The New Yorker Cartoons of Peter Arno (1925-1968)
He was about to abandon his ambition to be an artist for a musical career when he received a check for a drawing that he had submitted to a new humour magazine that had debuted February 21, 1925. With the publication of this spot illustration in the June 20, 1925 issue of The New Yorker, Arno began a 43-year association with Harold Ross' weekly.
Arno's single-panel cartoons helped significantly to shape the magazine's sophisticated but irreverent personality with a Manhattan menagerie that included: the aristocratically moustached old gent in white tie and tails, whose eyes, as Somerset Maugham observed, "gleamed with concupiscence when they fell upon the grapefruit breasts of the blonde and blue-eyed cuties" whom he avidly pursued; a thin, bald, albeit youngish man with a wispy walrus moustache, a razor sharp nose, and an ethereally placid expression who was often seen simply lying in bed beside an empty-headed ingenue with an overflowing nightgown; and a ponderous dowager, stern of visage and impressive of chest, whose imposing presence proclaimed her right to rule. This trio was joined by an assortment of rich predatory satyrs in top hats, crones, precocious moppets, tycoons, curmudgeonly clubmen, ruddy-duddies and bar-flies of all description - in short, the probable population of all of New York's cafe society which Arno subjected to merciless scrutiny from his favoured position well within the pale, and he found something ridiculous and therefore valuable in everyone from roue to cab driver.
Arno's cartoons juxtaposed the seeming urbanity of his cast against their underlying earthiness, thereby stripping all pretension away. He proved again and again that humankind is just a little larcenous and lecherous and trivial in its passions and pursuits, social decorum to the contrary notwithstanding.
An admirer of Georges Rouault, Arno employed a broad brush stroke to delineate his subject with the fewest lines possible, holding the compositions together with a wash of varying gray tones. Arno denied that he had invented the single-speaker, or one-line, caption cartoon that by the end of the 1920s had replaced its historic predecessor, the illustrated comic dialogue. In truth, the one-line caption had been used occasionally for years, but Arno deployed it more consistently than others (thereby doing much to establish the form) because he valued the astonishing and therefore risible economy of its interdependent elements: neither words nor picture made any sense alone, but together they blended unexpectedly to create comedy.
One of his classic efforts shows a mousy little man emerging from a knot of military experts who have just witnessed an airplane crash, the flames visible on the horizon in the distance. The picture makes no sense until we read below it what the mousy little man is saying: "Well, back to the drawing board." And his utterance makes no comedic sense without the picture. But when we read the caption after viewing the picture, the comedy surfaces suddenly as a kind of "surprise": the picture explains the words and vice versa, and we are startled, joyously, by the discovery that it all makes sense. Presto: in this perfect blending of word and picture, in this "surprise explanation" the modern magazine cartoon is born.
Peter Arno at The New Yorker
