A new exhibition at Martha’s Vineyard Museum looks back at the work of Denys Wortman, whose newspaper cartoons offered a daily view of life in New York for nearly 30 years.

The Two Worlds of Denys Wortman opened on September 19 in the museum’s Grain Family Gallery and continues through February 21, 2027. The exhibition brings together original cartoons, paintings, photographs, personal objects and archival material.

At the centre of Wortman’s career was Metropolitan Movies, the daily newspaper cartoon he produced from 1924 to 1954. Working at a pace of six cartoons a week, he created more than 8,000 drawings over the course of the series. They were syndicated nationally and, according to the museum, seen by millions of readers.

Wortman found his subjects in ordinary New York life. His drawings placed working-class New Yorkers against familiar city settings — Union Square benches, Lower East Side tenement rooftops and garment-industry workplaces among them. His long newspaper career covered the Great Depression and the postwar years, leaving behind an extensive visual record of a changing city.

The exhibition was presented with the help of his son, Denys Wortman, and uses material from both sides of his life to place the newspaper cartoons in a wider context.

Wortman also had a connection with The New Yorker. According to cartoon historian Michael Maslin, 49 of his cartoons appeared in the magazine between March 30, 1929 and August 28, 1937.

His work has been revisited before. In 2010, the Museum of the City of New York and the Center for Cartoon Studies presented Denys Wortman Rediscovered: Drawings for the World-Telegram and Sun, 1930–1953, an exhibition devoted to his drawings of everyday New York.