Exhibition

New York, August 17, 2011 – School of Visual Arts (SVA) will honor Edward Sorel with the Masters Series award and retrospective exhibition. Hailed by The New York Times as “one of America’s foremost political satirists,” Edward Sorel has delighted magazine readers for decades with his social critiques, political satires and whimsical picture essays. “The Masters Series: Edward Sorel” be on view from October 7 through November 5, 2011, at the Visual Arts Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th Floor, New York City. Edward Sorel has used his pen to lampoon politicians, businessmen, celebrities and even himself; his subjects have ranged from Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George W. Bush to Leo Tolstoy, Frank Sinatra and Madonna. With over 100 drawings, caricatures and illustrations, “The Masters Series: Edward Sorel” reveals a major American artist whose intelligence and humor are matched by his cunning storytelling and incisive social commentary. Born on March 26, 1929, in the Bronx, Sorel cofounded the internationally renowned Push Pin Studios in 1953 with fellow Cooper Union classmates Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser but soon left to establish his lifelong freelance career. His potent spoofs of public figures first appeared in left-wing periodicals, then later in mainstream magazines. Over the last four decades, his work has appeared in American Heritage, The Atlantic, Esquire, Fortune, Forbes, GQ, Harper's, New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Time and The Village Voice. Sorel is now most frequently seen in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, for which he has done 45 covers. Sorel is the writer and illustrator of several children books, including The Saturday Kid (Margaret K. McElderry, 2000). A collection of his caricatures, Unauthorized Portraits, was published by Knopf in 1997, and his book Literary Lives was published by Bloomsbury USA in 2006. That same year, Sorel completed a mural for the Waverly Inn, in New York City, which was later turned into the book, The Mural at the Waverly Inn: A Portrait of Greenwich Village Bohemians (Patheon, 2008).In 1998 the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., devoted several rooms to an exhibition of his caricatures. Other one-man shows include the Graham Gallery and the Davis and Langdale Gallery in New York City, the Susan Conway Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Boston, and Galerie Bartsch & Chariau in Munich, Germany. He is a recipient of the Augustus St. Gaudens Medal for Professional Achievement from The Cooper Union, the Hamilton King Award from The Society of Illustrators, the Page One Award from the Newspaper Guild, the Best in Illustration Award from the National Cartoonists Society, the George Polk Award for Satiric Drawing, and the "Karikaturpreis der deutschen Anwaltschaft" from the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover, Germany. In 2001, the Art Directors Club of New York elected Sorel to their Hall of Fame. On Tuesday, October 25 at 7pm, Sorel will discuss his career with artist James McMullan, best known for his signature posters created for the Lincoln Center Theater. The conversation will take place at the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street, New York City. Admission is free and open to the public.

In 1988, SVA founder Silas H. Rhodes instituted the College’s Masters Series, award and exhibitions honoring great visual communicators of our time.  Although the achievements of many groundbreaking designers, illustrators, art directors and photographers are known to and lauded by their colleagues, their names often go unrecognized by the general public. The Masters Series is intended to bring greater exposure to those whose influence has been felt strongly and by many, yet without widespread recognition. Masters Series laureates are Marshall Arisman, Saul Bass, Ivan Chermayeff, Seymour Chwast, Paul Davis, Lou Dorfsman, Heinz Edelmann, Jules Feiffer, Shigeo Fukuda, Milton Glaser, April Greiman, Steven Heller, George Lois, Mary Ellen Mark, Ed McCabe, Duane Michals, Tony Palladino, Paula Scher, Deborah Sussman, George Tscherny, Paul Rand and Massimo Vignelli.