William Steig - King of Cartoons
Children may know William Steig as the creator of Shrek, but their grandparents can trace the ornery green ogre’s roots through a body of children’s books, New Yorker cartoons and drawings dating back to the Depression. Neither group will be disappointed by the Jewish Museum’s exhibition “From The New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig.” The show is a child pleaser that does not stint on Steig’s adult biography.
A small selection of drawings and figures from the DreamWorks studio are shown alongside Steig’s final drawings for the 1990 book that later inspired the film. Also displayed are letters from Steig to the DreamWorks producer John H. Williams that are full of ideas for animated sequences. In one, for a scene that never made it into the movie, Steig suggests that Shrek’s mother be seen “worrying about him, like a Jewish mother.”
The child of immigrants, Steig was fortunate to come of age at an auspicious time for cartoonists. An entire industry of penny weeklies was devoted to boosting morale during the Depression and World War II. He was 23 when he began contributing to The New Yorker in 1930, and the magazine continued to publish his drawings, including several covers, until his death in 2003, at 95.
Brimming with scenes of domestic discord and references to Jewish immigrant life in the tenements, Mr. Steig’s early cartoons and drawings were a radical departure from the upper-crust dinner-party gags of previous New Yorker cartoons.
Around this time Steig also made a body of work exploring psychological states, some of which were collected in “About People: A Book of Symbolic Drawings” (1939). “Melancholia” shows a woman reclining in a cradle; “Loss of a Memory” depicts a man gazing at the empty space where his hands should be. Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s editor then, called these works “too personal and not funny enough,” but they caught on with devotees of psychoanalysis.
Steig’s overwhelming sense of isolation found a more resonant expression in a remarkable series of children’s books he started to produce in the late 1960s. Most have become classics, with grown-up ethical and philosophical dilemmas couched in the antics of lovable farm animals. In these works Steig’s sensitive, wavering line finds a parallel in his expressive writing.
Steig is frequently compared to that other famous New Yorker illustrator, Saul Steinberg, with whom he shared a reverence for Picasso. Steig, however, was more interested in internal landscapes than in the external life of the city that captivated Steinberg.
The novelist Henry Miller put it best, in a letter to Steig that is on display at the museum: “You give a sort of geography of the emotional reactions of man, his tiny little globe built around a microscopic ego.”
Via N.Y. Times
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