Remembering George Delmerico, Longtime Art Director of The Village Voice

Sylvia Plachy, staff photographer: George brought his sense of elegance to The Voice, he gave photographs space and importance. He had a rare talent, he understood the language of photographs. He showcased them so no one could miss their meaning.

I was still shy then, my pictures whispered, but George amplified them; ran them large. He didn't crop. He didn't take away the black line. He made photographs equal to words.

During his tenure I had a picture with no caption featured on the contents page each week. It was George's idea to make the title with bold letters above the photograph, almost like a marquee on a theater, instead of the usual photographer's credit, tiny and on the side.

To refresh my memory I pulled out tearsheets from those years from my filing cabinet. They are yellow, they crumble to the touch, but they are beautiful, effortless compositions of type and image; straightforward, lively, unpretentious, gentle yet solid like George. I almost forgot.

I miss him.

Ernie Lynk, staff designer: I have fond memories of George and all the great work we did together. It was an incredible time in New York with the arts scene and public health issues like AIDS. I remember it was so new that we didn't know how to spell it--whether it should have periods after each letter or not. George was not only a great designer with sensitivity and attention to detail, especially typography, he was also a journalist in the truest sense of the word. But rather than words as his expressive device he used page design and typography and photography and illustration to get the information across. And George knew and understood the issues; whether it was politics or art he understood the message. eorge was never a passive bystander in editorial meetings. He always had his opinion and it was always respected. I'm grateful to have worked with him and will always remember him giving me the opportunity to work with all of the other gifted and wonderful people at the Voice. It was one of the great times of my life. 

Mark Alan Stamaty, cartoonist: George Delmerico was a very nice guy, a pleasure to work with and the person--more than anyone else--who made it possible for me to have many wonderful years appearing in The Village Voice.

I first met George when he was an art director at The New York Times in the 1970s. He loved my children's book Who Needs Donuts? and I kept in mind that he did.

Sometime in the following year, George became art director at The Voice. I had been feeling some frustration with the limits of children's books in those years and had been thinking that The Voice might offer an ideal adult readership for the sort of work I hoped to do. A place where I might be able to expand the sensibilities and possibilities of my work. When I heard that George had been hired at The Voice, it seemed very fortuitous.

So I went to see him there and proposed a couple of things. One was a two-page spread drawing of Greenwich Village in the detailed, gag-filled style of Who Needs Donuts?  I also told him I was interested in doing a weekly feature. George said getting a weekly feature in The Voice was usually a quite difficult thing to do. But he offered a strategy. He expressed great confidence that if I did the Greenwich Village spread in the same vein as Who Needs Donuts?   it would be a big hit, attract a lot of positive attention and create a very receptive environment in which he could suggest to the editors that I be given a weekly feature. And George was right. As soon as my Greenwich Village spread appeared and editors and staff were feeling the feedback, George jumped right in and got me a small weekly comic strip that started out on the Letters pages then, after a few weeks, got moved to the Classifieds.

George was wonderfully supportive all the way. With my "stock" rising in The Voice office, I suggested I do another city spread--this time of Times Square. George was totally onboard. When he proposed it at a staff meeting, there was some concern expressed that a  cartoon of the then-raunchy Times Square might end up being quite sexist. George assured everyone that it wouldn't be. He handled the office politics beautifully and also passed on those concerns to me.

While I was working on the Times Square picture, George called me up one day to tell me the news that Stan Mack and Ed Sorel--two of the three cartoonists (along with Feiffer) who had large comic strips in the upfront pages--would be leaving The Voice to work for Clay Felker's remake of Esquire magazine. So there would be two openings for two new large comic strips upfront and George (bless his soul) had thought immediately of me. And he told me that what I needed to do was make an appointment with our editor, Marianne Partridge, right away. Which I did.

My meeting with Marianne went well. She was interested, but she said I had to show her something. So I went home and created the beginnings of MacDoodle St.Two weeks later, I showed her the first two episodes and tossed various additional sketches of characters and ideas of where it might be headed and she bought it! And there I was with my own nearly half-page strip in The Voice in the company of my hero, Jules Feiffer, on the preceding page. And all thanks, really most of all, to George's openness to new ideas, his creative spirit and generous heart. He was a very good man.

And George was also very much in love with what he did. I remember visiting him in his small apartment on Sheridan Square back in those days. My memory is that his apartment was actually in the upstairs of that tiny building that had been The Voice offices before The Voice moved to University Place. I believe the building is still there. It is shaped like a triangle, if I'm recalling correctly. And what I remember about George's apartment was that on his wall he had one or two large framed sketches of front page designs for newspapers that he had done in high school. In my memory, they might have been done on newsprint paper and possibly in dark pencil. And George described to me with great intensity how much, from a young age, he'd wanted to do EXACTLY what he was doing--designing newspaper pages. And how happy he was to have the very job he had.

George was a good friend and a great person to work with and for. He admired and respected artists. He looked for opportunities to give us space and freedom to do what we do best and enjoy doing it. He respected artists' visions and he took on the office politics to promote and protect us and pave the way for us to do the work that we and he believed in.


Allen Reuben, assistant photo editor: In many years of working with and observing George deal with ridiculous impossible deadlines, including  all the problems and personalities, the phrase "grace under pressure" describes him in every way. He was an immense talent, inspiring spirit and guiding hand to all. And the greatest friend anyone could ever hope to have. A tremendous loss. (Photograph of George Delmerico in his office by Allen Reuben.)