You can’t deny the arch wit of a Barbara Shermund cartoon.
Over the hundreds of illustrations she created for the New Yorker and Esquire in the 1920s through ’50s was a voice refreshingly astute, and a sense of humor equally wicked and teasing—yet charmingly so. Hers were modern cartoons. In a c. 1928 work, a young woman curled up on a couch with her mother is being harshly told, “Evelyn, speak more respectfully to your father,” as her patriarch hovers over her. “Oh Mother,” she responds, “don’t be so pre-war!”
But Shermund, one of the very few women cartoonists who achieved acclaim in the era, would barely be remembered. In her lifetime, she gave no interviews and left behind a scant archive. After her death in 1978, she was variously documented in historic accounts (often written by men) as “Helen Shermund,” “Barbara Sherman,” and “Beverly Shermund” who “specializ[ed] in cartoons about dumb blondes.” Her ashes were left uncollected at a funeral home for 35 years.
Enter Caitlin McGurk. After encountering Shermund’s work at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at the Ohio State University in 2012, the researcher and curator has spent more than a decade probing her life and body of work. Her “crusade to make her visible,” as she called the project, has resulted in a book, Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins, the first biography of the cartoonist, as well as the first exhibition of Shermund’s work in nearly a century.
“I couldn’t fathom how I and most colleagues I spoke to in the field had never heard of this artist before, one who was making such starkly feminist, funny, and just plain beautifully drawn work,” she told me. “Further, the field of cartooning has been so male-dominated that, for me, finding out for the first time about any woman cartoonist from the past is such a thrill—and I immediately want to share and celebrate their work.”
Born in 1899 in San Francisco, Shermund displayed keen artistic sensibilities at an early age, before attending the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). In 1924, she paid a visit to New York and never left—particularly as she landed a gig contributing spot illustrations and captioned cartoons for a nascent magazine, the New Yorker.
In all, Shermund would create some 600 works for the publication; she became the third woman artist to illustrate its cover, for its June 13, 1925 issue. Her lively line work and evocative ink washes lent themselves easily to her cartoon submissions, which sparkled with pointed observational humor. As founder Harold Ross once instructed his cartoonists, the magazine’s illustrations should “portray or satirize a situation,” but one that was “authentic” and “based on fact.”
In grasping that brief, Shermund’s cartoons effectively set the tone for the New Yorker‘s brand of metropolitan drollery. Her energetic visual style would also translate into her work for Esquire, Collier’s, Life, book covers, movie posters, and various advertising campaigns.
“Shermund was an incredibly versatile artist,” McGurk noted, “and could adapt her style to appeal to whatever audience her publisher catered to, which is an incredibly valuable skill in the magazine business.”
In between, Shermund traveled, painted, fell in love, married (twice, though she never lived with either spouse), exhibited at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, and became one of the first women to be admitted to the male-only National Cartoonists Society. Later in life, she ensconced herself in the seaside town of Seabright in New Jersey. She remained an intensely private individual throughout, such that McGurk had quite the task unearthing her papers.
While various institutional collections—the New York Public Library’s New Yorker Records and Morgan Library’s Melvin R. Seiden Collection, among others—held Shermund’s original works and her correspondence with editors, much of her personal life remains stubbornly obscure. She received, for instance, a poignant love letter around 1930 professing “I can’t forget you,” but its sender is lost to history.
Still, in Tell Me a Story, McGurk manages to color in dimensions of the artist through her work. Her ability to draw out women’s relationships is noted, as is her skewering of gender stereotypes and convention. A c. 1932 cartoon sees two young girls huddled gleefully over a letter, with one of them exclaiming, “Gosh—he loves you more than he does me.” McGurk also reads queer nods into a few of Shermund’s works, in winking captions such as “I don’t think he’s abnormal—he’s versatile.”
Her works outside of cartooning are also duly documented. Shermund’s adventures in Woodstock, New York, from 1928 produced radiant watercolors and lithographs of the natural landscape, while her sketches of everyday scenes attest to her shrewd eye.
In the 1940s, Shermund landed her syndicated column, Shermund’s Sallies, with William Randolph Hearst’s King Features, which would end up her last stable job. By this time, she was drawing gags to other people’s captions (most often, her frequent collaborator Eldon Dedini’s), her art dashed off with a spare, hurried hand in order to meet a rigorous schedule. Her work with magazines dried up in the following decades.
Shermund died at a nursing home in New Jersey, her artworks and personal effects willed to friends and neighbors. McGurk managed to locate many of these artifacts through Facebook community groups, some members of which had looked out for Shermund in her later years and remembered her fondly. Among these recollections are that of one Macy Goode, a Long Branch dentist and budding cartoonist who had written to local artists for advice. Shermund responded in earnest.
“Go out and sketch. Sketch everything in sight—things you like and things you don’t like,” she wrote. “Learn how to report with your drawing pencil. Make it literate. Make it talk, shout, sing, laugh, and cry.”
Most notably, McGurk also linked up with Amanda Gormley, Shermund’s half-niece, who had acquired a collection of her aunt’s letters from an antiques dealer. “Connecting with Amanda was the first of what felt like many small miracles along the path of this project,” McGurk recalled. “Amanda generously shared some of her own discoveries about Shermund with me, provided some context for family history, and most significantly—was able to claim Shermund’s ashes from the funeral home in New Jersey at which they’d remained since ’78.”
In 2019, with help from a GoFundMe campaign, Gormley and McGurk interred Shermund’s cremains in Colma, California, at the same cemetery where her mother was buried.
The book is just one aspect of McGurk’s mission to give Shermund her much-deserved moment in the spotlight. In 2018, she organized an exhibition of the cartoonist’s work at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, which traveled to the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio in 2020. The show is now on view at the Brandywine Museum in Pennsylvania, bringing together a trove of Shermund’s original cartoons and artworks that, as McGurk noted, “still pack a punch to this day.”
“I hope if audiences are already familiar with her, they will delight in the first-ever collection of her work, and if they haven’t heard of her, they will discover a new favorite,” she said. “I hope that the exhibition and the book will make clear women have always been part of the cartooning profession, and how cultural and societal shifts have shaped and sublimated artists voices who worked in her industry. Most of all, I hope they laugh a lot.”
Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins by Caitlin McGurk is out now on Fantagraphics.
“Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund” is on view at Brandywine Museum, 1 Hoffmans Mill Rd, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, through June 1.
