Kovarsky's World: New Yorker Cartoons at Society of Illustrators

Anatol Kovarsky (1919–2016) is celebrated with a solo exhibition, "Kovarsky's World: Covers and Cartoons from The New Yorker," at the Society of Illustrators in New York, running until March 3, 2018. The show features his witty black-and-white drawings and color covers that lampooned the art world from a conservative yet charming perspective. Kovarsky, born in Moscow and raised in Warsaw, studied economics in Vienna and painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before fleeing to the US via Cuba in 1941. He enlisted in the US Army after Pearl Harbor, served in the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris, and later settled in New York. From 1947, he contributed to The New Yorker, Collier's, Life, Look, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, and The Herald Tribune. His first anthology, "Kovarsky's World" (Knopf, 1956), cemented his fame. His personal painting style blended Rouault's thick outlines with German Expressionist color distortions. The exhibition presents his gentle, domestic humor targeting modern art's incomprehensibility, including classic tropes like perplexed museum visitors and a pre-mutilation Venus de Milo.