Emma Allen on Otto Soglow’s Spot Art
The New Yorker Don’t let go of old stuff easily. Recently our copy department removed the hyphen that we had kept in the “Inbox” longer than anyone should keep anything in an Inbox. But “teenager” clings to its awkward hyphen, and “cooperation” retains its umlaut. (Don’t call it an umlaut.) My favorite relics still in use are two large binders of “Talk spots” — hundreds of postage stamp-sized drawings that appear at the top of Talk of the Town pieces, which cartoonist Otto Soglow drew from 1926 to 1970, to illustrate the section’s stories, and which have (for the most part) been associated with new Talk pieces since then.
One of my first tasks at the magazine was to look through these binders and select decades-old drawings to accompany some of our most current stories. It was amazing to see how well these vintage vignettes continued to match the news of the week. Of course, over the years, hemlines fluctuate; Television replaces radio; Nixon’s jowls sag. But something about the look and tone of the designs is timeless. On a microscopic scale, they display the insolence and respect for hyper-specificity that constitute the magazine’s DNA.
Soglow was born in Manhattan in 1900 and almost never left. He wanted to become an actor, but settled for being a cartoonist, and was best known for his syndicated comic strip “The Little King,” a wordless strip about a rotund and charmingly immature monarch. The first of Soglow New Yorkers The cartoon was published nine months into the magazine’s existence, and its increasingly restrained aesthetic, which eschewed text and favored clean, elegant linework, was a harbinger of a style that became enormously popular.
When Soglow died in 1975, the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, wrote of his Talk spots: “He worked on these modest drawings with great earnestness, spending hours on each to understand their meaning and composition. » Shawn describes Soglow as “a gentle, melancholy, reticent man.” (His collected spots were released under the sweet, melancholic titles “Ho Hum” and “More Ho Hum”, although, according to other accounts, Soglow was a bit of a party animal.)
But back to the spots. I recently dug up the Talk stories that originally sat alongside a handful of Soglow’s little drawings – the images that most mystified or charmed me. An article from the May 9, 1931 issue, accompanied by a skyscraper wearing what I always thought of as sunglasses, says: “At the opening of the Empire State Building, too little emphasis was placed on the tallest tenant. It is significant that the world’s most magnificent architectural creation should be crowned by the Model Brassiere Company. . . . We take our hat off to the architects and engineers who have succeeded in raising a brassiere company to eleven hundred feet above the ground.”
A drawing of two naked people worshiping the sun was associated with a story commenting on the “great growth of nudist cults” (July 21, 1934). The image of a sculptor carving what appears to be a duck was actually drawn for a 1950s piece depicting a woman carving a duck from a piece of marble salvaged from the NYU Law School construction site. (We’d love to tell such a story today!) A drawing of a dinosaur skeleton, long used to illustrate stories about the Museum of Natural History, was first published atop a 1938 story about how the government purchased drab clothing for the needy. (The author considered “blue suits synonymous with Sunday, a day of incessant adult surveillance when our spirits were quietly broken at the Natural History Museum.”)
What about baseball players holding musical instruments, from 1947? “The Yankees will sponsor a symphony radio broadcast next season to get more women interested in baseball.” Meanwhile, a 1939 spot showing someone filming a cowboy and a big cat in a top hat first illustrated a story about presidential candidates who wanted movies made about them. Our columnist’s counterpoint: “This country likes boring presidents, who give it a certain feeling of security and rest.” Here’s more, ho hum. ♦
