Attempted Bloggery: Peter Arno's Wrong Impression

Saturday, February 23, 2019

Peter Arno's Wrong Impression

Today's discussions of gender and gender identity are generally complex, nuanced, and increasingly divisive politically. There is nothing at all nuanced about cartoonist Peter Arno's approach to the topic of gender definition some eight decades ago. In 1937, the most obvious way to blur the distinction of the sexes was to draw the bearded lady in a so-called freak show. That horrific institution has mercifully gone extinct today, but not before cartoonists such as Arno and George Price, to name two, drew considerable material from them, much of it understandably grotesque.

Arno's oddball drawing is so idiosyncratic and so bold that Heritage Auctions can almost be forgiven for listing it in 2010 as simply a "cartoon illustration." There is indeed a caption that goes along with it, as one might surmise by the fact that the bearded lady is rather forcefully speaking. The drawing itself was published by that literary institution known to us as The New Yorker, a fact apparently never suspected by Heritage. Go figure.