Friday, May 18, 2018

Mischa Richter: Lecturing Tojo

Mischa Richter's political cartoon of Hitler lecturing Tojo over the progress of the Sino-Japanese War may be dated to c. 1939-1940, as conjectured fairly convincingly by the recent eBay seller of this drawing. The cartoon may very well have been published in the New Masses, a prominent American Marxist magazine. New Masses was critical of just about every tyrant—save Stalin—but the magazine may have been going easy here on Hitler too in the wake of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 which guaranteed nonaggression between Germany and Russia. Hence Hitler appears as a benign figure in this cartoon. In the moral calculus of American Marxism, Germany's neutrality pact with Stalin outweighed consideration of all Nazi atrocities.

Mischa Richter
Original art
New Masses?, c. 1939-1940







Mischa Richter
eBay Listing Ended April 24, 2018



Mischa Richter
eBay Item Description




Note:  Was this drawing indeed published in the New Masses? If so, in what issue and on what page? What is the context? Is there a title or caption? Readers in possession of documentary evidence of publication should send it this way. I'll be waiting.

Attempted Bloggery seeks scans and photographs of original published and unpublished artwork by Mischa Richter (1910-2001) and by other New Yorker artists.


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Mischa Richter

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