In the dark days of the Depression, a Jazz Age artist captures a luminous, magical New York

He’s hardly a household name today. But Utah-born John Held, Jr. helped create the popular imagery of the 1920s. Held made Jazz Age icons out of bobbed-hair flappers, college guys in raccoon coats, sporty women wielding tennis rackets, and tuxedoed partygoers dangling cigarette holders from their lips. His gently satirical drawings depicting a carefree and exuberant era appeared on dozens of national magazine covers as well as inside periodicals and newspapers. His distinct style of work even made it to the book jacket of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age. Then came the stock market crash. Held turned 40 in 1929, lost a lot of money, suffered a nervous breakdown, and found that his once-constant and highly lucrative artwork commissions had mostly dried up. He was now free to do what he came to New York in 1912 for: to pursue the fine arts and become a watercolor painter. In the Depression of the 1930s, when the city’s new skyscrapers might look to some like tall gray husks,…