Illustrator Ronald Searle demonstrates how to carry a football to avoid turnovers. At press time, as it used to be called, the original art is available for purchase on eBay. Get it now during the off-season.
Ronald Searle Spot drawing of a football player for TV Guide
Ronald Searle Spot drawing of a football player for TV Guide, framed
Matt Jones, Ronald Searle's America, 2016
Matt Jones, Ronald Searle's America, 2016, page 315
Danny Shanahan reminds us that we have more to worry about this week than just the rising seas. He has embellished his New Yorker cover of March 7, 2016 with an original sketch of another well-known desert island hazard. Does anyone need reminding that it is, after all, Shark Week?
Let's go out on a limb here and suggest that a proposed New Yorker cover by Barbara Shermund is set in Central Park. With so many people enjoying the park in the summertime, somebody's got to keep it clean. Who better than a man in uniform? But is that pipe strictly regulation in the Parks Department?
Note: This blog is nothing like your local landfill. I have plenty more room. Send scans or photos of original art by Barbara Shermund or other New Yorker art by other New Yorker artists. I'll see if I can somehow find a place to post it.
Julian de Miskey's biographical page on the Papillon Gallery website is illustrated with "Jazz Club," a proposed New Yorker magazine cover, we are plausibly told. The artwork is extraordinarily energetic, overrunning its borders on all four sides. The palette is dominated by reds and browns; the composition has exaggerated diagonals going off to the right and to the left. Animated horn players seen from above occupy the foreground, slender and angulated dancers fill the middle ground, and seated club-goers provide a simple line of perspective at the back.
Julian de Miskey,Jazz Club, c. 1928
De Miskey's published New Yorker cover of June 6, 1925—his second and the magazine's sixteenth—makes for an interesting comparison with "Jazz Club." It's basically the same subject, highly-stylized but by comparison far more static and with a more conventional use of space. It is designed for a two-color press, the magazine's financial constraints being paramount in its early days. The evident similarity with the circa 1928 cover proposal possibly may have precluded the latter's use.
Instead, the magazine may have gone with a more humorous take on the 1928 jazz scene, one which remained somewhat stylized but which focused on the activity at the tables in the night club rather than on the dance floor. By now, the magazine's covers are printed in four colors—and this one's the bee's knees!
Note:Attempted Bloggery would love for readers to provide scans or photos of more original art by Julian de Miskey and for more proposed but rejected New Yorker cover art, particularly from published artists.
These days the New Yorker's covers generally don't venture into the opera house. In the early decades of the magazine, though, the cover art frequently took a seriocomic look at the spectacle of grand opera—and the grander the better. Productions, often at the Old Met, including their full complement of cast, crew, and audience were fair game as cover subjects. A proposed cover by the talented Julian de Miskey offers a backstage view of the heldentenor's dressing room at a production of "Siegfried." We are delighted to see that the singer, in full costume as Siegfried, the quintessential Wagnerian hero, has been bested by a tiny mouse.
The paper bears evidence of folding into three parts, as if it were a letter that at one time had been put neatly into an envelope. This shows the widespread casual attitude of artist and editors to concept art that was not destined for publication. No doubt they would have been more careful had they foreseen a time when this rejected cover proposal would be offered for sale by a leading bookseller for $2,500.
Julian de Miskey proposed New Yorker cover art
Julian De Miskey James Cummins, Bookseller Listing as of July 16, 2017
In 1961, Ronald Searle took note of the hype preceding the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair and submitted a magazine cover proposal for the New Yorker on the subject of the creative ferment already surrounding the event. His artwork shows a kinetic sculptor working, it seems, in the media of flags of the world and bicycle wheels. The sculptor is seen applying an oil can to a presumably squeaky wheel. The artwork is clever, colorful, and fanciful, maybe too fanciful for the New Yorker of 1961. Perhaps it was too early for the New Yorker's cover art to begin referencing the World's Fair at all, too early even for the editors to dedicate the cover to a beatnik sculptor drawn by that upstart Searle, whose first New Yorker cover would not be published until 1969.
Ronald Searle Proposed New Yorker cover art, 1961
Searle couldn't have known in 1961 that it was to be Walt Disney who actually would bring a signature kinetic sculpture to the New York World's Fair. The Tower of the Four Winds was designed by Imagineer Rolly Crump. The 120-foot-tall Fairground landmark was demolished after the fair closed, but a small scale model is on display today at Disney's Contemporary Resort in Orlando.
Rolly Crump, The Tower of the Four Winds model The Small World pavilion New York World's Fair 1964-1965
Disney's Contemporary Resort
Walt Disney World
March 26, 2008
Rolly Crump and Walt Disney with the model, c. 1964
Disney's Contemporary Resort
Walt Disney World
March 26, 2008
Rolly Crump The Tower of the Four Winds The Small World Pavilion New York World's Fair 1964-1965
The Tower of the Four Winds is shown starting at 31:27
Rolly Crump Discusses the Dismantling
of the Tower of the Four Winds
The Tower of the Four Winds
CGI recreation
June 3, 2018 Update: This piece was listed in 2013 by Taraba Illustration Art.
Ronald Searle,Proposed New Yorker cover art, 1961
Taraba Illustration Art Retrieved August 10, 2013
Note: Thanks to David from Manhattan for providing the Searle scan. This artwork first appeared online in 2008 on the Ronald Searle Tribute blog in the post entitled "Private Collections."
