Saturday, February 4, 2017

Peter Arno's Pep Talk

It's Super Bowl Weekend and our last chance this season to get a pep talk from cartoonist Peter Arno! A fine example of 1930's locker room humor was published in The New Yorker decades before there was any Super Bowl, but football was already very much an American sporting institution. The published caption is "Now get your pants on and go in there and win!"—which improves slightly on the calligraphic caption seen on the matte.

Arno's gift for composition is everywhere in evidence. The setting of lockers and players in the background gives the picture its verticals, against which the two main figures and the bench are set off by diagonals, rigid and dark in the case of the coach, lanky and bright for the exhausted player. Note how perfectly the facial expressions work with the body language. Note also how the two heads face each other at the same angle, the coach's jutting forward and the player's leaning back against the locker.

Peter Arno, "Now put your pants on and go in there and Win."
Original art, The New Yorker, November 20, 1937, page 18
Published as "Now get your pants on and go in there and win!"

Swann Galleries, September 29, 2016, Sale 2423, Lot 274
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Peter Arno, "Now put your pants on and go in there and Win."
Original art, The New Yorker, November 20, 1937, page 18
Published as "Now get your pants on and go in there and win!"


http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1937-11-20#folio=018


Note:  Now get your pants on and send me scans or photos of original art by Peter Arno. Then we can both go in there and win!


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Touchdown!

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