Lee Lorenz, the legendary cartoonist and long-time editor at The New Yorker, died Thursday at his home in Norwalk, Connecticut. He was 90 years old.
Born in Hackensack, New Jersey in 1932, the illustrator had a storied career at The New Yorker magazine from 1956 to the late 2010s. But it began only after he finally moved past his first love, jazz, and found he was able to make money cartooning for magazines, according to an obituary in The New York Times.
“Martha, my mother, was the reason we had The New Yorker around,” Lorenz told The Comics Journal in 2011. “She always wanted to be a writer or a poet but never got much further than the greeting-card business. My father wasn’t interested in the arts at all.”
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After high school, Lorenz earned a degree from Pratt Institute after leaving a scholarship spot at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, according to the New York Times. There, he studied painting and survived by booking jazz gigs playing the cornet, according to the Times.
When he left, his income came from cartooning—at first by selling ideas for “gag” cartoons, then finally his own drawings to magazines.
“When I got out, I didn’t have the vaguest idea how I was going to make a living. I just fell into cartooning and it turned out I had a real knack for it,” Lorenz told the Journal. “Especially the idea part, which I feel was the biggest stumbling block for most people.”
“After a few years, everybody in the business said, ‘If you want to make money you have to go to The New Yorker’ So I began submitting there,” he was also quoted saying.
Lorenz told the publication that his first New Yorker cartoon was a “nondescript” drawing of “some gorgeous airhead talking to a sugar daddy,” and called the drawing “indulgent.”
After being hired at the renowned magazine as a contract artist in 1958, he steadily moved up the ladder as he found his own style—which included his iconic, airy brush strokes—until he bagged the position of editor himself in 1973. He would hold the position of art editor until 1993, and cartoon editor until 1997.
Once at the top, he became a type of gatekeeper at the magazine. As an editor, Lorenz eyed cartoonists he considered had a “distinctive point of view,” according to his interview with The Comics Journal.
Lorenz continued to make comics into the 2010s, and most recently wrote a short testimony of the life of legendary New Yorker cartoonist and writer James Stevenson in 2017—painting a vivid picture with a description of Stevenson’s time at the storied magazine and his tap-dancing antics with another cartoonist, Frank Modell.
“Although they never appeared professionally, their impromptu performances outside their offices were wildly applauded and still echo down the corridors of The New Yorker today,” he wrote.
One of the last pieces of art Lorenz illustrated for The New Yorker was just as observant, and droll. The cartoon shows a color portrait of a dog walker driving forward a leashed pack of well-behaved canines. Next to them, distracted and rosy-cheeked toddlers ignore and scream at their teachers—as they, too, are leashed to a long walking rope.
