Helen Elna Hokinson was an American artist and cartoonist. She worked for The New Yorker and specialized in illustrating wealthy, plump, and ditsy society women and their foibles, referring to them as "My Best Girls"; they were also popularly known as “Hokinson Women. ”
Background
Helen Elna Hokinson was born on June 29, 1893 in Mendota, Illinois, United States. She was the only child of Adolph Hokinson, a farm-machinery salesman whose family (originally named Haakonson) had emigrated from Sweden, and Mary (Wilcox) Hokinson, an Arkansas native of English descent.
Education
Hokinson attended the Mendota public schools and, during her high school years, began to sketch her friends and other townspeople without their knowledge and solely for her own enjoyment. In 1914, the year following her high-school graduation, her parents grudgingly allowed her to undertake a two-year course at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, which in those days guaranteed to produce commercial artists who could make a living. She lived modestly at the Three Arts Club and specialized in fashion illustration and design.
Career
Hokinson managed to secure assignments from various department stores and art service agencies. In 1920 she moved to New York, intending to continue the same sort of work. The next year she and the artist Alice Harvey, with whom she had shared a small Chicago studio, took rooms at the Smith College Club, an inexpensive haven that had just opened and had some space available for girls who were not Smith alumnae. Hokinson did fashion illustrations for such stores as Lord and Taylor, B. Altman and Company, and John Wanamaker, while Harvey contributed humorous drawings to Life magazine. Both young women attempted comic strips for the Daily Mirror, but Hokinson's "Sylvia in the Big City" was the only one that actually appeared, and then only for a few months.
In 1924 the two friends enrolled in a course at the School of Fine and Applied Art. Hokinson's studies under Howard Giles, who taught the Jay Hambidge theory of dynamic symmetry, wholly altered her career. Never a caricaturist, she had based her high school sketches on nothing more than a selective observation of the truth. They had been funny only because something about the individuals themselves had been innately funny. Giles, recognizing Hokinson's talent for "drawing true, " encouraged her to devote herself more and more to this form of expression but with a design basis. Soon she was doing so with authority and dispatch and working in watercolor as well, combining dynamic symmetry with the Denman Ross color theory.
The artist's new-found joy resulted in her losing all interest in fashion illustrating, until then her only means of support. The founding of the New Yorker early in 1925 was most fortuitous, for to its editors the fact that Hokinson was not a cartoonist in the accepted sense mattered not at all. They were interested in mirroring the life of the city, and Hokinson's drawings did exactly that. The earliest of these, done in the magazine's very first year, were unaccompanied by captions. Presently, however, the editors (and sometimes, the readers) began to caption her work themselves, often originating ideas for her to work out and every month or so sending her on "covering art" assignments to sketch assorted metropolitan phenomena.
In 1931 a chance meeting with James Reid Parker, one of the New Yorker's short-story writers, led to a professional association that lasted for the next eighteen years, with Parker devising the situations and writing the captions for most of Miss Hokinson's drawings. In a Saturday Review of Literature essay John Mason Brown wrote, "Theirs was the happiest of collaborations. Without any of the friction of the lords of the Savoy, they found themselves as perfectly matched as Gilbert and Sullivan. If Hokinson's was the seeing eye, Mr. Parker's was the hearing ear. " Her best-known sketches were of pleasantly plump, middle-aged suburban clubwomen. Most, but certainly not all, of these women were unself-consciously charming, kind, self-indulgent, ingenuous to a degree, and generally addicted to short-lived enthusiasms.
But Hokinson confounds us because she drew so very many women (and men), each a true individual.
The nearest thing to a Helen Hokinson stereotype was the helpless lady phoning her husband from a police station and saying, "George, I've just done something wrong on the George Washington Bridge. " Another typical character was the thin, angular, elderly woman made of sterner stuff, who remarks in a crisp aside to her pewmate at a church wedding, "Personally, I like to see a nervous bride. " It is true, however, that many of Hokinson's admirers were inclined to think of her women as a type, an amalgam of women exemplified by the women's club treasurer who declines to submit her monthly report "because there is a deficit. "
Hokinson herself thought of her characters only as individuals, which in fact they are. Helen Hokinson worked very quickly, due in part to her huge file of rough sketches, and often completed a fine drawing within an hour. Two days usually sufficed for her weekly work, a fact she slyly concealed from the editors throughout her career.
As early as 1929, Hokinson had formed the habit of dividing her time between a New York apartment and cottages in Connecticut, first in Silvermine and then in Wilton. On November 1, 1949, she was invited to Washington to speak at the opening of the capital's annual Community Chest drive; she was killed with all others aboard her plane in a collision that took place as the craft approached National Airport. She was buried in Mendota.
Personality
Although Hokinson tended to be shy and monosyllabic with strangers, with people she liked and trusted, she was joyful and spontaneous.
Quotes from others about the person
"Hers was the rarest of satiric gifts. She had no contempt for human failings. She approached foibles with affection. She could ridicule without wounding. She could give fun by making fun and in the process make no enemies. " - Mason Brown