Boardman
Robinson
was born in Somerset, Nova
Scotia, in 1876. He spent his childhood in Wales but moved to the
United States when he enrolled at the Massachusetts Art School. Robinson
worked as a cartoonist for the New York
Times and
the New York Tribune where
he developed a distinctive style by using black crayon with ink washes.
Robinson was a strong supporter of woman
suffrage and after Alice Paul and Lucy
Burns formed the Congressional Union for
Women Suffrage (CUWS) he contributed to the organization's magazine,
the Suffragist. Robinson,
a socialist, went with John
Reed to Russia in 1914.
During the First World War Robinson had a large
number of cartoons published in the radical journal, The
Masses. In 1917 the US government objected to cartoons
by Boardman that appeared in The Masses
and the journal was charged with violating the Espionage
Act.
After the war Boardman became a contributing editor of the The
Liberator, a radical journal established by Max
Eastman. He also taught at the Arts
Students League. Boardman Robinson died in 1952.
Boardman
Robinson, New York Times (1914)
(1)
The
Masses (September, 1917)
The Post Office was represented
by Assistant District Attorney Barnes. He explained that the Department
construed the Espionage Act as giving it power to exclude from the
mails anything which might interfere with the successful conduct of
the war.
Four cartoons and four pieces of text in the August issue were specified
as violations of the law. The cartoons were Boardman Robinson's Making
the World Safe for Democracy, H. J. Glintenkamp's Liberty Bell
and the conscription cartoons, and one by Art Young on Congress and
Big Business. The conscription cartoon was considered by the Department
"the worst thing in the magazine". The text objected to
was A Question, an editorial by Max Eastman; A Tribute,
a poem by Josephine Bell; a paragraph in an article on Conscientious
Objectors; and an editorial, Friends of American Freedom.
(2)
Max Eastman, Love and Revolution
(1964)
A regular contributor to The Masses was Boardman Robinson,
then and perhaps permanently regarded as one of America's greatest
artists. "His masterly drawings had the breathlike delicacy as
well as the power of the old Masters," in the judgment of a fellow
artist, Reginald Marsh. Surprisingly as it may seem, he actually introduced
into America the idea, as old as Daumier, that cartoons should have
the values of art as well as of meaning.
He was big, burly, bluff, sea-captain sort of character, with dancing
blue eyes under bushy red brows, a red beard, and a boisterous way
of "blowing in" as though out of a storm, instead of merely
entering, a place of habitation. Everybody called him Mike, and I
guess it must have been in memory of Michelangelo, whose fury and
rapture his powerful and meaningful drawings did recall.
When Mike blew in with a picture of a white-clad, saintly Jesus standing
against a stone wall facing the rifles of a brutish firing squad -
"The Deserter"- I felt that number (The Masses, July,
1916) deserved a place in the history of art.
Boardman
Robinson, The Masses
(July, 1916)
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