Denys
Wortman, the descendant of of early Dutch
settlers, was born in Saugerties, New
York, in 1887. Wortman studied under Robert
Henri, at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art. Henri was
an advocate of realism in art became the leader of a movement that
Art Young described as the Ash Can School.
Robert Henri taught his students that the
artist's work should be "a social force that creates a stir in
the world". Henri also urged artists to use the "rich subject-matter
provided by modern urban life". Wortman, like other artists taught
by Henri, such as John Sloan, George
Bellows, George Luks, Rockwell
Kent and Edward Hopper were deeply
influenced by his ideas.
Wortman's work appeared in the world famous Armory Show in New
York City in 1913. Organized by the Association of American Painters
and Sculptors, a group started by Robert Henri
in 1911, the International Exhibition of Modern Art was held from
17th February to 15th March. It has been claimed that this event marked
the beginning of the progressive art movement in the United States.
In 1924 Wortman began working for the New
York World. His cartoons reflected Henri's views that artists
should use the "rich subject-matter provided by modern urban
life". His cartoons were particularly powerful during the Depression
and many were reprinted in The Unemployed
journal.
In February, 1931, the newspaper was sold to Edward
Scripps organization and the New York Telegram. His most
well-known characters were two vagrants, Mopey Dick and the Duke.
His son, points out on the Denys
Wortman Website that the artist's wife, Hilda Renbold Wortman,
played an important role in these cartoons: "She would sit on
park benches and listen to the conversations around her, reporting
back to my father the phrases and conversations that she overheard.
From these and other captions, he would create the image, the atmosphere
and the surrounding that would communicate the idea visually."
Wortman also worked for Metropolitan Movies
for thirty years. Denys Wortman, who retired from the New
York Telegram in 1954, died
at his home in Martha's Vineyard in 1958.
Mopey Dick and the Duke
"Here, put this toothpick in your mouth, Mopey,
and the other guy's will think we had something to eat."
Denys
Wortman, The Unemployed
(1931)
(1)
Charles Hanson Towne, An Interpreter of Manhattan (1926)
For over
two years now, those of us who dwell in New York have been seeing
in the World every day a cartoon depicting some phase of the great
honeycomb which is our city. Personally, I have watched for the work
of Wortman as I have watched for new "features". He has
made breakfast a delight and the burdens of the day a little easier
to bear. Here, it seems to me, is a man with vision and philosophy
- a poet with pity and humor in his hear, who happens to express himself
in terms of drawing, rather than in terms of flowing words. Loving
Manhattan as I do, having lived in its maze all my life, I have been
struck with the power of these pictures, their great humanity, their
unerring sense of the pathos, as well as the guttersnipe humor of
our big, throbbing town.
Has it every occurred to you that humor and tears are closely allied?
If one laughs too much, one weeps; and conversely, if one weeps too
much, one laughs. The dividing line between the two emotions is but
a hair's breadth. There are peril and despair in New York; but around
the next corner there may be unbridled mirth. it is this kaleidoscopic
quality of what is at once the ugliest and the most beautiful city
on earth which gives it the radiance and wonder we all recognize,
if we have even a touch of imagination.
Wortman has the seeing eye, the feeling heart. The pain in our streets
is no less real to him than their hurdy-gurdy laughter. He blends
the two. He dips beneath the surface, and extracts the best and the
worst of us. He reveals the pulsating town as it is, and as it always
will be. Our salesgirls, our gamins, our park-bench crowds, our flappers,
our rich and our poor are the materials for his robust, kindly philosophy.
He is never bitter. He is always just. He takes Manhattan at its true
worth, and gets it upon paper through the magic of pencil. He is not
merely a "funny" man. Like all great humorists, he is also
a great philosopher.
(2)
Guy Pene du Bois, Denys Wortman (1953)
Denys Wortman's
work should be treated as seriously in America as that of men like
Daumier and Forain in France, Hogarth and Rowlandson in England. Mr.
Wortman may have more good humor than some of the caricaturists just
mentioned, especially in his Mopey Dick and the Duke series, but he
continues to compete with them in the study of character and in the
interpretation of a certain type's inevitable impulses and movements.
His collection of comments on the human comedy have, which is curiously
rare in a cartoonist of today, a direct relation to life as it is
lived in certain definite communities and to the lines drawn in faces
by the community's mores as well as the turn of the clothes dictated
by the district's fashion.
Denys Wortman claims that the Duke is himself and Mopey Dick a distortion
done from the same model, that both are drawn from a large mirror
before which he poses with cheeks drawn in one instance probably and
certainly puffed out in the other and that their philosophy is, as
far as it goes, his. There is no reason to deny or even suspect this
claim except that one can easily realize that his philosophy or mode
of living is more remunerative than theirs.
(3)
Denys Wortman, Denys
Wortman Website (2000)
Mr. Wortman
lived and worked from his home on Martha's Vineyard from 1941 until
his death in 1958. I'm his son, the eighth in a line of Denys Wortmans,
and for some of you a familiar face on the Vineyard and current owner
of the home in which many of these cartoons were created. This is
my attempt to share the collective works, wit, and insight of my father.
In viewing his cartoons, one will find a striking resemblance to the
plight of today's realities, reminding us all of the timeless humor
of social and cultural mores.
This site is dedicated with profound admiration to my father, Denys
Wortman, and my mother, Hilda Renbold Wortman, who was also my father's
primary idea person. She would sit on park benches and listen to the
conversations around her, reporting back to my father the phrases
and conversations that she overheard. From these and other captions,
he would create the image, the atmosphere and the surrounding that
would communicate the idea visually.
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