Barbara Shermund, one of the very few women cartoonists who achieved acclaim in the era, would barely be remembered. In her lifetime, she gave no interviews and left behind a scant archive.
After her death in 1978, she was variously documented in historic accounts (often written by men) as “Helen Shermund,” “Barbara Sherman,” and “Beverly Shermund” who “specialized] in cartoons about dumb blondes.” Her ashes were left uncollected at a funeral home for 35 years.
Born in 1899 in San Francisco, Barbara displayed keen artistic sensibilities at an early age, before attending the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute).
In 1924, she paid a visit to New York and never left—particularly as she landed a gig contributing spot illustrations and captioned cartoons for a nascent magazine, the New Yorker.
In all, Barbara would create some 600 works for the publication and became the third woman artist to illustrate its cover, for its June 13, 1925 issue. Her lively line work and evocative ink washes lent themselves easily to her cartoon submissions, which sparkled with pointed observational humor. As founder Harold Ross once instructed his cartoonists, the magazine’s illustrations should “portray or satirize a situation,” but one that was “authentic” and “based on fact.”
In grasping that brief, Barbara’s cartoons effectively set the tone for the New Yorker‘s brand of metropolitan drollery. Her energetic visual style would also translate into her work for Esquire, Collier’s, Life, book covers, movie posters, and various advertising campaigns.
In between, Barbara traveled, painted, fell in love, married (twice, though she never lived with either spouse), exhibited at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, and became one of the first women to be admitted to the male-only National Cartoonists Society.
Later in life, she ensconced herself in the seaside town of Seabright in New Jersey. She remained an intensely private individual throughout, such that McGurk had quite the task unearthing her papers.
While various institutional collections—the New York Public Library’s New Yorker Records and Morgan Library’s Melvin R. Seiden Collection, among others—held Barbara’s original works and her correspondence with editors, much of her personal life remains stubbornly obscure. She received, for instance, a poignant love letter around 1930 professing “I can’t forget you,” but its sender is lost to history.
Still, in Tell Me a Story Where the Bad Girl Wins, Caitlin McGurk manages to color in dimensions of the artist through her work. Her ability to draw out women’s relationships is noted, as is her skewering of gender stereotypes and convention.
One 1932 cartoon sees two young girls huddled gleefully over a letter, with one of them exclaiming, “Gosh—he loves you more than he does me.” McGurk also reads queer nods into a few of Barbara’s works, in winking captions such as “I don’t think he’s abnormal—he’s versatile.”
Her works outside of cartooning are also duly documented. Barbara’s adventures in Woodstock, New York, from 1928 produced radiant watercolors and lithographs of the natural landscape, while her sketches of everyday scenes attest to her shrewd eye.
In the 1940s, She landed her syndicated column, Shermund’s Sallies, with William Randolph Hearst’s King Features, which would end up her last stable job.
By this time, she was drawing gags to other people’s captions (most often, her frequent collaborator Eldon Dedini’s), her art dashed off with a spare, hurried hand in order to meet a rigorous schedule. Her work with magazines dried up in the following decades.
Barbara died at a nursing home in New Jersey, her artworks and personal effects willed to friends and neighbors. McGurk managed to locate many of these artifacts through Facebook community groups, some members of which had looked out for Barbara in her later years and remembered her fondly.
Among these recollections are that of one Macy Goode, a Long Branch dentist and budding cartoonist who had written to local artists for advice. Barbara responded in earnest.
“Go out and sketch. Sketch everything in sight—things you like and things you don’t like,” she wrote. “Learn how to report with your drawing pencil. Make it literate. Make it talk, shout, sing, laugh, and cry.”
Caitlin McGurk also linked up with Amanda Gormley, Barbara’s half-niece, who had acquired a collection of her aunt’s letters from an antiques dealer. Amanda generously shared some of her own discoveries about her aunt with her, provided some context for family history, and most significantly—was able to claim Barbara’s ashes from the funeral home in New Jersey at which they’d remained since ’78.”
In 2019, with help from a GoFundMe campaign, her niece, Amanda Gormley and Caitlin McGurk interred Barbara’s cremains in Colma, California, at the same cemetery where her mother was buried.
