Ilonka Karasz New Yorker Covers

How is it possible that someone with 186 published New Yorker covers* is not a household name?

lonka Karasz (1896-1981) was an insanely talented artist/designer/illustrator who, in addition to magazine and book covers designed pottery, textiles, furniture, silver and decorative maps. Earlier this year, at the Bard Graduate Center, Karasz scholar Ashley Callahan presented the work of Ilonka and her equally talented sister Mariska. The creative siblings came to the U.S. from Hungary in the 1910s. They settled in Greenwich Village where they became active participants in the avant garde of fashion, art and design.

Thanks to Callahan’s extensive research, each sister has had her own exhibit at the Georgia Museum of Art and there is a book to accompany each; Enchanting Modern: Ilonka Karasz and Modern Threads: Fashion and Art by Mariska Karasz. You can see 106 Karasz covers at condenaststore.com

Whichever cover you find yourself on this weekend, picnicking in the park, sunning on tar beach, or stuck in traffic, I hope you have a wonderful holiday weekend.

*Next most-published-New-Yorker-cover woman is Gretchen Dow Simpson with 58 covers, followed by Edna Eicke with 51, and Mary Petty with 38. 

Made in China, c. 1903

Opium-smoking group, toy figures

Executioners, toy figures

Years ago, I took my nephew to visit the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. He was five years old at the time, and already a voracious and very astute consumer. He was an avid collector of action figures (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were all the rage) and he possessed an impressive knowledge of the entire toy category. So it was no surprise that en route to the Intrepid, he negotiated that we begin our visit at the gift shop. I was leaving on a trip to Europe the next day, and I asked him what country, were he to travel, would he most like to visit. It took all him of three seconds to answer, “China.” Why China? “Because that’s where they make all the toys.”

Probably 70% of all toys found under the tree this Christmas were manufactured in China, but in 1901, when German linguist and sinologist, Berthold Laufer embarked upon his three-year shopping spree for the American Museum of Natural History, China was only just beginning to modernize. American museums were woefully lacking in collections pertaining to Asian cultures and Franz Boas, the influential anthropologist of the AMNH and Columbia University enlisted Laufer, to change that. As the sole member of the Jacob H. Schiff Expedition, Laufer was charged with studying the history and culture of the Chinese people and acquiring specimens representing every aspect of ordinary Chinese life, including the home, commerce, the arts, and recreation.

Laufer sent back 305 crates containing some 7,500 objects, plus books, rubbings, photos and wax cylinder recordings. The haul accounts for about half of the Chinese objects held by the museum today. In the spirit of the season, I’ve chosen some toys, games, puzzles, etc. from among the 6,500 digitized items available on the AMNH website.

I started this post quite a while back, after attending a Bard Graduate Center symposium in 2012, Anthropology of Expeditions: Travel, Visualities, Afterlives. It was Laurel Kendall of the AMNH whose talk about Laufer's expedition in China prompted my own protracted excursion deep into the vast digital archives of the AMNH. There, you can see Laufer's own field notes along with thousands of objects you will probably never see displayed in the museum.

Box of toy insects

Toy monkey on a swing

Toy axe

Toy bow and pellets

Toy dog

Playing cards

Toy mask

European steam boat, toy

Horse drawing cart, toy

Insect kite

Fish kite

Peach of long life, kite

Two men, kite

Toy cats

Toy figure

Game ball

Magical blocks puzzle

Toy animal

Toy camel

Toy rooster

Toy monkey

Toy elephant

Toy duck

Edible Cage

Wild Edible Drawing # 6

Mulberry, burdock, hibiscus stems, barley,

hijiki, and clover, 1990, 17 x 12"

John Cage (1912-1992) made a few series of “Edible Drawings” toward the end of his life. They are handmade paper created from specific groups of vegetation—foods on his macrobiotic diet, Chinatown herbs, plants from a local forest. It appealed to Cage that the paper could, theoretically, be recycled as food.

Art critic, Francine Koslow Miller shares this anecdote:

Michael Silver, who was at the time the head chef at the Gardner Museum Cafe as well as a practicing photographer, purchased one of Cage's Edible drawings and kept it framed next to his menu at the Gardner Cafe. When the Cafe was taken over by an outside company, Silver celebrated his departure by 'cooking' his Cage drawing. He boiled the paper and turned it into soup, and served it to his friends at the Gardner. I love that he truly understood Cage's holistic view of drawing.

I’m not quite sure whether Cage is to be considered a “generative technology,” or simply hyper-interactive. For however much work across all media Cage himself is directly responsible, there is no way to even begin calculating the output he has spawned by way of collaboration, homage, inspiration, and association.

An Autobiographical Statement delivered by Cage in 1990, two years before his death, concludes with, “There is no end to life.” The plan is for the site to become a rich multimedia repository, linking to text, images, video, animation, etc. and “infinitely expand.”

In celebration of the composer/artist/writer’s centennial (today, Sept. 5), The John Cage Trust has issued the Prepared Piano App. With it, you can play and record sampled sounds that were recreated with the actual bits of hardware Cage used to alter a piano for his Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48). Sort of an open-source Cage.

And on it goes …

Wild Edible Drawing # 8

Milkweed, cattail, saffron, pokeweed,

and hijiki, 1990, 17 x 12"

Edible Drawing #3


Kale, turnip, herbs and mushrooms,


1990, 9 x 11-1/2″

John Cage's "Edible Drawing"

cooked and eaten - August 31, 1995

in the Gardner Museum's cafe 

1995, Chef Michael Silver

Sources: MoMA (2), Margarete Roeder Gallery, Fogg Museum