By Anatol Kovarsky
Note: Click on each image to get an enlarged view, begin navigating through the entire image gallery, and find out whether the original piece of artwork is available for sale. Learn more about buying original New Yorker art at www.newyorkerstore.com.
As Valentine’s Day approaches, I thought I’d share with our readers a real-life love story between a New Yorker artist and his wife, one that demonstrates that fairy-tale romances do still happen.
I had the recent pleasure of enjoying a three and a half hour lunch with my favorite nonagenarian, New Yorker cover artist Anatol Kovarsky, and his beautiful wife, the talented actress Lucille Patton. We dined with a nice couple who is adding an original 1966 Kovarsky New Yorker cover to their collection.
I brought color printouts of Anatol’s past New Yorker covers (39 total), and we discussed several in detail. He was quite talkative, and loved telling stories about his former art editors and the inspiration for many of his covers. read more…
While not created as a response to the destruction of the recent earthquake in Haiti, the 2007 painting “The Resurrection of the Dead,” particularly in the ghostly guards occupying the doorway (called guede, in Haitian myth) and the surrounding wall inlaid with pairs of gazing eyes, transmits to the viewer an appropriate sense of somber regard for the passing of souls.
“The Resurrection of the Dead”, by Haitian painter Frantz Zephirin, was featured on the January 25, 2010 cover of The New Yorker. The magazine will donate all profits from print sales of this cover to Partners in Health, which provides health care and other services in Haiti and has taken a leading role in earthquake relief efforts.
Gahan Wilson, a long-cherished name on The New Yorker’s cartoonist roster, will be making an appearance at the Strand Bookstore in New York City (828 Broadway at 12th Street) Tuesday, January 19 at 7:00 p.m. Wilson will be signing and discussing his recently released book set, Gahan Wilson: 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons.
The collection, a set of three volumes in a slipcase, assembles every cartoon Wilson has contributed to Playboy, along with all his text/art features and writing for the magazine, dating back to his first fiction piece in 1962.
50 Years of Playboy Cartoons on sale through Fantagraphics Books
The New Yorker Store Blog will be on holiday break until the week of January 4. We hope for happy holidays and a good new year for all of our readers. Until 2010!
(Boy standing at greeting card rack called "Starter Sympathy Cards," reading "No Way!", "Trag-o-rama," etc.)
Americans purchase about 7 billion greeting cards every year, and we have an ever-expanding variety of messages to choose from. Gone are the days when “Happy Birthday” and “Get Well Soon” were our only options (setting aside the life-saving “blank inside” cards). Today, your average card buyer can congratulate someone on their first house, send a coworker off to a new job, or express sympathy on the loss of a pet.
And yet, all this bounty hasn’t really changed our love/hate relationship with the peculiar social nicety that is the greeting card. Sure, most of us like receiving cards, and maybe a few of us actually enjoy writing them out and sending them. But the vast majority of us see greeting cards purely as a necessary evil – a gesture which is now so common as to be expected, and which at times becomes more exasperating to the sender than it is pleasing to the recipient. As such, the greeting card conundrum is perfect fodder for jokes, and, of course, for New Yorker cartoons. read more…
Ever hoped to catch a glimpse inside a real artist’s studio? How about two? The upper-Manhattan apartment shared by New Yorker cartoonists Michael Crawford and Carolita Johnson – with separate studios for each, artwork and books galore, and inspiring views of Fort Tryon Park – was recently profiled in the “Habitats” section of The New York Times. Read about the cartoonists’ living and working digs, described by a friend as a “wonderful apartment thick with paint and ink and exuberance.”
Illustration appearing on the October 3, 1988 New Yorker cover, by Barbara Westman
Illustrator Barbara Westman created nearly 20 covers for The New Yorker in the 1980s and 1990s. These images are best known for their vivid colors and the familiar, everyday nature of their subject matter. Westman’s illustrations are always engaging, whether they depict a day at the beach, a rainy walk home, or a single tree changing color. read more…
Note: This is the first in a series of entries in which New Yorker artists describe the inspiration behind their drawings, in their own words.
Part comedienne, part fitting model (a seamstress’s dream), Carolita Johnson is one of The New Yorker’s youngest and most outspoken female cartoonists. Never one to mince her words, Carolita recently told me the inspiration behind two of her popular cartoons:
"I paid three grand for this dress, I'll wear it wherever I want!"
Okay, so! For the wedding dress cartoon, the story is that in a ploy to try to make me feel guilty enough to hurry up and find a man to get married to, my mom once said to me that she’d like to see me in a wedding dress before she dies. 
read more…
As a nod to the holidays, we thought we’d share with you a fun bit of Thanksgiving history, illustrated by a New Yorker artist.
The New Yorker, November 25, 1939, by Richard Decker
This Richard Decker cartoon, from the November 25, 1939 New Yorker, refers to the political kerfuffle that resulted in not one but two Thanksgiving Days observed in 1939. read more…
When you see cartoons in the pages of The New Yorker, they all appear to be around the same shape and size. Some are a little larger than others, a couple are square; some are aligned vertically and others horizontally. Overall, though, the cartoons appear somewhat uniform.
But behind every cartoon is an original piece of artwork created by a different artist, and, naturally, each artist creates his or her art differently. It may be obvious to casual viewers that artists all have different styles, but they also use different mediums, tools, paper types, and paper sizes.
Below are six cartoons, displayed in approximately the size in which they appeared in The New Yorker. In their original form, however, they range in size from 5.5 x 7.5 inches, to over two feet wide and nearly as tall.
Scroll to the bottom of the post to see a list of the images, arranged from smallest to largest.
The New Yorker, November 26, 2007, by Frank Cotham
read more…
