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CARTOONS AGAINST THE AXIS
World War Two War Bonds Cartoons from the Terry-d'Alessio Collection
Wars cost money. Huge, heaping gobs of it. Two-front wars cost even more. When in December 1941 the Japanese attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and four days later Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy declared war on the United States, the U.S. government needed cash-and fast. Americans from all walks of life contributed to the war effort in any way they could, and cartoonists were no different.
In 1942 a unique art exhibit toured the country, comprised of cartoons by luminaries as diverse as Charles Addams, Peter Arno, Syd Hoff, Crockett Johnson, and Ad Reinhardt, all promoting the purchase of war bonds and/or lampooning the Axis powers. Every cent raised went to the war effort.
That show, Cartoons Against the Axis, was the brainchild of cartoonist Gregory d'Alessio, men's president of the Art Students League of New York. After Pearl Harbor, d'Alessio volunteered to spearhead the Committee of War Cartoons for the American Society of Magazine Cartoonists. Working closely with government officials, in February 1942 d'Alessio organized the first Axis exhibit and used the Art Students League's own gallery as its first venue. The show then moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
After their initial tour, the Axis cartoons returned to the Art Students League and stayed there, unseen by the public for over half a century until d'Alessio's widow, pioneering cartoonist Hilda Terry, approached MoCCA to re-mount the exhibition. The original Axis show comprised 200 works; with the assistance of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman, MoCCA has selected about a quarter of that number to fill its gallery space. Spiegelman writes:
The current show has tried to retain some of the xenophobic-even racist-anti-Japanese images, as well as some of the embarrassingly blunt propaganda and even some rather clunky drawings in order to offer a genuinely fair sample of what cartooning and our nation were like in their glory days.
MoCCA is proud to whisk museum visitors back to the WWII home front, both to honor d'Alessio (who passed away in 1994) and to provide examples of Art confronting Evil, a topic no less relevant in our current time than it was in 1942.
Curator: Sandy Schechter
Writer: Fred Van Lente
Logo Designer: Jerry Gonzalez
Researchers: Mark Lerer, William McCay, Richard Siller, Fred Van Lente
Proofreader: Liz Gehrlein
Artifact Preparation: Conservation Framing, Inc.
Special Thanks to Hilda Terry and Art Speigelman
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