1941 – 5/07/2016
Cartoonist, illustrator
Michael Crawford sold his first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1981. Since then, he has sold more than six hundred cartoons, illustrations and paintings to the magazine. Crawford’s work has appeared in the pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. A devoted baseball fan, he has played first base for The New Yorker’s softball team since the eighties. After the diamond, he became co-editor and wrote the foreword to “The New Yorker Book of Baseball Cartoons” with cartoon editor Robert Mankoff. Crawford’s talents go beyond creating cartoons — he is constantly working as an artist, and also recently worked on a video project for Issy Miyake, exploring the designer’s relationship with Irving Penn. He is currently working on an illustrated book “not really for kids” and an animated film about the skunk mafia of Central Park, who are fighting for control of the beloved urban oasis and all the animals in it. Crawford lives with another cartoonist from New York, Carolita Johnson, across from the Monasteries in Upper Manhattan.
I first saw him thirty-two years ago when I was sitting in a street-level apartment next to Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village. The apartment belonged to another cartoonist from New York, Richard Klein. I was waiting for Kline to finish the phone call so we could take a taxi to the Pierre Hotel on 5th Avenue for the magazine’s annual anniversary party. Suddenly Crawford entered through the unlocked door of Klein’s Seinfeld-style apartment. To be more precise, Crawford made his way sideways like a sand crab, looking like he wasn’t sure if he really wanted to be there or should be there. This entrance has become his calling card for me over the years: he looked like he was ready to leave as soon as he entered the room.
In those early days of his time at The New Yorker, he struggled to catch the shrewd eye of William Shawn. Crawford posted his work in a magazine, but instead of getting there and moving forward, he stopped. As he told me in an interview in 2013:
“Sean ran a total of 6 from ’83 to 1987, when he left. As soon as Bob Gottlieb [Robert Gottlieb was William Shawn’s successor as editor] took over, the level of purchases increased.” [In fact, Sean only ran four in those years].
The early Crawford seemed to owe something to the work of Jack Ziegler. His very first drawing in The New Yorker, in the June 25, 1984 issue, reserves the word Ziegleresque for “pow” at the end. With his third drawing, he quite appropriately showed us a baseball. Baseball was one of Crawford’s biggest passions. Again, from my interview with him: “Baseball has been my life from the very beginning.” He soon became a regular on The New Yorker baseball team.
When Gottlieb’s editorship gave way to Tina Brown, Crawford flourished. He told me, “Tina was mercilessly cordial, encouraged and welcomed the ideas being spread.” He worked with color (color was not alien to him. Like many artists from New York, he wore two hats: a cartoonist and a fine artist). His good friend Danny Shanahan recently said of him, “Michael isn’t really a cartoonist—he’s an artist.”
Somewhere in the middle of his career at the magazine, his family moved from the Boston area to a house at the end of a dirt road in a burg on the Hudson River — a picturesque town already packed with cartoonists from New York (the aforementioned Danny Shanahan, Liza Donnelly and himself). In all the years that he has lived here, I have noticed him walking around the city so many times: 0.
A few years later, his life changed again, and now, being single, he moved to Manhattan, where he eventually met a model who soon became a fellow cartoonist from New York, and eventually, in the very last weeks of his life, his wife. They became the fourth married couple of cartoonists from New York (four couples in chronological order: Mary Petty and Alan Dunn, Liza Donnelly and I, Emily Richards and Marshall Hopkins, Carolita Johnson and Crawford).
I think of Crawford’s hundreds of publications in the New Yorker: his strange energetically layered blurring or marker drawings with captions au courant; his other art: mafia paintings and the Kennedy assassination. I think of him sidling around parties, lifting his chin, checking out the stage (he rode a scooter for a while and showed up at events holding on to his helmet, ready to jerk off, and jumping back on his two-wheeled vehicle). and vroom in the night). In any conversation, his eyes never rested on me for more than half a second. They were wandering around, looking back and forth and everywhere; he wasn’t really here with me, he was somewhere far away out there. The reach of social attention is like mercury’s, unless, as I’ve heard, he was drawing.
All of Crawford’s bizarre observations are like slides quickly scrolling forward on an old slide projector. Here’s the last slide: many years ago, shortly after Crawford moved to this city, he wrote to me and said that he was putting together, on tape, versions of the song “On Broadway”… can I remember any unusual recordings?
Reference: michaelmaslin.com
