Edward Koren in Retrospect

"I detect a little laxity in your flossing," 1991. All artwork courtesy the Wallach Art Gallery and the artist

The expat life has its charms, but the downside is an endless longing for things not obtainable in the exotic land you inhabit. I’m talking here about M&Ms and peanut butter and the lengths to which one goes to find such American delicacies. In Budapest, where I lived in the late ’80s and early ’90s, that meant forking over $25 a week for an air-freighted copy of the Sunday New York Times more for the feel and the look of it than the content. And in London, where I lived after Hungary, it meant feasting on Edward Koren cartoons in my imported New Yorkers, which were as satisfying as corned beef sandwiches from Selfridge’s department store. Those whimsical, curly-haired folks with pointed noses and befuddled expressions — all rendered in Koren’s squiggly lines — spoke of home. Not exactly where I grew up on Long Island, but the world I knew about and aspired to, the Upper West Side, a neighborhood, as The New York Times put it recently in its review of a Koren retrospective, of “overeducated, comfortable but not superrich liberals and the psychotherapists who treat their garden-variety neuroses.”

The exhibition, “Edward Koren: The Capricious Line,” took place at an appropriate venue: the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, in the heart of the Upper West Side’s intellectual universe. (The show closed on June 12 but a lavishly illustrated catalog has just been published by the Wallach Art Gallery.) Koren, Columbia ’57, fits right in with his characters and their eternal quest to understand any number of perplexities: urban life, dentists, bicycles, machines, art and artists, and how city dwellers deal with the weirdness of the countryside at their weekend homes. It’s a world of fantasy “based firmly in reality,” notes David Rosand, in an exhibition essay, and one that is not only “psychologically acute” but also philosophically provocative, as the Times pointed out.