Ed Arno cartoons left mark on New Yorker
Source: The Oregonian - OregonLive.com (Original Article)
Ed Arno, whose sketchy, casually rendered cartoons on topics
domestic and cosmic appeared regularly in The New Yorker for
more than 30 years, died May 27. He was 92.
Arno, whose vaguely Thurberesque lines were characterized by
Brendan Gill as “skittering squiggles,” dealt in
whimsy and deadpan surrealism. A minister, conducting a
marriage ceremony, tells a couple, “I now pronounce you
both legally insane.” A group of swimming swans toast
Tchaikovsky. The pebble glass window on an office door reads
“N.Y. Dept. of N.J.”
In a twist of fate that Arno, in retrospect, probably
savored, The New Yorker initially resisted his attempts to
become a contributor because his last name, by coincidence,
was identical to that of the great New Yorker cartoonist
Peter Arno, who was born Curtis Arnoux Peters. (Like that
famous Arno’s, Ed Arno’s name was a pseudonym.)
The New Yorker cartoonist Michael Maslin, in an appreciation
posted on his Web site (www.michaelmaslin.com), recalled
being told by Ed Arno that when he first submitted work to
James Geraghty, the magazine’s art editor, in 1967, he
was told, “We can’t use two Arnos here.”
Rebuffed, Ed Arno contributed ideas that were executed by
other cartoonists, among them Peter Arno, whose death in
1968 cleared the way for Arno II’s entry into the
magazine’s pages in September 1969.
Ed Arno was born Arnold Edelstein in Innsbruck in what is
now Austria in 1916, and his family moved a few months later
to Czernowitz. At 3, he astonished his parents by drawing a
perfect copy of the Bayer aspirin logo, with its Gothic
script.
He studied stage design at the Ecole Paul Colin in Paris and
embarked on a career in film animation. Shortly after he
signed a contract with Pathe Nathan film studios, the Nazis
took over Austria, and he raced back to Czernowitz, where he
and his family were forced into the city’s ghetto and
then deported to labor camps. Arno was liberated in Frequent Flyer Credit Cards 1944 by
Soviet forces.
That year …continue reading