Robert Weber, whose elegant and witty cartoons about the privileged and the self-involved were staples of The New Yorker for 45 years, died on Oct. 20 in Branford, Conn. He was 92.
The death was confirmed by his wife, Debora Graves.
From 1962 to 2007, Mr. Weber drew 1,481 cartoons for the magazine, as well as art for 11 covers. Over those decades, the well-dressed people he depicted, often at parties or entertaining at home, were an overachieving bunch.
“So we finally reach the summit of Everest,” one woman tells two friends, lounging on a sofa strewn with pillows, wine glasses at hand, “and who’s already there but that pushy sportswear buyer from Bloomingdale’s, Tanya Urquhart.”
Weber people were nothing if not entitled, going about with what some might see as skewed expectations. The lone customer in a nondescript bar suggests to the oblivious bartender, “You know, a Bobby Short could do wonders for this place.” A young man sitting with his girlfriend on the beach says, “I see myself going into some form of public service, like banking.”
This mentality held true even for other species. A mouse returning home to the hole reports to his partner: “I’m back. The brie’s not ripe.”
It was rare, though, for Mr. Weber to draw animals. The cartoonist Lee Lorenz, who was art editor and then cartoon editor at The New Yorker during many of Mr. Weber’s years there, said he loved that Mr. Weber’s work was “grounded in real life, based on real-life situations and real people.”
Granted, they were upper-middle-class people, Mr. Lorenz said in an interview on Tuesday — perhaps like the magazine’s readers, with “the same kind of privileges but also the same kind of obstacles.” But he was never one to use what Mr. Lorenz called cartoonists’ clichés: flying saucers, a man on a desert island and the like.
Mr. Weber’s people did long for faraway places. “We were thinking about the Himalayas this summer,” a man with his arm thrown casually across the back of a sofa tells his dinner hosts. “On the other hand, there’s something very special about Montauk.” A man at a travel agent’s office: “We just want a vacation — we don’t want to learn anything.”
Sometimes his subjects were middle-aged white businessmen wearing glasses and looking comfortable in suits, ties and high-backed swivel chairs. “I asked you in, Featherstone, because I had a sudden desire to reach out to the Bookkeeping Department,” one such executive says to a befuddled employee standing before his desk in shirt sleeves.
In another cartoon, two men enter a cavernous, completely empty building. “Well, that does it, Charlie,” says one. “We’ve outsourced everything.”
But Mr. Weber insisted that these were not his people.
“I know nothing about businessmen,” Mr. Weber told The New York Times in 1980. “I don’t know any personally; I’m intimidated by them. They’re kind of authoritarian.”
Robert Maxwell Weber was born in Los Angeles on April 22, 1924, the son of Maxwell Weber, a salesman who left the family during the Depression, and the former Edith Huston, who raised Robert and his younger brother, Don, as a single parent.
Growing up, Robert and his best friend, Ross Littel — who became a noted furniture and textile designer — were influenced by the same high school art teacher. Mr. Weber and Mr. Littel (who died in 2000) served together in the Coast Guard during World War II and later studied together at Pratt Institute in New York.
Mr. Weber also attended the Art Students League of New York and worked as a fashion illustrator for Harper’s Bazaar and other magazines before beginning his cartooning career.
“What a beautiful draftsman he was!” Mr. Lorenz said in the interview. “Many cartoonists aspire to be artists; Bob was an artist who aspired to be a cartoonist — the only cartoonist I know who worked with charcoal. His drawings always suggested color to me.”
In addition to his wife, whom he met when she worked at The New Yorker (in the typing pool, her first job after college), Mr. Weber is survived by his brother; a son, Peter; a daughter, Lee Samatowic; and four grandchildren.
At least four other cartoonists whose work was featured in The New Yorker have died this year: William Hamilton, Frank Modell, Anatol Kovarsky and Michael Crawford.
When Mr. Weber contributed to “Last Laughs: Cartoons About Aging, Retirement ... and the Great Beyond,” a 2007 book of New Yorker cartoons, he was asked to list “three things you haven’t done yet.” He wrote:
“1. Voted Republican. 2. Fallen out of bed. 3. Turned down a glass of Champagne.”
No comments:
Post a Comment