Classic Cartoons: Martin Plimmer on George Price

FOR MORE than 50 years,

one of the world's most sophisticated magazines published illustrations of the backs of old television sets. This was one price The New Yorker paid to have the dynamic stylist George Price on its roster of artists.

Another was the depiction of the lifestyle shallows and lows of New York's socially marginalised white lower classes. Price's favourite take on these frequently soured characters, and what The New Yorker's cartoon editor Lee Lorenz calls their "bastard furniture", was from behind the TV set, no two of which he ever drew the same.

Though he didn't write his gags, considering himself to be an illustrator of jokes, he supplied heaps of comic visual material - cuckoo clocks, improbable souvenirs, novelty beer-can containers, hat lampshades.

This would be trash in anyone else's hands, but in Price's it was an art form.