Nurit Karlin, Who Found Her Voice in Wordless Cartoons, Dies at 80

An apple falls from a tree and misses a seated Isaac Newton.

A letter from “The Sublime” is addressed to “The Ridiculous.”

Two doves fight over an olive branch.

Nurit Karlin’s simply drawn cartoons, mainly for The New Yorker magazine, were subtle sight gags, rendered largely without captions. It was a familiar approach to New Yorker readers, who had long known the work of Saul Steinberg. But in Ms. Karlin’s case it was coming from an unusual source: When she began contributing to the magazine in 1974, she was the only woman in the ranks of its cartoonists, long a largely male preserve.

“She told me once, ‘I used to doodle. And then something would be there,’” Liza Donnelly, a New Yorker cartoonist whose book, “Funny Ladies” (2005), examined the history of female cartoonists at the magazine, wrote in an email. “Hearing that, it was like her pen line came directly from her brain. You can see it in her drawings. Her ideas did not feel contrived, never like a crafted joke.”

Ms. Karlin drew whimsical but thoughtful cartoons: an office worker sitting in what is actually one of his desk’s drawers; a lumberjack peering at a heart pierced by an arrow carved inside the rings of a felled tree; a harpist taking his bows on a concert stage with the strings of his instrument dangling from one hand.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/obituaries/nurit-karlin-dead.html?partner=rss&emc=rss