The New Yorker Cartoons of George Price (No. 87)

The New Yorker Cartoons (1929-1995)

of George Price

REVIEW BY TOM SPURGEON:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

George Price is a remarkably underestimated cartoonist, an amazing thing given the nearly seven-decade span of his career, most notably doing cartoons for The New Yorker. Whereas the art from other cartoonists from that magazine, like Peter Arno's or Chales Addams', might overwhelm the reader with heavy black and fat, ill-filled lines, George Price's delicate style was often so completely subservient to the joke a reader could miss its beauty. It is only on a second look - at the sheer detail in the scenes depicted, at the virtuosity with which Price could draw anything - that one begins to fully realise the extent of his talent. 

The cartoons early in Price's career - best represented to my mind by the book George Price's Characters - showed Price dabbling in variations of his trademark style and displaying a wide range of humour. As the years went by, Price became best known for cartoons about various couples, living amidst a vast avalanche of clutter, making humorous commentary about the matter-of-fact reality of their lives. Those cartoons adroitly acknowledge the gap between self-conception and reality, and did so in a way that could be read as both sarcastic and sweet. They served as perfect grace notes to the extremely image-conscious magazine in which they appeared.

Price was genuinely funny, and his comics were genuinely gorgeous. His strong line work has rarely been equalled, and Price's idiosyncratic sense of humour - speaking to a 20th Century way of American life that is slowly fading from view - has been sorely missed since his death in 1995. Giving Price's cartoons a second glance - even a third, fourth, and fifth - is to grant an audience to a quiet, unassuming, but often great artist who went beyond fulfilling the expectations of his particular niche to helping define one unique corner of American culture.

OBITUARY BY LEE LORENZ:

(from The New Yorker, 30 January 1995)

George Price, who died on January 12th, at the age of ninety-three, was a member of the remarkable generation of New Yorker cartoonists - among them Helen Hokinson, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and William Steig - who, between 1925 and 1935, reinvented American comic art. His happily rendered portraits of lowlifes, harridans, and sourballs added a distinctive, egalitarian note to the magazine's comic drawings, which up to that point had largely focussed on the diversions and rituals of the upper crust. Price's chosen terrain was proudly, even defiantly, lower crust. He claimed that his oddball repertory company was based on memories of his eccentric neighbours in his home hamlet of Coytesville, New Jersey (pop. 400). His father (a carpenter) and his mother (a seamstress) were both employed in the fledgling movie business, which was them establishing a beachhead in nearby Fort Lee.

Another neighborhood resource for the young Price was the painter George Hart, in whose studio Price came to meet such stimulatingly diverse artists as George Herriman and Diego Rivera. Hart encouraged Price's fondness for the offbeat and the picturesque by inviting him along on sketching trips to the crowded public picnic grounds at the foot of the Palisades or, across the river, the steamier corners of Hell's Kitchen. Price's first submissions to The New Yorker were based on these sketches and were published in 1929 as spot drawings. 

Price claiming that he was not an "idea" person, was reluctant to attempt the leap from illustrator to cartoonist, but he was prodded by the resourceful editor Katherine S. White, who assured him the the magazine would keep him supplied with ideas. Never was a promise better fulfilled; of the twelve-hundred odd "Geo. Price"-signed drawings that he created for the magazine, only one, amazingly was based on an idea of his own - it appeared as the cover of the December 25, 1965, issue and showed a covey of frayed, ill-cast street Santas riding the I.R.T. It is a sign of Price's genius that he could transform such a mass of other people's gags and roughs into a life's work of absolutely original, instantly identifiable art. On paper, the Price line was whiplike and beautifully finished; when lasers came along, they at last provided an image that befitted such exactitude. His drawings were elegantly composed, and featured an obsessive and hilarious attention to detail. Who else could make a barstool or the back of a TV set funny. Frank Modell, a long-term colleague, once remarked that Price's rendering of a tenement boiler room could have served as a blueprint for an apprentice plumber.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY:

George Price's Characters: More Than 200 of His Best Cartoons (2012)

The World Of George Price - A 55-Year Retrospective (1988)

Browse At Your Own Risk (1977)

The People Zoo (1971)