleon delusion, has become the doctor's own.


Charles Addams
Preliminary cartoon art
The New Yorker, April 20, 1981, page 41
Addams, Charles. Creature Comforts, 1981

Spot drawing by J. S. Nelson and a cartoon by Charles Addams



Spot drawing of a bucket of tennis balls
by J. S. Nelson





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Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Alan Dunn: A Fender Bender

Readers of Michael Maslin's Ink Spill learned last week that over the course of his career cartoonist Alan Dunn (1900-1974) published an astonishing 1,981 cartoons in The New Yorker. Today we look at one that got away. 

In 1948, Dunn sent an original cartoon along with a typewritten letter to "Brother Hodgson," apparently a fellow Phi Gamma Delta, or more commonly Fiji, fraternity brother known either from his days at Columbia University or from the national organization. Dunn explains that the cartoon nearly saw publication. "The New Yorker once okayed the idea but asked for a few minor changes. Being long repressed about 'changes' I decided to assert myself. 'Either take it as is or don't take it at all[,]' I meekly shouted. 'Very well, they rejoined, 'We won't take it at all.' So here it is."

Hodgson was evidently affiliated with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, because Dunn offered the original drawing to him for publication in Tarnation, the student humor magazine. They should have been thrilled to publish it, but did they? Quite possibly. An exhibition on humor at the library of the University of North Carolina notes that Tarnation was published between 1947 and 1954, so there was adequate opportunity to get it into print.

Dunn ends his letter with the motto "Perge!" It is this that identifies him as a Graduate Brother, as one is called, of Fiji. It means "Press on!" or "Persist!" There can hardly be a better creed for a cartoonist, particularly one of Dunn's prolific achievement.

The cartoon itself shows Dunn's fascination with newfangled technology. Car phones were first introduced in the United States in 1946. In Dunn's gag, set at the site of a downtown fender bender, the new invention is already being exploited by lawyers. But how would they manage to obtain the correct phone number in less time than it would take to walk down the stairs? One wonders what "few minor changes" The New Yorker had insisted on. Were the editors eager to change the silly name of the law firm, perhaps?


"Good morning, sir—I represent the law firm of Lolly, Mire and Fish..."
Alan Dunn
Tarnation [?]

Alan Dunn's signature


Alan Dunn
TLS


Alan Dunn
eBay listing ended August 31, 2020
Alan Dunn
eBay item description 





Note:  Can any Tar Heels tell me whether this cartoon came to be published, and when?

Perge!




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