Love Through the Ages cartoon

Edgar Miller
1952
Gouache on paperboard
L 58, W 109 cm

In the Gallery, two cartoon depictions illustrate the entire Love Through the Ages mural, originally installed at the Tavern Club in 1934. These pieces are always favorites of visitors because they show just how exceptionally prolific Miller was in even his large-scale artistic designs.

The original mural itself had become a beloved fixture at the Tavern Club and the dining room it was installed into became known as the "Edgar Miller Room". In the early 1950s, when the club was approaching its 25th anniversary, Miller was asked to design the cover for the memorial yearbook. For his design, he recreated the narrative of his original 1934 Love Through the Ages in a cartoon-like strip, showing the subject matter of almost the entire mural. Done in gouache, a form of heavy watercolor, this narrative strip hearkens back to the previous narrative program cover he made in 1935 to accompany the mural's unveiling party. That cartoon hangs at the other corner of this room.

In this reimagining of the original strip, Miller's figures become even more stylized and expressionistic, and he even added updates to the original narrative based on how history unfolded in the interim, most notably in the form of the ending, where the image of his stunning condemnation of fascism at the end of the mural, The Rape of Peace, had now been replaced by the image of a detonated atomic bomb's mushroom cloud. In another subsequent version of the mural, Miller would depict the end of history with astronauts finding love on the planet Mars.