Rose O’Neill exhibits art, poetry 

March is Women’s History Month. NY1920s always centers women’s history; this month we’ll do so a bit more emphatically.

One hundred years ago today … Rose O’Neill was exhibiting her drawings at the Wildenstein Galleries, 647 5th Avenue.

O’Neill was best known as creator of the cartoon character “Kewpie”–which itself was better known as a ubiquitous children’s toy. O’Neill was a poet as well some of her verse was displayed next to the paintings.

She was described in The Evening World  in late 1921.

Of the Wildenstein exhibit, Henry McBride wrote, 

Mrs. O'Neill is Michelangelesque in her attack. Her thought has roamed the world and all the ages. Dante knew nothing she doesn't know, and besides, she has consulted satyrs, fauns, unborn souls and the old lady around the corner who reads the future. The result she puts on paper with Rabelaisian unction. 

(“Striking Drawings and Poems by Rose O'Neill,” New York Herald, 5 March 1922, p. 49.)

Later in 1922, Sarah MacDougal would write that the exhibit was receiving “International Acclaim.”

The Wildenstein Galleries were located at one of New York’s legendary addresses: 647 5th Avenue was built by George Vanderbilt in 1905 and renovated by Gianni Versace in 1995.

– Jonathan Goldman, March 8, 2022

TAGS: art, painting, cartoons, comics, toys, women’s history