Image: g.gallery, Barcelona
A leather-bound scrapbook holding more than 100 pages and roughly 500 individual cartoons by E. Simms Campbell has resurfaced at Gallery 98 during a move between storage facilities. Compiled by J. Viehe Rumsey and dated 11 April 1948, the high-end embossed volume gathers Campbell cartoons made before that date. It measures 15 by 12 inches, and its cover and first five pages are detached.
Individual cartoons reproduced from the volume carry captions including ‘What will Mrs. Roosevelt think if she sees you with a dirty face?’, ‘We all felt we were getting in a rut!’ and ‘He comes from a very nice family, I understand’. A fourth refers to getting a batch of girls past the British blockade, placing at least some of the material in the visual culture of the war years.
Campbell’s career connected African-American print culture with the commercial mainstream of the 1930s and 1940s. In the mid-1930s his ‘Harlem Sketches’ was a regular feature in the Amsterdam News. He was then hired by the men’s magazine Esquire, where, according to Gallery 98, his racial identity was largely kept secret from the publication’s predominantly white audience. He created the magazine’s ‘Esky’ logo and is known for its ‘good girl’ cartoons of young women in skimpy or form-fitting clothing, and he is generally credited as the first African-American cartoonist to be published and syndicated in nationally distributed mainstream magazines. That position makes the scrapbook a document of authorship and access in American commercial illustration as much as of the drawings themselves.
The volume came to light with a group of other art-related material uncovered when the gallery left a storage facility after a 30 per cent increase in its fees. Gallery 98 says the find falls outside its usual scope — art ephemera from the 1960s to the 2000s — and extends instead into the histories of photography, illustration and jazz. The same batch includes illustrated 78 rpm record albums issued by Asch Records from 1944 with covers by David Stone Martin, a collection of more than 50 photographs and posters from the San Francisco jazz club Keystone Korner, active 1972–83, and Neysa McMein’s 1924 ‘Types of American Beauty’ covers for McCall’s. Those are separate from the Campbell scrapbook.
Gallery 98 is based at 134 South Oxford Street in Brooklyn, New York.
