By Della Hasselle
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — A new East Harlem exhibit is the first to show Great Depression-era Manhattan through the sketches of Denys Wortman, a significant yet long overlooked cartoonist from the 1930s and 1940s.
Denys Wortman Rediscovered: Drawings for the World-Telegram and Sun, 1930 - 1953 opens Friday at the Museum of the City of New York and is the first collective of Wortman's quintessential depictions of New York's harsh reality, and its recovery, during the Depression.
"There was a mix of what was real life, what you saw in the streets, and also partly what you saw in the movies," said cartoonist Jules Feiffer at a symposium Thursday night.
"The feel of the immediacy on the page is very compelling, very alive," said Feiffer, who helped curate the exhibit after discovering Wortman's son had 5,000 pieces of the artists work.
Wortman enthralled readers for more than 30 years by capturing lifelike moments in his visual column, "Metropolitan Movies," for the New York World, a paper later to be known as the World Telegram and Sun. His subjects included tenement dwellers, workmen on their lunch breaks, bosses in the garment district and women dealing with the harshness of reality during wartime.
"He was part of the long line of tradition of mapping out New York City in terms of the divide of social class, which is sort of beautifully observed by him," cartoonist and American Social History Project director Joshua Brown added Thursday.
Wortman, who lived from 1887 to 1958, eventually drew cartoons for more than 100 publications, including the New Yorker, and was the first cartoonist to be inducted into the National Academy of Design.
Wortman had all but disappeared from the public eye despite his professional accomplishments, according to museum director Susan Henshaw Jones.
"Denys Wortman and his cartoons were all but lost to history," said Jones.
"This overlooked cache of works reveals the scenes of the city as it evolved from the Great Depression to the Cold War, as it emerged from despair and moved toward prosperity, as it built and rebuilt itself in the mid-century."
Cartoonists at the symposium Thursday said Wortman's work was just as relevant today as it was then. Many compared his subjects of fiscal depression and political turmoil to the ones New Yorkers see today.
"You see the work and it immediately strikes a chord," Feiffer said, comparing his drawings of daily observations to a modern person Tweeting their daily experiences.
"It doesn't feel like the past tense even though it was in a past time."
Denys Wortman Rediscovered: Drawings for the World-Telegram and Sun, 1930 - 1953 will be shown at the Museum of the City of New York on 1120 Fifth Avenue from Nov. 19 through Mar. 20.
