Cartoonists in the Armory Show

In my previous post I argued that cartoonists’ reactions to the Armory show may have been born as much out of sympathy for and interest in the formal experimentation of the more revolutionary European modernists represented in the show, and that it seems possible to me that these cartoonists may have “seen themselves as within the broader orbit of the art world, in one way or another.”

This interpretation is reinforced further by the fact that there were actually several newspaper cartoonists who participated in the Armory show– who were actually among the artists shown at the Exposition. A site created for the University of Virginia’s American Studies program lists four newspaper cartoonists in the show, each of whom had worked on multiple recurrent newspaper comics features: Rudolph Dirks, Denys Wortman, Marjorie Organ, and Gus Mager. These artist each deserve at least a moment’s individual attention, as it’s quite an impressive list.

“Fledglings” by Rudolph Dirks, 1908. Not (to my knowledge) the painting shown by Dirks at the Armory Show, but of approximately the same time period. From the collection of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

Rudolph Dirks was the cartoonist who created The Katzenjammer Kids, one of the earliest strips to take the form of the comic strip as modern readers would likely define it: it used sequential panels,  word balloons, and had– at times– narrative continuity from strip to strip. Dirks is given a lot of credit as one of the most innovative creators of what became the standard graphic lexicon of comics.

In 1913, his work as a cartoonist would have been by far the most recognizable to New York audiences of all the cartoonists participating in the Exhibition. The Katzenjammer Kids still runs in a handfull of papers today, syndicated by King Features, making it by far the longest-running comic strip in history.

The wording of the UVA website is a little confusing, but it looks as if Dirks may have had two paintings at the Armory show, in galleries N and E.

Denys Wortman, “Bermuda Waterfront,” 1912, displayed in the Armory Show of 1913.

Denys Wortman was, until recently, a largely forgotten cartoonist, though he was remembered by fellow cartoonist  Coulton Waugh in his 1947 book The Comics as “of all newspaper drawings, perhaps the most artistic.” (p.168) Fortunately, with the publication of a recent collection of his work, as well as an exhibit of his work at the Museum of the City of New York, Wortman’s work is beginning to get the credit and remembrance it deserves.

There is a remarkable continuity between Wortman’s paintings and his single panel cartoon feature, Metropolitan Movies.  He was a genre painter and a genre cartoonist: in both cases, his work is imbued with the same feeling of quickly-sketched but masterfully rendered moments from everyday life. Looking at his paintings, his sketches, and his published cartoons, one quickly comes to feel that they were all very much part of the same project for the artist.

Marjorie Organ, “Robert Henri in Bed”

Marjorie Organ is by far the most obscure of the four cartoonists under discussion, which is unfortunate. She seems to have been the first woman to have a recurring comic feature in a newspaper, Little Reggie and the Heavenly Twins, which began running in 1902, when Organ was only 16. Six years later, she met the artist Robert Henri, one of the leading figures of the Ashcan School and “The Eight,” and they were married soon after, retiring almost immediately from newspaper work to focus on her family and her art.

Organ seems to have been relegated to obscurity for several reasons. Her work is not without merit, but she was certainly a journeyman among that first generation of newspaper comic strip artists, and she did not have the chance to mature due to her early retirement. She also suffered the misfortune of being a woman, and a quite attractive one at that– she is perhaps best remembered today as a subject of portraiture by her husband, especially in his painting Lady in Black with Spanish Scarf. She seems to be one of a long line of female artists who were overshadowed in a patriarchal society by their more-successful artist spouse.

Gus Mager, Self Portrait, 1914

Finally, Gus Mager was one of the first cartoonists to have a recurring strip in the black and white dailies, as well as an accomplished artist. Mager had begun as a comic strip cartoonist with his Monks series, a somewhat idiosyncratic and crudely (though expressively) drawn strip featuring a whole procession of different “monk” characters– anthropomorphic monkeys with names like Knocko the Monk, Sherlocko the Monk, Groucho the Monk, etc. In 1913, he had just begun a run in the New York World with his new strip, Hawkshaw the Detective, a humanized adaptation of his “Sherlocko the Monk” character. As a painter, one sees little of the crude simple lines of Mager’s early comic strips. His works are painterly, expressive, and comparatively quite complex.

The story of how the collection was built for the Armory Show is largely an account of the social networks that made up the art world in the US and Europe in the Progressive Era, and Mager apears to be an important member of that network and to why he and other cartoonists were included in the Exhibition– he seems to have been friends with Armory Show organizer Walt Kuhn, served as an assistant to Dirks, and in early 1913 began working in the World bullpen, alongside Wortman.

From the evidence available, it seems Mager viewed himself as existing in both the world of newspapermen and cartoonists as well as the art world. An article about Mager in the American Magazine of Art from 1916 by artist and critic Guy Pène du Bois emphasizes Mager as an artist of merit, while treating his work in newspapers as a trial overcome. Nevertheless, Mager continued at it for quite some time, and Hawkshaw alone ran until the 1950s.

These newspaper comic strip cartoonists participating in the Armory show points to their own belief that they were not apart from the art world, but of it. Other Armory Show participants did illustration work for papers and magazines, like George Bellows and John French Sloan, and there are two other cartoonists omitted from the UVA site that are particularly important– and those two cartoonists will be the subject of the next post in this series.

The Cartoonist as Artist:

• Part 1- Cartoonists View the Armory Show
• Part 2 – Cartoonists in the Armory Show
• Part 3
• Part 4

Working on a dissertation that attempts to put early newspaper comics into their cultural context, I had hoped to avoid the topic of “art” all together. Whenever I come across analyses that depend too much on the cannons of high art or literature, I grow suspicious. Even when looking at an especially well-done one, like Thomas Inge’s discussion of George Herriman and Dada in Comics as Culture, it tends to feel, to me, like an exercise in legitimization.

“Here,” these authors seem to say, “I’ll prove that comics have artistic merit. Look how many similarities we can find between this artform and your supposedly legitimate high art!” The old saw about dancing about architecture comes to mind. And as someone who believes that the medium of comics is worthy of appreciation and study on its own merits, there’s just something distasteful about trying to borrow cultural capital to legitimate the medium.

That said, historical research can often seem to develop its own agendas, independent of the researcher. And that seems to be the case with my dissertation. While I had hoped to avoid discussing art history and high modernism, I find that multiple threads of my research keep tying back to that topic. And I’ve decided to give in.

Cartoonists View the Armory Show

One of the sites of entanglement, the things I keep coming back to in spite of my own desire to leave the topic alone, is The International Exhibition of Modern Art in 1913, better known as the Armory Show, remembered as the first large exhibit to bring Modernism to the attention of a wide American audience.

Two paintings perhaps best represent what was so revolutionary about the Armory Show, and dominated much of the uproar that followed the Exhibition’s opening: Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier n° 2, and Matisse’s Luxury.

Looking at Duchamp’s painting, we see an artist who is actually working on a very similar project to many cartoonists of the time: both are struggling to create a new visual language that can communicate them in a static medium, and the influence of Muybridge’s experiments with motion and photography can be seen in each. Duchamp, like contemporary cartoonists, is trying to show movement over time and through space in the picture plane.

The Rude Decending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway), from the New York Evening Sun, 20 March 1913.

Many cultural critics and comics historians have cited various cartoonists’ parodies and pastiches of Duchamp as visual evidence of the culture’s unease with modernism. These commenters do the cartoonists a disservice, I think, in viewing them as merely cultural observers, and not as artists themselves. In fact, most of the members of the first generation of newspaper comic strip cartoonists had fine arts training from art institutes and colleges.

Moreover, I think that viewing these cartoons as merely an expression of the public discomfort with, or confusion at, modern art overlooks the similarities of their projects. I would argue that many of these cartoonists did see themselves as artists, or at the least as people engaged in the greater art world, conversant with trends in the states and abroad. They may have seen the similarities between Duchamp’s futuristic cubism, with its abstraction and focus on movement, and their own work. They are likely to even be quite sympathetic to claims about the immorality, crudeness, or lack of merit of modern art, as these claims were echoes of a largely-forgotten social panic about newspaper comics that began around 1908 and lasted until approximately 1912.

Moving on to Matisse’s Luxury, which was another flashpoint work in the exhibit, though less of a lightening rod than Duchamp’s Nude. Again, we can see an aesthetic similarity between the modern artist and the cartoonist. Matisse’s use of (relatively) flat colors, dark outlines around objects (especially in the foreground), and figures that are equally built from anatomy, symbolic representation, and an aesthetically chosen line (be it aesthetically pleasing or off-putting) are all in certain ways  similar to the type of art that appeared in the Sunday comic supplements of the urban papers at that time.  Images like this were probably far less shocking to cartoonists than to most of the public that came to the Armory show. Alfred Stieglitz had been exhibiting European modernists in smaller galleries, including Matisse, since at least 1905. While the Armory Show drew the broader public to the new guard of European artists, it would be unsurprising if many of these professional illustrators, many of them young men who had fairly recently trained in art schools, would have been among the patrons who attended these galleries. 

Simply put, it is harder to imagine that many cartoonists saw themselves as disconnected from the world of fine art than it is to imagine that they might have seen themselves as within the broader orbit of the art world, in one way or another. It is likely that many of them frequented galleries, met artists, and were part of the world of fine arts while also working as cartoonists for newspapers.

The Cartoonist as Artist:

• Part 1- Cartoonists View the Armory Show
• Part 2 - Cartoonists in the Armory Show
• Part 3
• Part 4