"He Put on the Lid - and the Bottom Fell Out"

Robinson was an illustrator and political cartoonist whose portrait of critic James Huneker appears in this exhibition. In the early years of the 20th century Robinson was virtually the founder of Leftist cartooning in the United States. One commentator said of him, "He killed the old, badly-drawn, cross-hatchline cartoon and developed a cartoon which was also a work of art… A few of his swift lines and a little of his grim, sardonic humor are more deadly than columns of editorials." This drawing appeared in the January 1920 issue of The Liberator, a socialist journal founded in 1918 when a similar publication, The Masses, was forced to stop production, and comments presciently on the economic and social unrest that would cause the Great Depression and lead to the rise of fascism in the coming decades. With Thomas Hart Benton, whose work appears in the case to the right, Robinson was also one of the founders of the American mural movement in the 1930s.