BARBARA SHERMUND

Ocean Liner Illustration (The New Yorker Cartoon)

1926

Charles Rocher (1890-1962. Sailors, ca. 1920s. Gouache on paper. Sheet measures 19 x 25 inches. Considerable damage and loss as depicted. Signed lower left.

Barbara Shermund (1899-1978). Society Satirical Cartoon, ca. 1940s. Gouache on heavy illustration paper, image measures 17 x 14 inches; 23 x 20 inches in matting. Signed lower left. Very good condition but matting panel should be replaced. 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...

Gobardhan Ash - Untitled - Gouache on Paper 10 x 15 inches (unframed size) Style : Regarded as a pioneer of modern Indian art, Ash’s contribution at the time when India witnessed the advent of Western modernism is significant and colossal. His work was exploratory, visionary and inspiring. He printed with bold courage and a free spirit, never yielding to the rules set by official art. He rejected the preconceived notions of how an artist ought to render his subjects and inevitably rebelled against the academic rules “ If we look at nature in the open, we do not see individual objects each with its own colors but rather a bright medley of tints which blend in our eyes, in our minds.” – Gobardhan Ash (The Statesman, April 24, 1994). His verbal imagery alluded to what was real and relevant in India yet transcended to communicate a deeper, universal message about the human spirit. Disillusioned with the limits and constraints he faced, Ash withdrew into his private introspective world to explore his own mode of artistic expression. And although it was the convention then to paint divinities or exotic female figures on their way to the temple, Ash embarked on a new approach altogether to paint farmers toiling in the fields, workers engaged in intense labor to earn their living, thereby setting a new trend of socio-realistic art in India. In 1945, Ash was brought into the public eye when the progressive writers Association discovered his series of paintings on the Bengal famine. The paintings depict, if not document, the ravages of the 1943 catastrophe. In juxtaposition to the famine series, his impressionist and post impressionist gouaches during the late 40s come as an interesting antithesis. Colors, rich and vibrant, come alive in a pulsating tone to dominate the entire painting. Ash never subscribed to a stringent artistic form or technique. Rather, his works from the 80s display yet another intriguing and jarringly different style in his treatment of portraiture. His colors, with the exception of the apparent outlines, are reduced to smudges and smears so that the painting appear to originate from stained canvas. His subjects, spectral figures that engage and draw us within their profound state of despair and helplessness. To characterize the life works of Gobardhan Ash is to recognize the complexity and spontaneity of his ideas and the enormous richness of his style. An artist who devoted his entire life to art, his paintings have transited and evolved from monochromatic sketches and landscape to portraiture; from naturalistic real-life depictions to abstract expressionism. Whatever the genre style-Ash has demonstrated an eloquent mastery over the diverse style, techniques and medias employed, as evident in the vast retrospective collection. His paintings are conceptual and purposeful, displaying a unique individuality. His art expounds a frank desire to convey the value of uncompromising artistic sincerity. Gobardhan Ash remains today a prolific artist of his time. About the Artist & his works : Born : Regarded as a pioneer of modern Indian art, Gobardhan Ash (1907-1996) was born at the village of Begampur in Hoogly district of West Bengal.. Family : His father was Haricharan Ash and mother Gouri Devi. He spent all his life in this village and died here in 1996 at the matured age...

Portrait of Andy Warhol with Purple Hair in Pastel and Gouache on Paper Whimsical portrait by Ricardo de Silva (Brazilian, 20th Century). Andy Warhol is l...