John Held, Jr.

John Held Jr. (American, 1889-1958)

More than anything else, John Held Jr. expressed in his pictures the brash spirit of the 1920s with his famous flappers and collegiate capers, bootleg gin, jazz bands, and necking parties. His drawings, highly stylized, are fragile and delicate, yet entirely appropriate to the artificiality of the era.

As a youth, Held had made a number of linocuts styled after the early, crude, wood engravings. Harold Ross, The New Yorker editor, encouraged Held to develop this second approach; it became a very popular feature, usually as a vehicle for satirical parody of the Victorian era. All of Held’s work was tremendously successful throughout the 1920s and appeared copiously in the old Life, Judge, Liberty, College Humour, Cosmopolitan, and The New Yorker magazines.

With the onset of The Great Depression, such frivolity was no longer appropriate, and Held quietly turned to the more serious career of breeding and sculpting horses, working with ceramics and wrought iron. He was also artist in residence at Harvard in 1940 and at the University of Georgia in 1941.

[Taken from the internet web site of Comenos Fine Arts, 2/7/2000 --jag]