Michael Crawford, whose cartoons salted the pages of The New Yorker with mischievous observations of ballplayers, lovers, the art world and the city life of people who probably read The New Yorker, died on Tuesday at home in Kingston, N.Y. He was 70.
The cause was cancer, his daughter, Farley Crawford Bliss, said.
Mr. Crawford sold more than 600 cartoons and drawings to The New Yorker after William Shawn, the editor at the time, bought the first one in 1981. Like many cartoonists of a nonpolitical stripe, he was something of a sociologist — a student of habits and trends, memes and fashions, the purposes and cross-purposes of human interaction, most of which he exploited for gentle ridicule or defiant amusement.
To wit: A stout, bald man with glasses and a pocket protector on the striped shirt that clashes garishly with his spotted tie and plaid trousers approaches a table of elegantly dressed people around a casino crap table. “The name’s Bond,” he says. “Duane Bond.”
Or: In front of the bathroom mirror, a shirtless man embraces a shirtless woman from behind, tugging on her bra strap with his teeth. “Why can’t you just learn to floss like other men?” she says.
He sometimes played with familiar iconography: His rendering of a Swiss Army knife had all its blades extended, but they were all corkscrews. The drawing was labeled “French Army Knife.”
He occasionally drew animals, but they behaved like wiseacre people. A pair of salmon leap upstream to discover a bear wading in wait at the top of the falls. “I recommend the trout,” one of the fish says.
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In his early drawings, Mr. Crawford was more precise and illustrative than he became as his style evolved. His signature later work was parsimonious in its number of lines, although he was not a minimalist, using shades of gray, clever framing, juxtapositions and suggestions of movement to create sophisticated images.
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A Crawford cartoon from The New Yorker. Credit Michael Crawford
“Expressionistic is how I described his style,” his wife, Carolita Johnson, who is also a cartoonist, said in an interview on Thursday. “I had to help him get hands right. I helped him with anatomy. He helped me with perspective and shading.”
Mr. Crawford was a also a painter — his best-known works were scenes of well-dressed gangsters — and a lifelong baseball fan who played first base for The New Yorker’s softball team, and whose latest paintings, influenced by Richard Diebenkorn’s works, were abstract renderings of the Green Monster, the left-field wall in Fenway Park. He was the editor, with Robert Mankoff, of “The New Yorker Book of Baseball Cartoons.”
Musings on both art and baseball showed up often in his cartoons. He could be acerbic about the contemporary art world, as in his depiction of a man standing in front of a large abstract painting on a museum wall who says to a woman who is looking at it, “It’s meaningless, lady, believe me — I painted it.” And acerbic about the contemporary sports world, as in a drawing of a fielder in mid-error saying to a teammate: “Whaddya want for 19 mil?” He managed occasionally to put both keen interests together, as in a parody drawing called “Around the Horn With Henri Matisse,” in which he put baseball gloves on the famous figures in Matisse’s “Dance” paintings and altered them to suggest fielding and throwing.
“You know artists from the look of their work, from a world they create and a set of obsessions that they have,” David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said in an interview on Wednesday. “With Michael, it was an expanding world all the time. He didn’t sit still.
“As with all the best artists, his style was immediately recognizable. And so were his obsessions. He was obsessed with everything from the mob to baseball to the darker corners of intimacy, marital and otherwise.”
Michael Thomas Crawford was born in Oswego, N.Y., on Oct. 21, 1945. His father, Edward, was a lawyer who became a New York State assemblyman and a State Supreme Court justice. His mother, the former Margaret Conlin, was a homemaker who became, later in life, an advocate for homeless and runaway children and an activist against nuclear proliferation.
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Another Michael Crawford from The New Yorker. His work for the magazine poked fun at marriage, sports, art and the lifestyles of the denizens of New York. Credit Michael Crawford
He graduated with a degree in English from the University of Toronto and briefly attended law school there before embarking on a series of jobs, including teaching at a private school in Vermont and working for a pollster in Washington. An aspiring poet and a self-taught artist who began with line drawings and wire sculptures, he lived for a time in the Boston area and published poems and illustrations, mostly in local newspapers and magazines. His daughter said that growing up, she recalled her father always yearning to see his work in The New Yorker; he began sending his work there in the mid-1970s.
“Eventually, started peppering The New Yorker with gags around 1975 and Whoosh! Before you knew it, it was 1981 and I had my first New Yorker check (for a grand 400 clams I think it was),” Mr. Crawford recalled in a 2013 interview with Michael Maslin, another cartoonist, on his blog Inkspill.
Mr. Crawford’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Johnson, whom he met in 2002 and married this year, and his daughter, he is survived by a son, Miles, and a sister, Kate Briscoe.
Three other cartoonists whose work was featured in The New Yorker — Anatol Kovarsky, Frank Modell and William Hamilton — have also died in 2016.
In an email, Ms. Johnson told a story to illustrate her husband’s personality.
“When one of the doctors at the hospital was trying to assess Michael’s mental acuity she picked up some random pen and asked, ‘Mr. Crawford, what would you do with this?’” Ms. Johnson wrote. “And he replied ‘I wouldn’t do anything with that. I use a Uni-ball Signo.’
“I was so proud. He was an art snob and a humorist till the end, really. Right till the end.”
A version of this article appears in print on July 15, 2016, on page B15 of the New York edition with the headline: Michael Crawford, 70; Wielded a Wiseacre Pen. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
