Marjorie Organ

Marjorie Organ
Birth Name:	Marjorie Organ
Born:	December 3, 1886
Died:	July 1930
Country:	Ireland, United States
Area(s):	Artist, cartoonist
Web Presence
Lambiek Comiclopedia

Marjorie Organ Henri (December 3, 1886 - July 1930) was one of the first first female newspaper cartoonists in America.

Life & Career

Organ was born in Ireland on December 3, 1886, the daughter of a wallpaper designer. Her family moved to New York c. 1895, and Marjorie attended Saint Joseph's School and the Normal College (later Hunter College) before studying with cartoonist Dan McCarthy. In 1902, at the age of 16, she joined the staff of the New York Evening Journal, working in the paper's art room with Richard Outcault, Rudolph Dirks and Paul Bransom. She was regarded as something of a "maverick" by the social mores of the day, making no objection to the older men's salty humour.

She created "Little Reggie and the Heavenly Twins", a strip about a hapless little man strung along by a pair of beautiful but manipulative girls, which ran in the Journal from October 27, 1902 to February 3, 1905. It has been suggested that Organ herself and her best friend Helen Marie Walsh, who married Rudolph Dirks, may have been the inspiration for the "Twins". She also created "The Wrangle Sisters", about a pair of young socialites, which ran in the Journal from December 8, 1904 to January 7, 1905, and several others for the Journal and the New York World, including "Strange What a Difference a Mere Man Makes!", "Girls Will Be Girls", "The Man Haters' Club" and "Lady Bountiful".

In 1908, when she was a student of the New York School of Art, she met the head of the school, the widowed painter Robert Henri. Three weeks later they married in Connecticut. Her career as a cartoonist ended, but she continued to paint and draw, exhibiting at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, and managed her husband's business and social life. Henri painted a portrait of her in 1910, "O in Black with Scarf".

She died of cancer in July 1930.

Gallery

Little Reggie and the Heavenly Twins

"O in Black With Scarf", portrait by her husband Paul Henri, 1910

References

• Bennard B. Perlman, Robert Henri: His Life and Art, Courier Dover Publications, 1991, pp. 85-87, 137
• Betsy Fahlman, "The art spirit in the classroom: educating the modern woman artist", in Marian Wardle (ed.), American women modernists: the legacy of Robert Henri, 1910-1945, pp. 93-115
• Allan Holtz, Obscurity of the Day: Little Reggie and the Heavenly Twins, Stripper's Guide, 7 December 2010
• Allan Holtz, Obscurity of the Day: The Wrangle Sisters, Stripper's Guide, 2 September 2011
• Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy, The Robert Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987, p. 178
• "Robert Henri weds a pupil", New York Times, 7 June 1908
• Updates 9, The Comic Strip Project

View Marjorie Organ's memorial at Find-A-Grave.

Marjorie Organ on Other Wikias:
Irish Comics