The ‘Jolly Bunch of Pen-Pushers’

In The Los Angeles Times’s Junior Times, on Dec. 11, 1927, the teenage Philip Guston (born Goldstein) won a prize for his drawing extolling the Junior Club, the youth organization behind the Sunday supplement that brought his work its first mass audience. Credit… via The Los Angeles Times. [New York Times caption and illustration]

For me the skills of cartoon and caricature are from on high, which is why I relished this article about Philip Guston. It told me much I didn’t know. He was the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in Montreal who moved to Los Angeles. In adulthood he changed his surname from Goldstein. As a student at Manual Arts High School in the 1920’s, he was friends with a young Jackson Pollock.

In one of his first cartoons for the Junior Times, published July 25, 1926, Guston represents the act of artistic arrival with the character Skinny Slats, a boy who is cheerfully welcomed by the draftsmen who were Guston’s new colleagues at the Junior Club. Credit… via The Los Angeles Times. [New York Times caption and illustration]

[Guston] joined a youth organization that produced The Junior Times, a Sunday supplement in The Los Angeles Times for essays, poems, puzzles and illustrations by kids, for kids. From 1925 to 1929, in these pages, Guston honed his pen for an audience of the West Coast’s largest home delivery.

Published in the Junior Times, July 29, 1928, Guston’s most sophisticated cartoon suggests the individual personalities of his friends at the Junior Club, young artists who would go on to significant arts careers themselves. Credit… via The Los Angeles Times. [New York Times caption and illustration]

The “jolly bunch of pen-pushers,” as Guston described the teenage illustrators in a sleekly drawn, George Herriman-esque panel of July 1928, would go on to arts careers themselves: Louie Frimkess founded the firm Advertising Designers, Philip Delara joined Warner Brothers; Bill Zaboly, a Minnesotan, inherited the design of Popeye after E.C. Segar’s death, while Manuel Moreno, the brightest face in Guston’s group, established a short-lived studio in Mexico after animating for Walter Lantz, the creator of Woody Woodpecker.

Ronald Gwinn’s front page cartoon for the Junior Times, Oct. 3, 1926. Published the same year Guston debuted in that Sunday supplement, Gwinn’s cyclops foreshadows the signature “shaggy easel and blaring lightbulb recognizable in Guston’s later work,” our critic writes. Credit… via The Los Angeles Times. [New York Times caption and illustration]

Art history is aware of Guston’s loftier influences — his mentor in West Coast Surrealism, Lorser Feitelson, or the Hollywood collectors of Duchamps and Brancusis, the Arensbergs — but these homegrown funny pages, with their collaborations and callbacks, were a laboratory for him and for budding artists of all predilections.

Controversy surrounds Guston’s figurative painting later in life, and critics speculate that he may have regretted racial stereotypes that appeared in his youthful cartoons. To quote the article: “Guston left no record beyond the comics themselves.”

(Walker Mimms, “Are Philip Guston’s Teenage Cartoons the Key to His Klan Images?” New York Times, 6-14-24)

1 Response to The ‘Jolly Bunch of Pen-Pushers’

peter robinson says:

July 10, 2024 at 6:49 pm

Thanks for that Jim. I couldn’t see anything in his (late) paintings but now it all makes sense.

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