New Yorker cartoonist with a wry look on life

A self caricature.

Bernard Schoenbaum's genius as a cartoonist enlivened the pages of The New Yorker for three decades. His subjects, or, rather, his targets, were quite like his readers. They were affluent, worldly, liberal, image-conscious, socially competitive, middle-class Americans. He and his colleagues, Frank Modell, James Stevenson, Lee Lorenz, and Robert Weber were gifted, with particularly well-tuned ears and eyes for the culture, and had the ability to immediately pick up on and identify trendy cultural behaviour and turn it into an exquisite gem of a cartoon.

Their collective work, captured in The Complete Cartoons Of The New Yorker, is a visual education of their times. Born in Manhattan to Russian Jewish émigrés, he was educated in the Bronx and at Parsons School of Design. Much of his career was as a freelance advertising illustrator but when his wife, Rhonda, took a job as a librarian, he was able to devote himself to cartooning. He contributed his first drawing - as The New Yorker prefers to call them - in 1974, when William Shawn was still editor, and he contributed some 463 for the magazine.

Some of his earliest work was captionless, no easy feat and a reflection of his skill as an artist. His approach was literal, while his style was a soft fluid line and easy-on-the-eye wash. He captured clothing and accessories beautifully, so the reader would be on their way to laughing even before they got to read the caption. The world of his cartoons embraced businessmen, married couples, street life, after-work drinkers, parents and children. A young girl says to her father who is in an arm chair reading the newspaper, "I need some short-term economic stimulus"; a boy to his father, "about my allowance? care to throw some numbers around?"; another girl asks her mother, "how much longer must I be good?"

Bernard Schoenbaum is survived by his wife and three daughters. * The National