The Intimate Art of Merle Nacht

Frank Rizzo Photo.

Merle Nacht’s artwork is like a whisper in your ear, gently evoking a smile, a sigh, or a nod of recognition. It doesn't proclaim as much as suggest. It doesn’t push so much as nudge. Often, the works are just little moments, caught on the breeze, on the fly, on a notion.

To find her musical equivalent, think of Blossom Dearie or Peggy Lee: artistic minimalists whose sophisticated, spare, and sly works are instantly recognizable and distinctly their own.

Nacht’s wide-ranging artwork has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Hartford Courant and numerous other publications. For 12 years she was a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, with dozens of black and white wisps of drawings and five colorful covers to her credit.

Merle Nacht: Drawings, Illustrations, Paintings: A Retrospective will be on display from March 29 through April 16 at Merwin’s Art Shop, 1052 Chapel St., in New Haven. The exhibit can be seen during the shop’s hours: Tuesdays through Fridays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Saturdays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Merle Nacht, Easter Music. First published in The New York Times. Image courtesy of the artist. 

Lary Bloom, editor of the former NorthEast magazine of The Hartford Courant who now lives in New Haven, described Nacht’s delicacy of style and humor to another famed New Yorker artist.

“She’s a modern James Thurber — but without the bitterness,” he said. “There’s always something going on in the drawings that creates some sort of juxtaposition. It’s not cutesy. I always looked forward to her illustrations because I knew they would be innovative and fun to look at.”

Nacht’s work also includes illustrating books for children as well as for grown-ups. Her drawings appeared as cover and inside art for books such as “101 Reasons to Dump Your Man and Get a Cat” by Molly Katz, published by William Morrow and “Mummy Took Cooking Lessons and Other Poems” by John Ciardi, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Merle Nacht. Wanted: A New Flag for Florida. Published in Sunshine Magazine, South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Image courtesy of the artist. 

Corporate clients include Aetna Insurance, United Technologies, Pratt and Whitney, and Nissan. Nacht’s work has been featured in shows of the American Institute of Graphic Artists, Society of Publication Design, Society of Illustrators and The Art Directors Club (New York City). She was part of “The Art of the New York Times” exhibit, organized by The Museum of American Illustration at The Society of Illustrators in 2005. Nacht has been awarded prizes by U.P.I. and the Society of Newspaper Designer.

In person, Nacht, 75, is a petite and charming woman, delicate of frame, soft-spoken and neat as a shiny pin in appearance. In some ways she is a personification of her art.

“If you saw her work and then were at a crowded party, you would say, ‘That’s obviously Merle over there,’” said Bloom “Her artwork is an extension of her personality.”

From Ads To Art

Left: Red Tree.  © Merle Nacht and The New Yorker. First published as the cover of The New Yorker, Oct. 13, 1986. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Right: Jumping Boy. © Merle Nacht and The New Yorker. First published as the cover of The New Yorker, Aug. 7, 1989. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Nacht grew up in a middle-class family in Erie, Penn., and was encouraged by her homemaker mother to draw and take art classes. “She wanted my brother and myself to be exposed to art,” said Nacht from her home in downtown New Haven, where she lives with her husband of 53 years, Arthur Nacht.

After graduating from the School of Art at Syracuse University with a major in illustration in 1968, Nacht headed for New York. She soon began working in the art department for Franklin Simon’s department store. Newly married, the Nachts moved to Boston and while her husband sought his masters degree from the Harvard Business School, she worked on illustrations for Filene’s department store. The couple returned to New York, where she became an assistant to an art director of a publishing house.

It was at this time that she began creating her own art. One of her first showings was at a gallery at Henri Bendel’s.

Nacht said her favorite artistic influence is Henri Matisse. “I love the freshness of everything about his work and the way he experimented with color and the way he used color with line,” she said. She also admires Gustav Klimt, “especially his patterning and detail work. I also love David Hockney.”

Discouraged with the city in 1973, the couple moved to the Hartford area. Her husband worked at The Hartford Insurance Group and she found a position at G. Fox & Co.'s art department.

Finding she preferred the challenge of assignments, working with others and having deadlines, she put together a portfolio, and began traveling to New York to pitch her talents to art directors there. Soon her works—cut paper, pencil and water color, pen and ink, pastel—were being published in Redbook, Glamour, Gourmet and then The New Yorker.

Advice from that magazine’s art director regarding cover work proved useful: “Don’t try to do a joke. Try to do something beautiful.”

“I decided then that I was not going to try to make [submissions] look like a New Yorker cover," she said. "I’m going to make it look like my drawings.”

Her first cover was colored chalk on black background featuring a ferris wheel. Four more covers followed (and the magazine purchased another three to put in its “vault.”) Nacht still gets royalties from her New Yorker artwork on mugs and posters and other merchandise it sells.

Changing Times

The Nachts moved to New Haven in 2003 and that point, she says, her regular clients shifted. The New Yorker had new leadership. The market for illustrators—and print magazines—had changed.

Nacht’s dot-eyed characters and whimsical humor seemed ripe for engagement with greeting card companies—and one could easily see her work going in a Sandra Boynton commercial direction. There was some involvement with a card company but it was limited, she said.

Nacht said preparing for the New Haven exhibit and going over many decades of drawings allows her to see not only the scope of her work, but to enjoy the  pleasures that come from her details, too.

“‘Oh, I like this,” she said as she reviewed her drawings—and her career. “It’s another little moment.”

A solo show of Merle Nacht’s work will run at Merwin’s Art Shop, 1052 Chapel St., from March 29 through April 16. Merwin’s hours are from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Fridays,  and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays. They are closed on Sundays and Mondays.