[NOTE: Friend Gary Sandman, of Roanoke Meeting in Virginia, has long been collecting and distributing short articles about artists and performers who are Quaker, or Quaker adjacent.
His latest profile is of the longtime illustrator and artist, Edward Sorel. It was so appealing that with his permission, we are re-posting it here, with some addenda we found online.]

GUEST POST: Gary Sandman on EDWARD SOREL

Edward Sorel (b. 1929) is an American cartoonist and writer.  His work usually focuses on political topics, though occasionally it touches on other subjects, and it is enlivened with his sardonic humor. 

The cartoons are pen-and-ink sketches, filled out with watercolors and pastels.  The best of them, in his words, are “spontaneous drawings”.  Among the numerous magazines in which his work has appeared are The Nation, The Village Voice, Esquire and Vanity Fair.  

Sorel has published children’s books, Hollywood histories and autobiographies, in collaboration with others or on his own, including Johnny-on-the-Spot, Superpen: the Cartoons and Caricatures of Edward Sorel and Profusely Illustrated: a Memoir. He is also known for his mural at the Waverly Inn in Greenwich Village.  

Sorel has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, the Art Institute of Boston and Galerie Bartsch & Chariau.  His honors include the Auguste St. Gaudens Medal for Professional Achievement, the Page One Award and the National Cartoonist Society Advertising and Illustration Award. 

Sorel began attending Morningside Meeting in New York City in 1963.  After he separated from his first wife and lost his job, he went through a long dark period. Ed Hilpern, his therapist and a member of the Meeting, recommended that he explore Quaker worship.  

He met Nancy Caldwell, the love of his life, at the Meeting, and they were married there in 1965.  (Above is a cartoon of the Sunday morning they met).  

Sorel participated in anti-Vietnam War marches in Washington DC with Friends and joined with them when they walked across the Peace Bridge at Rochester to deliver medical supplies for North and South Vietnamese civilians to Canadians Friends, who had agreed to forward the supplies.  

When he and his family moved upstate in the early 1970’s, they attended Bulls Head-Oswego Meeting.  A gleeful atheist, Sorel is known for his anticlerical cartoons and has sat on the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.  He felt, however, that he could become a member of the Friends because of Quaker social witness.

I have always loved Edward Sorel’s cartoons.  I first saw them in Ramparts magazine in the mid-1960’s and enjoy them still in The New Yorkermagazine.And I was delighted to see the cartoon above.  I had worshiped at Morningside Meeting several times when I lived in New York City.

A quote from Sorel about his first Friends Meeting for Worship:

“What I remember best is the silence.  It seemed to charge the room with a connectedness of yearning”.  

Gary Sandman

[ Gary has published an extensive collection of his artist profiles in a book titled QUAKER ARTISTS. Copies can be ordered (hard back or e-book) through his website, at: http://garysandmanartist.com/ ]

From an interview with Sorel in  The Comics Journal,  January 17, 2014:

SOREL: Well, I’ll always be very grateful to Moon Missing. While I was having my nervous breakdown after my first marriage collapsed, I went to Quaker meetings. I thought it would be a good idea for me to be concerned with troubles other than my own.

At a meeting, I met a woman during the coffee break, and I was able to let drop that I had a book out, which was Moon Missing. I think she assumed that I was a writer, rather than a cartoonist, and so she became impressed enough that we went out to breakfast, and we fell in love and we got married, and lived happily ever after. So I’ll always be grateful to Moon Missing for that.

Moon Missing was a fantasy that was about what happens in the world when the moon disappears. It used people who were very much in the limelight at the time. Moon Missing was published by Simon & Shuster, who had a half-page ad set to appear in The New York Times on a Monday morning.

Unfortunately, it was the Monday morning that the newspaper strike started, and that was the end of Moon Missing, which was remaindered along with all of the other books that couldn’t be publicized.

The story of my life is a whole series of stories like that, which leads me to believe that there is a God and he’s pissed off at me. For example, I don’t know if you know my poster of [New York Catholic] Cardinal [Francis] Spellman, that was done at the peak of the Vietnam War.

TCJ: “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammo.” I was going to ask you about that.

SOREL: Yes. “Pass the Lord and Praise the Ammunition.” Right. Well, that poster …  that was really one of the happiest days of my life when Personality Posters said that they would make a poster out of this drawing, which everybody, every magazine refused to publish — even [the radical] Ramparts refused to publish it. It was somehow too sacrilegious.

Here he was going to make a poster of it and I would be famous at last. The day that poster got off the press was the day that Cardinal Spellman died, and that poster was not sold anyplace in the United States. It was sold in one store in Chicago that had its window broken for selling it.

TCJ: What year was that?

SOREL: That was 1968 or so.

TCJ: Can you explain what Spellman represented socially and theologically?

SOREL: Well, he represented the continuation of the long line of reactionary fatheads in the Catholic Church. People forget that he had gone over to Vietnam and assured the soldiers that they were friends of Christ’s simply because they were over there. A tradition, I believe, carried on by Cardinal Cooke, who was his successor. Much of my cartooning is anti-clerical, which explains why I appear in The Nation instead of …  I don’t know. Is there a magazine that, uh …

About the poster:

Pass the Lord and Praise the Ammunition
Cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman, 1889-1967

“What I enjoy attacking,” Sorel has noted, “are things that everyone else is not attacking. Which brings me to my favorite target: organized religion.” At the time of this drawing, influential Catholic cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman, who had been military vicar general of the United States armed forces since 1939, was a dedicated anti-Communist and outspoken hawk on the issue of Vietnam.

Spellman had urged American intervention since 1955, but by the mid-1960s, his views were strongly criticized by American religious leaders and antiwar Catholics. Sorel summarized those feelings in his 1967 poster Pass the Lord and Praise the Ammunition, a blistering attack on the cardinal’s militaristic approach.

Spellman died, however, just as the poster was finished, rendering it unsaleable, as Americans remembered what an important spokesman he had been for the church. Sorel reused the image for the wrapper of his 1972 book, Making the World Safe for Hypocrisy.