Young, Art

YOUNG, ART (1866–1943). The leading American socialist cartoonist and a leading humorist of the early twentieth century, Art Young believed the best political work directly attacked the capitalist system. His devoted readers delved further, into the staggering artistic talent that Young brought to all his work, and the deep criticisms that Young expressed about the sorry fate of modern civilization at large.

Born in Illinois near the Wisconsin border, Young arrived with his family at an early age in Monroe, Wisconsin, and experienced the comfort of a secure middle-class home. His mother greatly encouraged his interest in art, and the loan of a Dore volume from the town library introduced themes he would return to intermittently for the rest of his life. He successfully published a cartoon in the popular weekly Judge during his teens and soon set off for the big city to attend the Chicago Academy of Art and Design. From there, he joined the staff of a daily paper as an illustrator, gradually developing his deeper intellectual interests. He created the definitive sketches of the Haymarket anarchists, accepting the mainstream view of their guilt. After studying art in New York and Paris for eight years, he returned to Chicago and worked for the Inter-Ocean newspaper with famed cartoonist Thomas Nast. In late 1895, he returned to New York and drew political cartoons that increasingly took on reformist nature.

At first convinced by pseudo-patriotic support for the Spanish-American war, he had already begun to doubt the logic of warfare, another key theme in his later work. He joined the Socialist Party in 1910, drawn most especially to Eugene V. Debs. After some geographical shifts, he settled into a studio in Bethel, Connecticut, from which he could easily travel to Manhattan for work and social life. Greeted as a sort of avuncular senior figure amongst the youthful Greenwich Village radicals, he joined the staff of The Masses magazine, making his living with cartoons for popular magazines like Life, Puck, and Metropolitan. Arrested and put on trial with other Masses editors for humorously resisting the appeals of war-patriotism, he emerged unscathed and drew for the The Liberator, Bolshevik-inclined successor to the Masses. In 1919, he launched his own radical humor magazine, Good Morning, with a socialistic former editor of Life, Ellis O. Jones. It was never a commercial success, despite public fund-raising entertainments, and folded two years later.

Regaining the commercial prestige that he had lost as the price his wartime courage, he began drawing for the Saturday Evening Post, increasingly artistic rather than didactic, including “Trees At Night,” which became a small stand-alone art book. He used his good fortune and time to create a studio and public gallery of his own work in Bethel, and a semi-memoir, On My Way (1928), which enjoyed, like Trees, a fine reception from critics. Then came the Great Depression and the bouts of ill-health that troubled him for the rest of his life. He remained somewhat active, in and around the Left, with cartoons for socialist newspapers (some of the most interesting had appeared in the Yiddish weekly, Groysser Kundes, with his own lettering translated) and, near the end of his life, a tribute issue of the Communist New Masses.

His own pet project, updating the many artistic version of Dante’s visit to Hell, included a youthful version published in 1888, Hell Up to Date, and a final version, Art Young’s Inferno (1934), a hilarious if commercially unsuccessful treatment of so-called American progress. Here, Young’s own prose reached an apex as well, with dry witted commentary on Man’s supposed progress toward enlightenment exposed as foolish pretense.

An Art Young revival of sorts commenced in the twenty-first century with the reprinting of Art Young’s Inferno, and the gathering of many scattered materials from private collections into To Laugh That We May Not Weep. Here, in nearly 400 oversized pages, hundreds of prints gathered from private collections along with excerpts from his rarest works. Essays by Frank M. Young, Art Spiegelman and Justin Green, among others, here brought new light to the quality and impact of Young’s life work.

Beffel, John Nicholas, ed. Art Young: His Life and Times. New York: Sheridan House, 1939.

Bray, Glenn & Frank M.Young, eds., To Laugh That We May Not Weep: The Life & Times of Art Young. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2017.

Cohen, Michael. “’Cartooning Capitalism’: Radical Cartooning and the Making of American Popular Radicalism in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Bos, Dennis and Marjolein t’Hart, eds. Humour and Social Protest. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 35-58.

Fitzgerald, Richard. Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the “Masses” and “Liberator.” Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973.

Heller, Steve, Glen Bray and Charles Recht, Introductions to Art Young’s Inferno. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2019.

Art Young. The Masses, 1912-1918. “Good Morning.” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/visual_arts/satire/young/

Art Young Papers. Guide. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_046/