Home > Letters to CR

Mike Rhode on Anne Cleveland
posted May 20, 2006
 

As much as I respect Heidi MacDonald, I'm firmly in your camp on this one. Cleveland was just one of a multitude of cartoonist book illustrators who're forgotten today. While I love her work, she didn't do a syndicated strip or animation or anything else that would keep her in the public eye. Should she be remembered now? I don't know - should Carl Rose who had a very similar style? Gluyas Williams? He even had a comic strip and worked with Robert Benchley one of the biggest humorists of his time. What about Miguel Covarrubias, a far bigger artist in his time, but almost as forgotten now. I just saw an exhibit at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, DC and I was amazed at how much book illustration he had done. The exhibit appears to have been done because his work was given to a foundation to promote his work and ensure his reputation survives.

Survival of a reputation is a tough question - before the internet, there was no easy way to start researching an artist, and artists now as well thought of as Vermeer and Van Gogh went out of fashion and memory until rediscovered by new generations. Now, as you point out, in 15 minutes you can put together a basic biography and bibliography (presumably from used book sites?) -- work that would have taken weeks as little as ten years ago.

My suspicion is that she was a part-time artist who began her career in school, let it fade to start a family, restarted it when the children got older and then let is slide again, but that's just guesswork based on looking at the dates of her work. I'll be interested to see what you discover. I wonder if Cartoonist ProFiles ever did a piece on her.