“He also had his priorities straight: art, women, night life, gin, and music, not necessarily in that order.” – Cartoonist Danny Shanahan on Peter Arno.

As someone who struggles to be able to draw even a stickman figure there are no cartoonists whose abilities I don’t envy. But it’s possible there is only one cartoonist whose life I’d actively covet.

That’s no surprise. Most cartoonists are chained to their drawing board working for scant reward. Peter Arno was different though. The archetypal New Yorker cartoonist, his life was as glamorous and gilded as the debs and playboys who were to be his comic victims. And he was more famous than most of them.

Arno (1904-1968) dated film stars, mounted Broadway shows, was courted by Hollywood, became the subject of profiles in Time and Life magazines, even got a mention in  F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up. He was photographed by a young Stanley Kubrick, liked to work no more than two days a week, was named the best dressed man in America by the Custom Tailors Guild of America in 1941, and even got to design his own car once.

 And he was one of the most popular New Yorker cartoonists in the history of the magazine. He sold his first cartoon to the magazine in 1925 and was a regular (or as regular as his sometimes lackadaisical working habits would allow) until his death. And as Michael Maslin, himself a New Yorker cartoonist, points out in his new biography of Arno, it was the cartoonist’s appearance in the magazine’s stuttering early days that helped transform its fortunes.

The New Yorker’s editor Harold Ross called Arno “the greatest artist in the world,” which may have been overstating it a little. But there’s no denying the boldness of Arno’s line, the comic rightness of his caricatures. Arno’s world was one of dames and dowagers, playboys and henpecked husbands, captains of industry and chorus girls. He took aim at New York café society while fully playing a part in its daily round. “The Roaring Twenties was a catch phrase: Arno’s work was the roar itself,” Maslin writes.

And Arno’s cartoons were funny. That’s the key. Although the concepts for his cartoons were often provided by others, it was the power of his cartooning– all strong black strokes held together by a grey wash – that sold the punch line. His comic world was powered by the promise of alcohol and sex. He “made lechery ludicrous,” as Life magazine suggested in 1940.

The Herald:

“I would see fatuous, ridiculous people in public places, in night clubs where I ran a band,” he once told Joseph Mitchell, “on trains and beaches, in cafes, at parties, and I was awfully annoyed by them, by the things they did and said. I had a really hot impulse to go and exaggerate their ridiculous aspects. That anger, if you like, gave my stuff punch and made it live.”

Of course he was as guilty of many of the same sins he assigned to others. It should be noted that he was at the same clubs and parties and cafes of course. And as Maslin reveals there were fights over women, there were two failed marriages, there was an old school sexism to his work that began to look rather dated by the 1950s when Playboy and Mad Magazine were engaging with rock and roll and the post-war world.

But then time catches up with everyone eventually. What we’re left with is a cartoonist who offered a raucous comic vision of his era, or at least its more socially elevated addresses.  

Oh and trivia fans should note his cartoon of a plane crashing into the ground. As it bursts into flames a rather too sanguine engineer walks away saying, “Well, back to the old drawing board.”

Yes, that is indeed where the phrase comes from.

Peter Arno: The Mad, Mad World of The New Yorker’s Greatest Cartoonist, by Michael Maslin is published by Regan Arts.