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Tag: drawing

The singular wit of one of the New Yorker’s first women cartoonists – Hyperallergic

Born in San Francisco in 1899, Shermund moved to New York in 1924 to make her way as an artist. Her early cartoons centered on the character of the flapper — fashionably dressed, outspoken, and sexually liberated — whose comic interactions with other character types painted a picture of life in 1920s New York. Rendered in lines as crisp as the finest etching, and a sense of flapper style and posture drawn from life, Shermund’s young women gossiped in delis and on the subway; they smoked cigarettes and danced late into the night with married men; they woke up, horribly hungover. And while Shermund may have lampooned her flappers, her sharp social commentary took relationships between young women seriously, recognizing the true, even subversive solidarity between them. There’s a knowing wink under all that eyeshadow — each gossipy comment is a whispered secret.

art, Barbara Shermund, drawing, humour, illustration, satire

14/02/2025
Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement – Aeon Videos

Commemorating [André Breton’s Surrealist] manifesto’s centennial, this short documentary from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA) explores the surrealist exercise known as ‘exquisite corpse’, in which each participant creates one portion of a body, unaware of how the other participants’ contributions will look. Taking viewers through a history of the exquisite corpse up to today, the piece explores how these projects embody the surrealist emphasis on freedom, community and radical creativity.

art, documentaries, drawing, painting, Surrealism

09/02/2025
Rhythmical Lines – The Paris Review

In his treatise, he attaches great value to his interest in aesthetics amid such political uncertainty, writing, The very fact of the author’s interest remaining so resolutely focused over the period of many years, the care with which he preserved his sketches through the ravages and challenges of two world wars, suggest that he attached great importance to his pursuits although they might have seemed so trifle in the context of the turbulent historical events that were going on. It is upon the viewer to decide whether the author’s opinion of his linear ideas is justified.

Though this text is aimed at an imaginary future viewer, Szpakowski could never have anticipated the particular tensions of the twenty-first-century gaze: our initial suspicion that the designs, for their perfection, must be computer generated; and, upon discovering that they’re not, our fetishizing his hand-drawing technique. Szpakowski took issue, in his lifetime, with the swallowed-whole way of looking that rendered his designs mere decorations, perhaps drawing on older referents like the ancient Greek meander motif or textile patterns. He insists that “a single glance would not be enough,” and that his were in fact “linear ideas,” with “inner content” accessible only to those who follow the line with their eyes on its journey from left to right: a process not unlike reading.

art, drawing, Wacław Szpakowski

03/12/2024