This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In the mid-1920s, Harold Ross, founder of a new magazine called The New Yorker, was looking for cartoonists who could create sardonic, elite illustrations accompanied by witty captions that would act as social criticism.
He found that talent in Barbara Shermund.
For about two decades, until the 1940s, Shermund Ross and his first art editor, Rea Irvin, helped realize their vision by contributing nearly 600 cartoons and cheeky captions in a fresh, feminist voice.
Her cartoons commented on life with humor, intelligence and irony, using female characters who criticized patriarchy and paid tribute to speakeasies, cafes, feisty women and leisure. They spoke directly to flapper women of the era who defied convention with a new sense of political, social and economic independence.
“Shermund’s wives spoke their minds about sex, marriage, and society; smoked cigarettes and drank; and joked about everything at a time when it wasn’t common to see young women doing that,† Caitlin A. McGurk wrote for the Art Students League in 2020.
In a Shermund cartoon published in The New Yorker in 1928, two abandoned women sit on couches chatting. “Yes,” someone says, “I think it’s best to just get married and forget about love.”
“While to many the idea of a New Yorker cartoon evokes an elitist, dry non-sequitur—often more alienating than familiar—Shermund’s cartoons are the antithesis,” wrote McGurk, associate curator and assistant professor to Billy Ireland of the Ohio State University Cartoon Library and Museum. “They are about human nature, relationships, youth and age.” (McGurk is writing a book about Shermund.)
And yet, in the 1940s and 1950s, as America’s postwar focus shifted to domestic life, Shermund’s feminist voice and cool critique of society went out of fashion. Her last cartoon appeared in The New Yorker in 1944, and much of her life and career after that remains obscure. No major newspaper reported on her death in 1978 – DailyExpertNews then went on strike, along with The Daily News and The New York Post – and her ashes lay in a New Jersey funeral home for nearly 35 years until they were claimed by a descendant on look for information about her.
Barbara Shermund was born on June 26, 1899 in San Francisco. Her father, Henry Shermund, was an architect; her mother, Fredda Cool, a sculptor. Barbara showed a talent for illustration from an early age and her parents encouraged her to explore her passion. She published her first cartoon when she was 8, in the children’s section of The San Francisco Chronicle.
Shermund’s mother died in 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic. Several years later, her father married a woman who was 31 years younger and eight years younger than Barbara. As her father and his new wife started raising their own family, Barbara became estranged from them.
She attended the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) to study printmaking and painting and regularly won awards.
She moved to New York City in her mid-20s to seek an independent life while pursuing her artistic ambitions.
She is said to have met Harold Ross and Rea Irvin through mutual connections from college and in the magazine industry. Her contributions to The New Yorker included about nine cover illustrations, as well as spot illustrations and section mastheads that helped set the magazine’s visual tone.
Her perspective was influenced by her intersection with profound historical moments: In addition to surviving the Spanish flu pandemic, Shermund lived through World War I and the suffrage movement.
One of her 1920s cartoons, after women won the right to vote, depicted two men in tuxedos smoking by a large fireplace, with a saying captioned: “Well, I guess women are just people after all.”
In 1943, Esquire magazine sent Shermund to the Hollywood set of the musical comedy “Du Barry Was a Lady” to sketch actresses performing in an “I Love an Esquire Girl” series. She also made a promotional poster for the film, starring Red Skelton and Lucille Ball.
She also took on advertising commissions at a time when women were rare in the industry, illustrating advertisements for companies such as Pepsi-Cola, Ponds, Philips 66 and Frigidaire.
From 1944 to about 1957, she produced “Shermund’s Sallies,” a syndicated cartoon panel for Pictorial Review, the arts and entertainment division of Hearst’s many Sunday newspapers.
Shermund lived her final years drawing at her home in Sea Bright, NJ, and swam at a nearby beach. She died on September 9, 1978 in a nursing home in Middletown, NJ
In 2011, a niece, Amanda Gormley, decided to research her family’s history and was surprised to find that Shermund’s ashes had not been claimed at a New Jersey funeral home since 1978.
In May 2019, Gormley raised money through a GoFundMe campaign and, with the contributions of many artists and cartoonists, arranged for Shermund’s ashes to be buried next to her mother’s grave in San Francisco.
“The women she drew and the captions she wrote showed us women who weren’t afraid to fool men, and showed us what it’s really like to be a woman,” says Liza Donnelly, cartoonist and writer at The New Yorker. in an interview. “Shermund’s wives had humor and guts, just as I imagine the artist himself had.”
Perhaps one of Shermund’s most notable pieces is indicative of her irreverent and fearless attitude to life: a young girl sits on the lap of a paternal figure and says, “Please tell me a story where the bad girl wins!”