The Family Line: Edward and Madeline Sorel

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The history of art is peppered with artistic fathers and daughters, from the Italian Baroque painters Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi to the twentieth-century Mexican artists Guillermo and Frida Kahlo. In other arenas, such as theater, film, and music, one readily thinks of Henry and Jane Fonda, Tony and Jamie Lee Curtis, and, more recently, Lenny and Zoë Kravitz, Billy Ray and Miley Cyrus, and Ethan and Maya Hawke. Whether artistic inclinations and talents are genetic, absorbed through an atmosphere of familial influence, honed through years of diligence and training, or involve some combination thereof is a matter of perspective and subject to debate.

This exhibition explores the artistic trajectories of the illustrator Edward Sorel and his daughter, the artist Madeline Sorel. Born in the Bronx in 1929, Edward Sorel has created some of the best-known and beloved covers and illustrations for The New Yorker, The Nation, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and many other publications, as well as a number of books created with his late wife, the author and historian Nancy Caldwell Sorel (1934-2015). In 1954 he founded Push Pin Studios along with his Cooper Union classmates Seymour Chwast (b.1931) and Milton Glaser (1929-2020); this award-winning art agency would in many ways define the look of 1950s and 1960s graphic design. Sorel’s now instantly-recognizable graphic style, characterized by spontaneous,  gestural pen and ink linework, was one developed over decades; examples on view here from his extensive career reflect his continuing search for an artistic approach that would convey both personal integrity and individuality. Still working at 97, Edward Sorel remains a fervent freethinker who has long skewered the sacred cows of politics and religion in his work, exposing the hypocrisy and greed that often plague these professions, regardless of party or denomination (much like one of his heroes, the nineteenth-century French painter and illustrator Honoré Daumier).

Madeline Sorel’s journey as an artist has also been an exploration of self. As the daughter of a well-known artist, she understands the struggle to shine one’s creative light under such a respected but daunting shadow. In the 1980s and 1990s she established herself as an illustrator for New York newspapers and for book projects such as The Printer’s Apprentice (1995); like her father, she searched for a medium and working method that would allow her the freedom to fully express herself and her personal outlook. After attending a workshop of the fiber artist Jean Gauger, she began experimenting with Nuno felt, a hand-worked blend of wool and silk from which she now creates large, colorful, landscape-like forms and unique wearable pieces. In her book Nuno Felt Art (2018), she described the process in almost sublime terms, a communion with natural elements that she likens to another art form in which she also excels, collage. The Family Line documents her work in all these media, a path that rhymes, not echoes, that of her father. 

For students of Kingsborough Community College, where Madeline Sorel has taught for twenty-five years, the lives and careers of Edward and Madeline Sorel contain lessons for life as well as art: regardless of where you are at the moment, keep striving for the development of your most genuine self; borrow, but don’t blindly imitate; and find the medium or style that allows you to best express your own view of the world. Above all, their art reminds us all that speaking truth to power is an integral responsibility of civic engagement.

The nearly eighty-year career of illustrator Edward Sorel, whose widely-recognizable style and wry humor have made him a New York institution, is characterized by several periods of dramatic stylistic change. His gestural, spontaneous pen and ink work came only after years of experimentation and searching for a style that best expressed his idiosyncratic take on the world. Displayed in this section of the exhibition are examples of his work through 1962, starting with his cover of The Quill (January 1943) done when a student at P.S. 90 in The Bronx. 

Born Edward Schwartz in 1929 (he later renamed himself after Julien Sorel, the idealistic but jaded protagonist of Stendhal’s 1830 novel The Red and the Black, with whom he shared a humble upbringing and an innate contempt for the hypocrisy of politicians and clergy), he received his earliest artistic training at Saturday classes at Pratt Institute and at The Little Red Schoolhouse on the Lower East Side (with art materials provided to the school by sculptor and museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney). Sorel later attended Cooper Union with Seymour Chwast (b. 1931) and Milton Glaser (1929-2020); the three, later joined by Reynold Ruffins (1930-2021), would go on to co-found Push Pin Studios, an influential art design firm that helped establish the look of graphic design in the 1950s and 1960s.

Sorel maintained that the training he received at Cooper Union, geared towards more abstract forms of commercial art, had diminished his drawing ability (so much so that he mainly served as a salesman at Push Pin). His earliest published work was in what he refers to as a geometric art deco style, several examples of which are on view here. Rediscovering his love of drawing following his departure from Push Pin Studios in 1956, he created the award-winning Sorel’s Affiche (1959-60), a promotional broadside he sent to some 750 art directors monthly as a visual calling card to acquire commissions. In 1960 Grove Press published his How to Be President: Some Hard and Fast Rules, which reflected Sorel’s cynicism towards the political process; soon thereafter came the imaginative Cold War-era satire Moon Missing (1962) and a number of collections of his work, including Making the World Safe for Hypocrisy (1972).

As Sorel was developing his personal style in these early works, his drawings at this time reflect the influence and inspiration of artists such as Joseph Low (1911-2007), André François (1915-2005), Ronald Searle (1920-2011), and, later, David Levine (1926-2009) and Feliks Topolski (1907-1989). A frequent claim he makes about his early work is that he didn’t make his first good drawing until he was 40, the point at which he began working in the spontaneous drawing style for which he is now known (in reality achieved through numerous preliminary ink drawings that eventually lead to the perfect visual iteration of the idea). He was inspired in part to work in this manner by his neighbor in upstate New York, the watercolorist Robert Andrew Parker (1927-2023), who painted in a similarly direct manner.

As the daughter of an internationally-recognized illustrator, Madeline Sorel has been surrounded by art and artists since birth (her mother Elaine had been an agent for illustrators during her short marriage to Edward Sorel). She showed an early talent for art and fashion, creating a Mod clothing line called Bee You at the age of nine that promoted self-empowerment through vibrant apparel. Her childhood (and that of her brother, Leo) was spent in New York City during the week and in upstate New York on weekends, where Edward Sorel had purchased a 19th-century farmhouse with his second wife, author Nancy Caldwell Sorel.

On view in this exhibition are three sketchbooks that Edward Sorel created for his daughter, a yearly holiday tradition in which Sorel illustrated and presented highlights from the lives of each of his children. Also in this exhibition is a faux movie poster he designed for Madeline in 1973 containing references to her transition from High School of Music and Art to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). The Rebecca Schwartz referred to in the drawing as saying “She’s so talented” is her paternal grandmother.

After graduating from RISD, she was a regular contributor at The New York Times, New York Daily News (an example is illustrated at right), and publications such as Games Magazine. Book projects would follow, including an edition of André Malraux’s Man’s Fate (1984, Random House) and Good Tastes: The Sherry Golden Cookbook (1985, Alfred A. Knopf). Sorel also illustrated Stephen Krensky’s The Printer’s Apprentice (1995, Delacorte Press); exhibited in this section of the exhibition are two works from this project, a preliminary sketch and the final drawing used in the publication.

While illustration has been a lifelong interest for Madeline Sorel, she has never shied away from learning new art making techniques. Collage and printmaking have been avenues of exploration for many years, and she often creates with watercolors and pastels. Since 2001 she has taught at Kingsborough Community College; since that time she has earned her Masters in Art Education (2004, Brooklyn College) and her MFA (2018, Marywood University). Examples of her work from this period can be found in the last section of this exhibition,  

Although he has claimed to not read the sort of newspapers that have comic strips, Edward Sorel has expressed aesthetic appreciation for some of the early masters of the craft, such as Billy De Beck (1890-1942, creator of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith) and Cliff Sterrett (1883-1964), whose Polly and Her Pals is shown at right. Sorel has called Sterrett’s work “the best art deco strips I’ve ever seen.” Taking the genius of popular cartoonists such as Winsor McCay as a given, Sorel prefers to champion the work of lesser-known illustrators such as André François to ubiquitous figures as MAD magazine’s Jack Davis (1924-2016).

Over the years Sorel has applied his gestural style to the panel format, creating one-page strips that are often autobiographical in nature, offering humorous insights into his inner thoughts. For a number of years he created panel pages for The Village Voice and The Nation. Madeline Sorel has worked in this format as well, and her piece The Story of Clucky is an homage to her father’s panel strips.

Illustration has given Edward Sorel a format to express his views on politics (while left-leaning, he spares no party in his drawings) and religion, which he observes with the skeptical eye of a freethinker. In his work for publications such as The Realist and Ramparts, Sorel became known as a leading caricaturist of the period for his scathing drawings of war hawks--including the controversial Cardinal Francis Spellman (1889-1967). His most significant entry into the mainstream press, however, would be his cover illustration for Gay Talese’s notorious profile on the singer and actor Frank Sinatra in the April 1966 issue of Esquire (illustrated at right).

Cinema, particularly film noir and the golden age of Hollywood, has been a lifelong passion that often appears in his work; as a child in the Bronx he was “addicted to the movies” and followed actors such as Jean Gabin, William Powell, and Spencer Tracy. Literature has been of equal importance in his work (his adopted surname was taken from the main character of a Stendhal novel). In First Encounters, created with his late wife Nancy Caldwell Sorel, the couple imagined the real-life meetings between writers, actors, directors, and artists. Five works from this project are shown here.

In 2006, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, commissioned Edward Sorel to create a monumental mural for his historic restaurant The Waverly Inn (Bank Street, Manhattan). His sprawling calvalcade of celebrity caricatures run the cultural gamut from Walt Whitman and James Baldwin to Martha Graham and Andy Warhol; two preliminary sketches for this project are displayed in the nearby vitrine.  

While starting her career as a freelance illustrator in the 1980s, Madeline Sorel has never been afraid to venture into new and challenging artistic territory such as encaustic (painting with heated wax mixed with pigments) or fiber art as a means to more fully express herself as an artist. A frequent participant in international workshops and Artist-in-Residence programs, Sorel has more recently seen her purpose as that of a community artist/teacher who serves intergenerational groups of artists in south Brooklyn. In this way she works to return art making to its once-common place within the human experience--as something available to all, an aspect of life that is both individual and communal in its creation. Sorel has called her work as a community artist her “proudest achievement.” This shift in perspective was fortuitous in that the opportunities for traditional illustrators were then dwindling as the digital revolution was transforming the very nature of printed media.

In recent years she has discovered Nuno felting, an art practice that has brought her “joy and discovery.” Nuno (Japanese for “cloth”) is a fiber art developed in Australia in the 1990s and involves a handworked meshing or blending of silk and natural wool fibers in water. Often used to make lightweight scarves and other wearables (which she also designs), Nuno felting was used to create Sorel’s tapestry-like landscapes. This new technique, which she likens to collage in its arrangement of different elements, represented a departure from the demands of commercial illustration work and a freedom in creating irregular-shaped pieces that embody the college aesthetic she appreciates in American artists like Romare Bearden (1911-1988), Faith Ringgold (1930-2024), and Ghanaian artist El Anatsui (born 1944).

In 2018 she published Nuno Felt Art, both an instruction guide and a personal account of her journey to this new medium (the book’s design layout was by Olga Mezhibovskaya, a former Kingsborough art professor). Her description of the Nuno felting process is one of interacting with the elements of nature to create something never before seen. “Becoming at one with your creation, losing track of time and feeling content in the present moment,” she wrote, “is a powerful feeling. As I’m exerting energy into my work, I am receiving energy from it.” Finding Nuno felting was like finding herself as an artist. Her distinctive work in Nuno felting helped her earn her MFA from Marywood University in 2018.

Throughout this transformation from commercial to community artist, Madeline Sorel has equally transformed the lives of countless students at Kingsborough Community College, where she has taught Illustration since 2001.