The cartoonist appeared to be pleased by this recollection. “I showed them what I could do,” he said.
Helen Hokinson
The funniest people in the republic to Helen E. Hokinson, formerly of Mendota, Illinois, and daughter of a salesman for the Moline Plow Company, are the middle-aged ladies who live in exclusive Westchester towns, in the Oranges or in the Gramercy Square neighborhood, and whose more or less empty lives revolve in a dignified fashion around the garden or culture club, the beauty shop and the detective story.
They are women who have charge accounts, plenty of leisure, poodle dogs, chauffeurs, a box at the opera and the right to sit in Gramercy Park. They have regular appointments with hairdressers, and the hard cash some of them spend in beauty shops would wreck a bank.
Their husbands are executives and brokers. They are on the boards of private charities, and there are a flock of Madame Presidents among them.
Just about all their activities are funny to Miss Hokinson, perhaps the best lady cartoonist in America, who has a sharp eye, a dry sense of humor and plenty of ability with charcoal and wash.
Her work is personal and feminine. She deals almost entirely with females, and she can rip a woman apart, but when she goes to work on a man she merely scratches him. As a matter of fact, Dorothy McKay is about the only one of the women cartoonists whose work does not always show “the woman angle.”
The boudoir and the fitting room in a fashionable shop and the parlor are the scene of most cartoons by Barbara Shermund, Alice Harvey and Mary Petty, Miss Hokinson’s colleagues.
Miss Petty, for example, is typified by a cartoon showing a spectacled dame in an evening gown with a train. The saleswoman beside her says, “I want Miss Moak to look at you, Ma’am. Miss Moak is our trouble-shooter.”
Miss Shermund draws giddy, angular girls. For example, two girls are lounging about in a room, one in pajamas and one in an evening dress. The latter says, “I told him there are some things I won’t do, and going to a museum is one of them.”
Miss Hokinson goes farther afield for her characters.
“I see my women at the flower show, the dog show and places like that,” she said. “I find them at concerts, trying their best to be moved by the music, because it is so cultured. And I see them at flower shows talking about flowers and giving their Latin names, which amuses me because I have a nice flower garden and I like flowers as well as they do, but I don’t know a single Latin name.
“I don’t like people to get the idea I am bitter about them. I just think they’re funny. I seldom draw the vicious type—they don’t interest me at all. The ones who are unconsciously funny are the ones I like.”
Her cartoons emphasize the frivolous in the clubwoman type. There is her fat hostess in a room full of women who guides another fat lady up to a group and says, “Mrs. Purvis is just back from Spain. She says they’re wearing their skirts QUITE short.”
There are the two middle-aged ladies—whether Miss Hokinson’s ladies are “middle-aged” or “elderly” is puzzling—who are coming down the steps from a shabby apartment house. In one window is a sign, “Mrs. Digby, the Spiritualist, Messages.” Both the ladies look vaguely disappointed. One turns to the other and says, “Someday I’m going to a five-dollar medium.”
Many of the situations she satirizes take place in beauty shops or fashionable stores, and a frequent character is the fatuous saleswoman, anxious to make a sale and to impress the customer with her taste. She is the one who says to the clubwoman standing before the looking glass, “If it gives Madame a stomach we can take it out.”
“One time a newspaper man in Boston wrote me a letter and said he rather liked my clubwomen drawings, but that for a long time he didn’t really believe they existed,” said Miss Hokinson. “But he enclosed a clipping from a rotogravure section showing a meeting of clubwomen, and it was exactly like one of my uplift-club cartoons.”
One of her best club-meeting cartoons is one in which Edna St. Vincent Millay is sitting on the platform (it is a good caricature of Miss Millay). One old sister jumps up impulsively and, waving her hand, says, “Madame President, I move we read some of our poems for Miss Millay after she finishes.”
Miss Hokinson spends most of the year in a bungalow she calls Columbine Cottage, on Dishpan Creek in Silvermine, Connecticut. It is a section in which many artists have settled. She works in a little frame house which is mostly windows built in the woods at the edge of a meadow. She can look up from her drawing board and see an overfed horse named Charley grazing on the thick Connecticut grass and switching his tail at the flies. Beside her drawing board she keeps a filing cabinet in which she has laid away hundreds of sketches.
In the files are sketches made on concert programs, on envelopes, on the margins of newspapers, on the insides of paper-match folders.
“People from all over send me ideas for cartoons,” she said. “I give them a commission if I use the idea. There is a lady over in New Jersey who sends me a lot. I’ve never seen her. If she hears a saleswoman say something funny, she sends it to me. I like to get them.”
Miss Hokinson also finds types for her cartoons at church suppers and bingo parties in the community in which she lives.
An old man runs a sawmill across Silvermine River from her bungalow, and she buys church-supper tickets from his wife.
Miss Hokinson’s real name is Haakonson. Her father was Swedish, but he Americanized the name soon after settling in Illinois. She left Mendota to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, planning to be a fashion artist.
“I wanted to earn my living,” she said. “I didn’t want to go back to Mendota, although it’s a nice place. My mother still lives in Sterling, Illinois, and I go out there every Christmas.”
After studying at the Academy, she stayed in Chicago for two years, doing fashion drawings for Marshall Field’s and other stores. Then she came to New York City; she thinks “it was somewhere around 1922, because I was here a couple of years before The New Yorker started.”
She was a routine fashion artist for several years. At one time in this period she did a comic strip for a tabloid and called it Sylvia in the Big City.
“It was terrible,” she said. “One of the editors came over to me and said, ‘Now, listen. Your audience is composed of the gum-chewers and you got to appeal to them.’ I lasted five or six months, but in that time I saved enough money so I could look around for a while.”
The turning point in her career was the discovery of the theory of dynamic symmetry, which states that there is geometric form to everything—a snowflake, a leaf, the human body—and that the artist should “organize on his drawing surface a series of similar shapes based in symmetrical triangulation, and the picture will grow in conformity with nature’s plan.”
The theory is not generally accepted, but some of the best artists who ever lived, including George Bellows, believed in it, and it worked out fine for Miss Hokinson.
“I found out about dynamic symmetry in a night class taught by Howard Giles at the Parsons School,” she said. “It changed me entirely. When I am drawing now, sketching a person unawares even, I start with little rough triangular shapes and work out from that.
“It is wonderful for catching the gestures of people or the way they wear their hats or coats.
“Mr. Giles told us to sit in the subway on our way to class and draw people, how they were sitting, in straight lines—no curves at all. I would draw pictures of women with these straight lines and Mr. Giles would look at them and laugh. I was hurt. He said to keep at it.
“One day Garrett Price saw some drawings I made on a deck when I was seeing a friend off. They were just pictures of fat women waving to friends, fluttering their handkerchiefs.
“He said I should take them to The New Yorker, which was then a new magazine. I did, and they took them, and I’ve been drawing for them ever since. At first my cartoons were printed with no captions. Then they began putting captions on them, and after a wh
ile I got the knack.
“I prefer no captions on most cartoons. I think it would be just as well if the cartoon told the whole story. Of course, I’d rather have a caption when it’s something like, ‘If it gives Madame a stomach we can take it out!’”
William Steig
Not yet thirty, William Steig sold his first cartoon in 1930 and has become in six years one of the most respected humorous artists in the country, celebrated as much for his draftsmanship as for the comedy and social criticism inherent in his pictures of middle-class married life, of humans eating and drinking, of city children. He is perhaps best known for his cartoons of kids, the series of Small Fry cartoons.
He became a successful cartoonist with a minimum of backing and filling. After two years at the College of the City of New York, where he was a water polo star, he decided he wanted to be an artist. He talked the matter over with his father, Joseph Steig, then a house-painting contractor, but now a painter of crowd scenes, and they came to the conclusion it would be wise for him to study at the National Academy of Design.
After leaving the Academy he found that cartoons were what he wanted to draw all the time and he has concentrated on cartoons, although he is a good watercolor artist and one of his watercolors, “The Protest”—a study of a husband and wife—now hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.
“I had to break away from the things I learned at the Academy,” he said. “You develop nothing but bad habits in places like that. I had a good time there. We played football in the backyard during lunch hours and we used to hang out in an ice-cream parlor near the school and talk about art.
“The people were nice there, but I had to break away from the training I got. I imagine most cartoonists who went to formal art schools had the same experience. I am satisfied to do humorous drawings. I think the cartoon is a worthy art.”
Many of Mr. Steig’s cartoons and cover designs, particularly those of wide-eyed city kids, are based on memories of his experiences in the streets and in vacant-lot baseball and football fields of upper Manhattan, where he was born, and the Bronx, to which he moved when he was a child. Many of the kids in the Small Fry series probably went to P.S. 53 with him.
His Small Fry drawings are more realistic and reflect a higher regard for children than the glossy, varnished paintings by women in the women’s magazines.
There is the frightened little girl with her tiny hands clasped tightly together who looks through the window at the lightning in the sky; there is the boy who has found a worm in his apple; and there is the puzzled boy who laboriously has taken an alarm clock apart.
Perhaps you remember his drawing of a pleased small boy who has piled four pillows on a couch and is lolling on them while he demolishes a big lollipop. The title is “Sensualist.”
Mr. Steig is an urban cartoonist. All his people live in apartments or tenement flats. When he draws a country cartoon, it is a cartoon about city people on a farm in Connecticut for the summer. He lives at least six months of the year in Connecticut. His Colonial-style house is near the town of Sherman, but he gets his mail at Gaylordsville, his telephone exchange is New Milford, and the train he sometimes uses to get home after his weekly trip to Manhattan stops at Brewster, New York. Consequently, he does not quite know how to tell people where he lives.
He comes from an unusual family. Ten years ago there wasn’t an artist in the family and now there are eight. His father, who came here thirty years ago from Lemberg, a town then in Austria, but now in Poland, was a house-painting contractor until 1932, when illness caused him to retire. Since then he has been painting. He has held one exhibition.
“He paints crowds,” said his son. “Such things as state fairs and band concerts. I don’t think he’s painted a picture that didn’t have at least 100 persons in it.
“My mother, Loura Steig, started painting last February and she is very good. I guess you would call her a primitive. My wife, Elizabeth Mead, is an artist. She does baroque interiors. My brother Henry is an artist. He is also a writer. Right now he is doing some stories on swing musicians, under the name of Henry Anton. His wife, Mimi Steig, is a genre painter. My other brother, Arthur, writes advertising copy for an agency, but he is also a painter. He is the best artist in the family. His wife, Phyllis Steig, paints people. Sometime soon we are all going to hold an exhibition together.”
Since his marriage last January, Mr. Steig has quit making cartoons satirizing domestic situations. He did not quit, however, because a few months of married life convinced him that his drawings of the bored husband in the overstuffed chair were untrue or unfunny, but for the same reason that Peter Arno quit drawing the Whoops Sisters—he wanted to stop before the public got tired of them.
He likes best to draw pictures of persons engaged in actions which show exactly what kind of humans they are—eating corn on the cob, for example, or sitting around the house after dinner, reading the paper. Some of his best work is in two series of character studies of persons eating and drinking he made for Vanity Fair. There is the buttermilk drinker, a fat-faced man with carefully parted hair; and there is the beer drinker, a stout gentleman with a ragged mustache and a pleased expression.
In his drawing of eaters, he really appears to be enjoying himself. There you see what he calls “the pseudo-correct eater,” a double-chinned lady who holds both little fingers outstretched as she fatuously drinks tea and eats a biscuit; and “the beast,” a gentleman who grasps a huge poppy-seed roll in one hand and a spoon of hot soup in the other.
Mr. Steig’s mind is inquisitive and he has tried to figure out for his own satisfaction just why people laugh at cartoons. He does not believe that laughter, even that precipitated by a cartoon, is always noble, finding that “quite often there is a certain amount of viciousness in it.”
“I think that laughter over a cartoon or a comic strip is pretty well explained by a man named A. M. Ludovici, who wrote a book called ‘The Secret of Laughter,’” he said. “A lot of cartoonists believe he is right. He calls his idea ‘the theory of superior adaptation.’ The idea is that a thing is funny if it creates in the spectator a feeling of superior adaptation, that for the moment he is a superior person, certainly superior to the man who has been hit over the head with a rolling pin.
“Take for example a man who understands a foreign language. He hears someone trying to say something in this language and he thinks the mispronunciations are exceedingly funny. He feels superior.
“It is easy to laugh at cartoons of kids, because we are certainly better adapted than they are. At the same time kids are delighted at a chance to laugh at a grown-up. The more ridiculous an adult is in a slapstick comic strip, the more they laugh. At the same time kids like pictures of other kids. I’ve seen children laughing at my Small Fry drawings and they undoubtedly felt superior.
“I think that a sense of humor can be carried too far. For example, there are speakers who realize that the only way they can put something over is to tell a lot of anecdotes. Audiences feel that if a speaker isn’t funny he’s no good, and that is bad.
“Enjoyment of a cartoon also involves what Freud calls release of psychic tension. We are all inhibited and a piece of humor breaks down these inhibitions. A nonsense drawing releases one momentarily from the burden of serious thinking.”
Mr. Steig believes the cartoonist is an important citizen in periods when the world is afflicted with depressions and the growing-pains concomitant with changes in the social order. People are bewildered by the times and they turn to cartoons, just as they turn to moving pictures and jazz music, for a release, for an opportunity to laugh and feel superior.
He is glad that cartoonists have quit depending on he-said and she-said jokes, but he believes that the dependence on gag-lines likely will become as bore-some. He believes that a drawing which can take any one of six different gag-lines likely will be a bad humorous drawing, and he looks forward to a period when most cartoons will have no titles or gags beneath them at all. Unlike many cartoonist
s, he writes his own captions.
He is a prolific cartoonist, and he works with no soul-heaving. He works with pen and ink, with wash, with charcoal and with watercolors. He does cover designs in gouache, which is more opaque than the usual watercolors. For amusement he works on his thirty-acre farm, pruning apple trees or working about in his flower garden. Also for amusement, he carves figures out of wood cut from fruit trees.
“I’ve been carving wood for about a year and I find a lot of pleasure in it,” he said. “We cut down some fruit trees out here and I use the wood from them. Fruit-tree wood is not soft, but it carves easily.
“Next year we are going to have a vegetable garden, and I think I’ll get some goats. Most of my people are pretty definitely New York people, but I can draw them as well out here in Connecticut as I can in Manhattan, and we are thinking of living out here the whole year, rather than just for six months.”
He comes to town every Tuesday with a bundle of drawings. His work appears most regularly in The NewYorker, although he does illustrations for articles and stories in Collier’s and other magazines. He has published a book, “Man About Town.” He keeps no regular working hours, starting and knocking off when he pleases.
Right now he is turning out cartoons for a gasoline company in addition to his usual work, and on his weekly trip to the city he often comes across drawings of his pasted on Connecticut billboards.
His favorite comic strip is Barney Google, and when asked to name his favorite artists he mentioned Pieter Breughel and Giotto, who is said to have drawn a perfect circle with a single stroke when asked for a sample of his work to show a pope.
Asked to name some cartoonists whose work he respects, he began with James Thurber and named about twenty.