Displaying the Gems of Jester

Two legendary New Yorker cartoonists — one sharp, the other sweet. A fixture of the Harlem Renaissance. And a groundbreaker who inspired a 1960s art movement.

These four artists share a common career origin story in the pages of Columbia’s iconic humor magazine, Jester. And this fall, an exhibition of their early work for the publication is taking center stage on campus.

“Drawn by a Columbian” opened in September inside the Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s Chang Octagon. The show spotlights the visuals done by four notable alumni artists: Charles H. Alston CC 1929, TC 1931; Ad Reinhardt CC 1935; Charles Saxon CC 1940; and Edward Koren ’57. Founded on April Fool’s Day 1901, Jester is one of the oldest campus humor mags in the country. It flourished from the 1920s to the 1950s; at its peak, Jester was named best in the country by the Association of College Comics two academic years in a row (1936–37 and 1937–38). The magazine stopped publication in 1989, only to be revived twice, in 2001 and 2004. It was shelved again in 2020.

University Archivist Jocelyn Wilk credits Koren as the motivation for the exhibition. After he passed away in 2023, she and other RBML staff began going through the issues of his time to assist with obituary writing and tribute articles. “There were so many cartoons, and some of them made me laugh out loud — even still, from the 1950s,” Wilk says. “Most of Jester is a little dated, but there definitely is some beautiful artwork.”

She recalled scanning images by Reinhardt years earlier for another Columbia project; his distinctive style stayed with her. Which other alumni might be featured? Though Wilk was the least familiar with Saxon’s work, she knew that the RBML had a collection of his drawings — that made three. Her colleague, Records Manager Joanna Rios, who had recently done a blog post about Alston, suggested he be included as the fourth.

Wilk spent more than a year sourcing, scanning and printing materials, and working with the library’s conservation staff to help prep them for display. “Drawn by a Columbian” will feature original art items as well as reproductions; information about the artists; their contributions to Jester and other Columbia publications; and a postscript for each detailing how they continued to interact with the College after graduation.

Here, get to know the four alumni being highlighted.

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Charles H. Alston CC 1929, TC 1931

Alston arrived on campus in 1925 after graduating from DeWitt Clinton H.S., where he was the arts editor of the school’s magazine. He quickly joined the staff of Jester as well as the yearbook, The Columbian, and was a member of the Black fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha. His work at Jester reflects his preference for smooth lines and physical accuracy; an elegant pen-and-ink drawing from December 1927, “A marry Mary Christmas” (below), depicts a newly engaged couple kissing near a wreath. After three years at Jester, Alston switched in his senior year to Morningside, a campus literary magazine, where he produced woodcut portraits for the covers.

Alston was also integral to the development of the neighboring community of Harlem as a Black cultural mecca. While at Teachers College, his naturalistic style began to evolve and he was increasingly inspired by African art and aesthetics. He started an art program at an after-school center, Utopia Children’s House (under Alston’s tutelage, one young student — 12-year-old Jacob Lawrence — would go on to become one of the best-known Black artists of the 20th century). In 1934, Alston co-founded the Harlem Art Workshop; he also secured a studio at 306 W. 141st St., known simply as “306,” which grew into a creative community hub.

The following year Alston was named the first Black supervisor for the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Federal Art Project. An assignment to compose two murals for Harlem Hospital resulted in some of his most recognized work, Magic in Medicine and Modern Medicine. Heavily influenced by the Mexican muralist movement of the time, the pair contrasted holistic curing in Africa with the new Western methods being practiced by Black physicians. Though Alston’s designs were initially rejected by the hospital administrators as “too much Negro subject matter,” they eventually allowed the murals to proceed. The paintings were completed in 1940.

During his influential teaching career, Alston was the first Black instructor at both the Arts Students League and the Museum of Modern Art. Described as an “intellectual activist,” he co-founded the Black artists collective Spiral in 1963; in 1968, he returned to Columbia to speak about his activism. Alston was made full professor at City College that same year and remained there until his death in 1977.

In 2005, Harlem Hospital announced a $2 million project to restore Alston’s and other WPA-era murals; they were reinstalled and placed on public view in 2012.

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Ad Reinhardt CC 1935

Though Reinhardt would become famous for his minimalist, monochromatic style, his Jester artwork was anything but. As the magazine’s cover designer (and as a senior, its editor-in-chief), Reinhardt’s illustrations were striking and geometric, featuring sharp lines and bold colors. His most iconic covers include a Cubist-inspired academic studying by candlelight for the January 1932 issue (below); November 1933’s fiery Columbia lion in football gear; and a jazzy abstract in March 1935 that doubled as the program of that year’s Varsity Show.

Born to German immigrants in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1913 and raised in Ridgewood, Queens, Reinhardt considered himself a painter from an early age. Confident in his technical skills, he passed on an art school education and accepted a full scholarship to the College, where he studied under esteemed art historian Meyer Schapiro CC 1924. As an undergrad, Reinhardt took painting courses at Teachers College; in 1943, he would hold his first solo exhibition there.

In addition to painting, Reinhardt was a prolific cartoonist, with a bent toward satire; his drawings for Jester ranged in style from comics poking fun at campus life to edgy caricatures of the dictators of the day. In 1943, the progressive newspaper PM hired Reinhardt as a staff artist; three years later he created a series of snarky cartoons for the paper, biting critiques of the contemporary art world that he called “How to Look.” He would go on to accept cartoon assignments for decades — including for Jester — even as a painter and full-time professor at Brooklyn College.

Over the years, Reinhardt began to reduce the use of form and color in his paintings; his art career took a radical turn in 1953 when he disavowed color entirely. Reinhardt adopted a spare, “Art-as-Art” visual philosophy, creating abstractions that were purposely devoid of meaning or emotion. He began work on his signature monochrome “Black Paintings” — muted squares of layered black and nearly black shades — that were a crucial precursor to the Minimalist art movement of the 1960s.

After Reinhardt’s 1967 death from a heart attack in his studio at 732 Broadway, The New York Times wrote, “In his determination to distill art to the edge of nothingness, to what he called ‘pure aesthetics,’ the artist became, quite suddenly in recent years, popular, and a hero and leader to a new generation of American painters.”

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Charles Saxon CC 1940

Saxon started at the College at a precocious 15; he was interested in music — his father and great-uncle were violinists — but Saxon chose a different beat, studying drumming and playing in jazz bands while an editor at Jester. His sense of humor was equally lively; Saxon drew cartoons of old ladies giggling over dirty words, and a man seeking the Lost and Found for an elephant outside his window. His stunning yellow October 1939 cover (below) depicts a Columbia footballer as a fat-bottomed centaur.

Still in his teens after graduation, Saxon worked as an editor at Dell Publishing before becoming a bomber pilot in the Army Air Corps; he flew 40 missions over Germany during WWII. After the war, he returned to Dell, then became the editor of Modern Screen. He interviewed some of the most glamorous movie stars of the era but was indifferent to that glitzy lifestyle; friends said he liked to talk about his first trip to Hollywood and his astonishment at being met by limousines from all six major studios.

In the 1940s, Saxon resumed drawing cartoons in his downtime and began selling them to The Saturday Evening Post and other publications; his first New Yorker cartoon appeared in 1943. After ditching editing to become a full-time cartoonist, he joined the magazine’s staff in 1956.

Saxon ultimately drew more than 700 cartoons for The New Yorker, including 92 covers. His drawings lampooned a particular breed of upper-class snobs defined by their environments — boorish Wall Street tycoons in their corporate offices and sniffy, Bermuda-shorted suburbanites at their country clubs. Colleagues, however, described his satire as “gentle and cool, carefully composed and never suggesting outrage.”

Lee Lorenz, New Yorker’s cartoon editor for 24 years, acknowledged that Saxon’s subjects were an easy target for humor, but said: “Chuck saw beyond that to the bitter side of it: people too cautious to take advantage of the very opportunities that their privileged position offered them.”

Saxon also drew numerous advertisements for clients including American Airlines, Chivas Regal, IBM and Xerox. As his 1988 obituary in The New York Times noted, “So ubiquitous was his advertising work in the late 1970s that one edition of The Wall Street Journal featured ads by Mr. Saxon for three different companies.”

Saxon died from heart failure at 68. His work was collected in three volumes, Oh, Happy, Happy, Happy! (1960), One Man’s Fancy (1970) and Honesty Is One of the Better Policies (1984).

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Edward Koren ’57

Koren credited Jester for launching him on his career path; he began contributing as a first-year and became editor-in-chief as a senior. “A huge chunk of my life was spent either writing or drawing for the magazine,” he told The Comics Journal in 2013.

Koren started drawing cartoons as a high school student at Horace Mann. His parents wanted him to be a doctor, however, so he arrived at the College on the pre-med track. He quickly realized that was not his calling, and refocused toward artistic pursuits. “At that time you could really sample the great smorgasbord that Columbia had,” Koren said.

His Jester work honed what would become Koren’s recognizable style, featuring shaggy, long-nosed animals and humans in “ordinary” social situations. An early cartoon from 1954 shows a giant dog in the same shape of the car he’s trailing. His October 1956 cover (right) — ahead of that year’s presidential election — shows an enthusiastic family cheering a grinning, humanoid Richard Nixon on the TV.

After graduation, Koren was accepted into Yale’s M.F.A. program but put it off and took a job at a city planning firm. He hated it. So he went back to Columbia and asked his former art history professor Dustin Rice for help. Rice suggested that Koren work with his friend, painter S.W. Hayter, at the prestigious Atelier 17 in Paris. Koren studied etching and engraving under Hayter, then returned stateside in 1959 and joined the U.S. Army Reserves, spending six months at Fort Dix, Texas. After earning an M.F.A. from Pratt in 1964, he joined the faculty at Brown, where he taught until 1977.

Koren published his first New Yorker cartoon in 1962; he would eventually contribute more than 1,000 illustrations to the magazine, including dozens of covers.

“There’s an immense sweetness to his personality that radiates through his work,” New Yorker editor David Remnick said in Koren’s New York Times obituary. “This was not an acerbic comic spirit. He had a very different sensibility. There was a real soulfulness to everything he did.”

Koren also contributed to the Times, Newsweek, Vogue, Vanity Fair and other publications. His artwork appeared in shows and galleries across the United States and Europe; many pieces became part of museums’ permanent collections.

Koren never retired. For The New Yorker’s April 17, 2023, issue — published just days after his death at 87 — he drew Moses on a mountaintop, holding up a stone tablet of the Ten Commandments in Roman numerals and proclaiming to his people: “Time for an update!”

“Drawn by a Columbian” will be on view in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s Chang Octagon (on the sixth floor of Butler Library) through Dec. 14.