What makes a line funny? Or not? Looking at my father’s work immediately raises this question, in part because only some of his drawings are humorous. In others, he produces “serious” images. The distinction among these approaches is clear—but how? Is it the shorthand? The sketchy quality? The relation between the image and what it represents? Or some inflection in the cartoon lines that indicates a wink-wink understanding that they are to be taken lightly?
My father made his living as a commercial artist, a cartoonist. He designed and illustrated insurance brochures and pamphlets that outlined benefits for employees, mainly in the corporate world. He did advertisements for banks, utility companies, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He said once that most of his work had been done for Fortune 500 companies. More interestingly, he noted that a cartoon of a person in bed in traction could be far more readily consumed than a photograph of the same scene. Nothing funny about accidental injury, but much to be amused by in the deft little lines indicating a swollen foot in a big white cast.
Boris Drucker (1920-2009), Charcoal drawing of JD, 1965
I was thirteen in 1965 when my father asked me to stand for this portrait. A Saturday morning, most likely, after breakfast, he probably suggested I pose for him. My white button-down shirt and blue jeans were the uniform of the moment, the weekend dress that my best friend and I modified only by the occasional swap for a black turtleneck. School days required other concessions to conventions and dress codes. In the 1960s, girls did not wear pants to school, and our pleated skirts, knee socks, and cardigans were the classic outfits on which the dreams of pederasts were built. Tellingly, my father had no interest in portraying me in outfits required by regulations, but instead in the clothes that embodied an attitude, a statement.
The entire portrait is about attitude the way a Turner painting is about atmosphere. The drawing is suffused with the cross currents of my mood—angry, defiant, withdrawn, sullen, and, at the same time, ready to perform a role for the artist to capture. The portrait can’t have taken him more than an hour, its lines are so direct, fresh, immediate and unhesitant, and he clearly drew rapidly. His ability to capture my stance and all it expresses was virtuosic. The confidence in his art arose from competence. He drew every day, most of the day. This was his livelihood but more, his medium of fluency.
I don’t remember that morning, but the pattern of family life in the period was regular and predictable and within it I carved out the time for my girlfriend and my writing, the only two things I cared much about. I was in the hideous throes of adolescence and the agonies of all it brought with it. I had been very different as a younger child, outgoing and interested in popularity and social success. Precocious and wise-cracking, I was often a bit of a brat before the teen sulk set in. Once, on the way home from elementary school I was at the transfer point for the bus lines when I ran into my father. I was still a little thing, but from the age of eight I took two public busses to school, my token pack purchased every Friday at school. Imagine, now, letting a girl that age take a bus, get off on a city street corner, wait for the connecting line, and think it was fine for her to be on her own among the random adults? And in that little pleated skirt….
The day I had the encounter with my father I had gotten off the rapid No.17 bus at the corner of Spruce Street where I waited for the lumbering No.90. As I entered the crosswalk, he came towards me, recognized me, and called out, “Hey Jo, hey!” He reached to give me a hug as I got to the curb. People around us were already staring and I looked at him and said in a bold strong voice, “Get away from me!” I cried. “I don’t know you mister and I don’t know what you want!” Strangers stopped on the street, giving him the looks you can imagine were elicited by my cries. He turned and walked away, no doubt glad he escaped without intervention from any of the bystanders. I thought it was funny, which shows where my little self was at that age—eight or nine—quick to quip and be a smart-ass. At home that night my father shook his head, “I wasn’t going to try to explain to anybody at that corner that I was your father.”
Our relationship was benign, but disconnected. He had work, professional life, and I was deeply inside of my connection to my mother, then, later, in my teens, absorbed in my best friend. So by the time he drew this portrait, we were on easy but neutral terms. Whatever curiosity he had about my inner life or outer activities, he displaced into the discussion of topics at the dinner table. He encouraged us to imagine other worlds, multiple dimensions, engage with the stuff of physics and space travel with occasional forays into social justice and politics as conceived at the time. Both of my parents were radical skeptics, allergic to orthodoxy of any kind, committed to science, education, and progressive politics.
Boris Drucker (1920-2009), Magic marker drawing of JD, 1981.
Next to the 1965 charcoal portrait, the cartoon sketch from twenty years later has the density of a little emblem, concentrated and as deadly accurate in its own realization as the portrait is on its graphic terms. My father frequently embellished his letters, cards, and envelopes with these quickly drawn images, and though the expression on this character’s face has equal intensity to that of the larger portrait, its graphic language is light. Somehow, looking at the drawing, we know it is funny, clever, acutely perceptive but also appreciative. The mocking tone is gentle. My father’s work was always compassionate and deeply human. By his own admission, he was never cruel in his work or being. Angry, yes. As a Jew who had experienced discrimination growing up, been through the Second World War, the rise of fascism, the Holocaust, the atomic bombs, and then the repressions of McCarthy, among other events, he had many issues that triggered anger. But he compartmentalized these so they did not seep into his work, his daily life, or his capacity for perception and mimicry.
Boris Drucker (1920-2009), Portrait of David, oil paint, circa 1954.
The third portrait, of my brother, was made around 1954. The painting shows him as a very young boy, ambivalently placed on a small stool that provides a delicates seat. Painted in flat, faux-naïve style, the work was an exercise in composition and tone. But my father chose the style on purpose as the best way to show the anxious eldest child with his unblinking vulnerability and open-eyed look. The elements in the painted interior were part of our childhood world, from the Colonial patterned wall-paper, the hallway chest and bookshelves, to the linoleum floor. The literalness of the rendering is essential to the portrayal of innocence, as if my brother needed to be situated within as unambiguous a world as possible to allay the worries that beset his tormented soul from an early age. The enlarged head, under-developed body, grip of the hands, all painted in accord with early American primitive portraits, are signs of my father’s willingness to depict what he could in some ways barely stand to see. My brother is just a child, and my father wants to believe that in time he may outgrow the anxieties that trouble his young face, creasing his forehead between the brows. He is painted as if stable, but perched in a precarious relation to the world.
Taken together, the three are only a handful of the many portraits (in charcoal, watercolor, oil and ink) that my father produced in his lifetime, especially if one counts the many tiny quick-sketch cartoons of us among the tally. He once told me, describing a character in one of his cartoons published in The New Yorker, that he studied every detail of dress, expression, hairstyle, accessories, posture and so on to prepare a drawing of a 1970s “bachelorette” type single working woman. Almost paradoxically, the drawings are at once minimally schematic and saturated with specifics. His consummate skill, like his unerring perception, was always in the service of appreciation and compassion. But also, honesty. He refused to look away, to ignore those realities that informed his work, and so, in each of these such different images, that uncompromising integrity appears.
While it seems possible to grasp what makes a drawing accurate, analyzing the humor remains hard. The qualities that make those little lines funny continue to escape easy explanation.
Thanks for this shared memory!
Oh my God, I remember the portraits of you and David just as well as the memorized the paintings I grew up with in my own house a mere two and a half blocks away, and looking at these took me right back to scurrying home in the deepening dark across uneven wet brick and cement sidewalks from an afternoon in your company.
Breakfast. My brothers and I with our raison bran or pop tarts eaten by ourselves standing in the darkened kitchen. Your house, the five of you seated around the table in the bright dining room with a hot breakfast. It is both interesting and compelling to know your father in a different way from the terrifying large whiskery man, who, over fried eggs and bacon, pointing with his index finger would bid me kiss his tongue-protruded-cheek mornings when I came by so that we could, in the earliest years, walk to City Center School together. I wish now that I had known him as a person not just your father so different from mine.