Here's the complete gallery brochure from a 1979-80 exhibit of Ed Arno cartoons at the Austrian Institute in New York City. It was designed by Helga S. Orthofer.
Looking at these great drawings, it really whets your appetite to get into your Tardis or time-traveling DeLorean and go back to 11 East 52nd Street circa 22 years ago so you could see ALL of the great Arno cartoons on display.
When Ed Arno, newly-arrived in New York City from Romania in 1965, approached The New Yorker magazine, he was told, "We can't use two Arnos here". The reference, of course, was to the publication's most prestigious cartoonist, the famous Peter Arno. But, as you will soon read, that didn't stop the quiet and modest Ed for very long. He was used to surmounting obstacles that would literally destroy a good many cartoonists. - Cartoonist PROfiles #99, September 1993
Ed Arno referenced this exhibition in an interview with Jud Hurd about twenty years later (complete interview here). After four years in a German labor camp,
he became an art director and artist for children's books and magazines in Bucharest, and also drew cartoons for satirical magazines in Romania and the Soviet Union. Then one great day in the late 1950s, he saw a collection of New Yorker cartoons by Charles Addams, on the shelves of the USIS Library in Bucharest. These examples represented the pinnacle of cartoon achievement in Arno's mind. He admits now that he carried the book around with him for years after that as an inspiration and a goal. To get ahead of our story a bit, in 1969, four years after Ed and his wife Rita came to the U.S. permanently, Arno made his own debut in The New Yorker, and Charles Addams came to Ed's first one-man show at the Austrian Institute in New York. "Just having him there," says Arno, "was a thrill to me — an affirmation!"
Brendan Gill's piece continues after a couple of pages ...
A big thank you to Don Orehek.
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