1955 Pocket Book. Paperback. No. 1087 - 7. Cartoons by America's most sophisticated artist. Inside you'll find a riot of fun as Peter Arno lampoons the sophisticates and the stuffed shirts, the sugar daddies and upholstered dowagers, the young blades and the ladies of the evening.
(First edition bound in dark blue and orange cloth with bl...)
First edition bound in dark blue and orange cloth with black design and lettering to the front board and orange lettering to the spine. Hardcover is in VG+ condition in a very good dust jacket. Foxing to the end papers. Rubs to the book's corners and spine tips else clean, tight and unmarked. The dust jacket is price-clipped. Chips to its corners and at the head and heel of its spine. The front panel has small chips at its edges and creasing along its upper edge. Mild dust soiling to the rear panel.
Peter Arno was born on January 8, 1904 in New York City, New York, United States, the son of Curtis Arnoux Peters, a New York State Supreme Court justice, and Edith Theresa Haynes.
Although his father expected him to prepare for a career in law or banking, Arno preferred art and music, contributing drawings to the Yale Record and organizing the Yale Collegians, a nine-man band with Rudy Vallee as lead singer.
Education
He attended the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, and Yale College (1922-1923).
Career
He began submitting cartoons to Life and Judge, but none was accepted. In 1923, Arno left Yale for the artists' milieu of Greenwich Village, changed his name to Peter Arno, and continued his panel painting. After more of Arno's cartoons were rejected, he was about to accept an offer from a band in Chicago when the New Yorker bought one of his drawings in 1925.
Arno's work appeared regularly in the New Yorker for the next forty-three years, helping to establish the magazine's distinctive voice and style. Robert Benchley credited Arno with revitalizing the joking cartoon: "With the advent of the New Yorker, and with the New Yorker, Peter Arno, the entire technique of picturized jokes underwent a sudden and complete change.
The old, feeble, two-line joke practically disappeared and in its place came a fresh and infinitely more civilized form--the illustrated single remark. " Although he refused credit for inventing the one-line caption, Arno admitted to being "one of the first to use it consistently, so that it became a trademark. "
The "Whoops Sisters, " his first successful cartoon characters, were, however, still captioned in dialogue. Attired in muffs and silly hats, the sisters were gin-soaked harridans who, according to Arno, "cavorted about town yelling 'Whoops, ' followed by appropriate remarks, at the pop of the nearest button. " The urbane cartoons for which Arno became best known retained the irreverence and earthiness of the Whoops Sisters but were rendered with more visual and verbal economy.
His favorite subjects were old roués, generously proportioned dowagers, curvaceous showgirls, haughty maître d's, and brainless ingenues, all of whom he depicted with powerful black lines and crisp silhouettes. With this cast of images, which also includes his "Cadwallader, " a balding little man who never quite catches the drift of an innuendo, Arno relentlessly skewered the pretensions, prejudices, and hypocrisies of New York café society.
Well known as a Manhattan bon vivant, Arno was on intimate terms with his subject matter.
His social life was chronicled in the gossip columns, especially after an altercation in 1931 with Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. , over his attentions to Mrs. Vanderbilt. At the time, Arno had only recently been divorced from Lois Long, whom he had married on August 12, 1927, and who wrote for the New Yorker under the pen name Lipstick; they had one child. In August 1935, Arno married Mary ("Timmie") Livingston Lansing, a celebrated debutante, from whom he was divorced in 1939.
In the 1920s Arno's relationship with the milieu he satirized was equivocal, but by the late 1930's it was clearly negative.
Technically Arno's drawings delivered their punch through a carefully weighted interdependency of picture and caption--which was, in his mind, the most important characteristic of the New Yorker cartoon. "The reader had to examine the picture, " he explained, "before the joker in the caption made its point, or vice versa. The quick revelation of incongruity (actually the sudden realization by the reader that he'd been hoodwinked) brought the laugh. "
An Arno cartoon for the New Yorker began with rough sketches, which were reviewed at weekly meetings of the magazine's art staff. Some would be picked out for finishing, often with suggestions from the staff for improving the picture or rewording the caption. Back at the drawing board, Arno would pencil in the layout, swearing that he used more erasers than all other artists at the magazine combined. The skeleton of the drawing was then laid down in heavy india ink, followed by a laying-on of wash (an ecclesiastical-sounding process, in Arno's mind).
The final product, according to one of his New Yorker colleagues, was an image so distinctive that that "bold signature of his was the only unnecessary thing in any Arno drawing. " Arno spent the last years of his life living with his mother in Harrison, New York.
Although ill with emphysema, he continued to contribute regularly to the New Yorker, which published one of his cartoons the week of his death.
Arno was tall, strikingly handsome, and impeccably dressed.
Interests
Arno played piano, banjo, and accordion and performed with the group at Gilda Gray's Rendezvous, one of the first postwar New York nightclubs. He also wrote music, achieving minor Tin Pan Alley success with a song entitled "My Heart Is on My Sleeve. " Later he coauthored a Broadway musical satire, Here Comes the Bride (1931).
Arno wrote that he was "a painter at heart" in the early 1920's, although he never formally studied painting or drawing.
Connections
Arno married Lois Long on August 12, 1927, but they divorced.
In August 1935, Arno married Mary ("Timmie") Livingston Lansing, a celebrated debutante, from whom he was divorced in 1939.