Ranan Lurie, RIP

Another of the giants in my profession has gone to that great drawing board in the sky:

1968, Life magazine

Ranan Lurie, who died on Wednesday at the age of 90, was an outstanding caricaturist in his day, an Israeli-American published worldwide. (Albeit hardly ever in one place for very long.)

1969, Life magazine

And when I say he was a caricaturist, it's largely because he concentrated so much on getting the faces of politicians so exquisitely exact that he didn't bother to be so persnickety with the other elements of his cartoons.

1972

And it didn't detract from his cartoons in the slightest.

(But make no mistake: drawing someone riding a bicycle ain't easy.)

1973

Aside: Let this be a lesson, kids: don't ever use rubber cement to put newspaper or magazine clippings into a scrapbook. (You kids didn't understand a word of that, did you.) What appears to be grayscale in this cartoon of Henry Kissinger and the leaders of Germany, Greece, France and Great Britain is just my lousy choice of an adhesive staining the paper.

And I've cleaned up this scan considerably.

Oct., 1976

Even if you didn't catch Lurie's signature or the helpful title over his cartoons, you could recognize them by the little sun shining in each and every one.

July, 1976

There are more recent Lurie cartoons out there, but I'll have to leave them for others to display. These are just a few of the ones I saved in scrapbooks back in the day.

Rest in shalom, Mr. Lurie.