Profiles in Business: Edward Koren and the economics of cartooning

Vermont Business Magazine, May 01, 2004 by Marcel, Joyce

Art may be art, but it's also a business. Most artists can be loosely defined as freelancers, if not entrepreneurs, and since freelancing is at best an unstable business, the more successful the artist is, the more he can afford to immerse himself in his art and still keep a roof over his head.

Success can also provide something as valuable as food and housing to an artist: independence.

Artist, illustrator and cartoonist Edward Koren, the UpperWest-Side Manhattanite, who makes his home in the tiny village of Brookfield in central Vermont, has found a remarkable balance between the roller coaster ride of freelancing and a comfortable life as one of The New Yorker magazine's most distinctive cartoonists.

The New Yorker, with a paid circulation rate of 987,285 and an 80 percent renewal rate, is America's most sophisticated, intelligent and influential cultural magazine. In addition to its August history, high style, foreign and national reporting, cartoons, illustrations, quality fiction, poetry and arts coverage, it is known for respecting its contributors, and their copyrights and paying them well, That makes it the Holy Grail for freelance illustrators, photographers, writers and, especially, cartoonists.

"The New Yorker may be the Holy Grail, but lately it's the only Grail for magazine single-panel cartoonists," Koren said. "There's nothing left."

Koren's broken-line drawings are easily recognizable. His gentle, pretensionskewering and yet warm-hearted cartoons of fuzzy people, unidentifiable but hairy beasts and happily animated inanimate objects has become synonymous with The Now Yorker. They have made Koren something that is rare in the art world and incredibly valuable in the business world: a brand.

"He is a brand - that's the best way to put it," said New Yorker journalist Mark Singer in a recent phone interview. "His style of drawings is fundamentally distinctive. A Koren drawing looks like a Koren drawing whether it's in the New Yorker or The New York Times or a Vermont publication. Or in the books Ed illustrates and writes. The other essential with a Koren drawing - and this is not only true of Ed, but it's a necessity that doesn't always get met - is that the drawing itself is so wonderfully drawn."

Koren is uncomfortable thinking of himself as a. 'brand, or as anything except as an artist. He points out that being a brand can have its disadvantages. For every potential employer who wants a dancing vegetable or a fuzzy dog or a hairy personage, there will be some who want something less identifiably "New Yorker."

In person Koren, 68, is warm, witty and brightly observant. He's so easy to talk to that even a first-time visitor feels as if she has known him all her life.

Singer calls him "an extremely endearing fellow." Another of his colleagues, humorist and author Calvin Trillin, says, "He's a nice guy. He's always been very easy to work with. And we've been friends for better than 40 years."

Cartoonist Lee Lorenz, who served as the art editor of The New Yorker from 1973 to 1994 and as its cartoon editor until 1997, says, "Ed is an artist I admire a great deal." Koren is nothing if not prolific. During his 43 years as part of the "New Yorker family' he has published close to 1,000 cartoons and contributed numerous magazine covers. Seeing his cover art on newsstands all over New York was "wornderful at first," Koren said.

"And now, like everything else in life, it's a little less magical," Koren said. "But I still don't take it for granted. You realize how ephemeral all this stuff is. You have your little moment there and it gets swallowed up by time. It comes down to the basic pleasure of the practice of the craft."

Koren's craft is as much art as it is entertainment, Singer said. "People don't necessarily associate the word cartoonist and artist in the same thought, and that is' simply nutty," Singer said. "Ed is a true and great artist, as was Saul Steinberg and a lot of people I could mention, like Charles Addams and James Stevenson."

Lorenz described Koren's drawings as having "an etching quality."

"It has that nervous fine, very distinctive," Lorenz said in a recent phone interview. "And a kind of urban humor that certainly was not unprecedented to the New Yorker, but he had a special slant on it. Very much Upper West Side humor those urban couples who both write novels and have very precocious children and are interested in the arts, rather intellectual, well-read. In a way it was very hip, very New York- oriented."

And gentle. Always gentle.

"Very few New Yorker artists have ever been cruel, or even cutting," Lorenz said. "Ed skewers certain types, but in an affectionate way. And they're people we all know and recognize and perhaps have as friends. There's a certain forgiving quality in his work. He's created a convincing portrait of a certain strata of society, many of whom have moved to Vermont, which I sometimes think of as the UpperUpper West Side."

As an illustrator, Koren has illustrated books by Peter Mayle, Delia Ephron, George Plimpton and Alice Trillin. He has written and illustrated two books for children, "Very Hairy Harry" and "Behind the Wheel," as well as several others for adults, including the intriguingly titled, "The Hard Work of Simple Living: A Somewhat Blank Book for the Sustainable Hedonist."