SALUTE TO ART YOUNG

Meyer, Ernest L.

Salute To Art Young By ERNEST L. MEYER ART YOUNG, veteran cartoonist, and inveterate friend of the friendless, died at 77 last holiday weak in New York and since then the world has been a drearier...

...A great many of these drawings are in On My Way...
...luck, the weary with the money struggle...
...Art Young a failure...
...Salute To Art Young By ERNEST L. MEYER ART YOUNG, veteran cartoonist, and inveterate friend of the friendless, died at 77 last holiday weak in New York and since then the world has been a drearier place, for a little of its precious light is lost...
...He saw so many sides to a question...
...Near the end of On My Way she wrote: "I belong with the failures—with the man who is sitting at home tonight after hiV day's work who knows that his wife, his friends, his relations think: 'He is a failure.' I'm with this man and the whole army of splendid men and women who wear the ragged badge of defeat...
...I am with them, but not sadly, because in my visions of a new world there is going to be a different definition of success...
...And besides them there are the entries of his daily life, excursions into many fields, and word portraits of the many people Art Young met and liked...
...He called a meeting and orated till his shirt-front crackled...
...Art Young was a good bit of a cynic, but he had that grand quality of being able to laugh at himself...
...They say," Art Young complained, "that Art Young loves everybody and everybody loves Art Young...
...Lord, if we make a prayer as this new year dawns, let it be this: give us more failures like Art Young—a million of them—and then maybe we might call this life of ours a success...
...And that was a fine quality in him, for had he seen only one side he would have been either a go-getter or a fanatical spouter of isms— in either case a frightful bore...
...Maybe he might have made a mint of money drawing toothy gals for the dentifrice ads or painting magazine covers for the slicks...
...He never quite knew...
...He was neither...
...They tell you true things...
...This stirring picture Art Young entitled: "The uprising of the proletariat...
...Lew Wallace, Jack London, and a hundred more...
...Was he a pacifist, a red radical, a liberal, a genius, or a bum...
...Art Young The Failure Art Young was never sure of himself intellectually...
...I know that some people are successful who deserve to be, but I am with the unadaptable, the out of...
...The attempt was a dreadful flop...
...He just couldn't...
...Lord, how I hate...
...If the same thing had ever happened to Upton Sinclair he'd deny it in a letter to the papers 20 pages long...
...At one time he felt the call to sally forth among the masses and lead them to the light over the bridge of oratory...
...He was burdened—or blessed—with a feeling for social justice and forever had a warm spot in his heart for the bedeviled victims of whatever is wrong in our civilization, and that's a heap...
...His drawings are bold, but his mental deductions fuzzy...
...There's "Old Bob" La Follette, "the man who believed what he believed—hard...
...Therefore he remained warm, delightful, slightly puzzled, and always poor...
...as Art Young reports...
...I hate as well as I love...
...Art Young never lived to see the bright new world he visioned, but his pen threw valiant sparks, and by them we who follow can grope forward through the dark...
...A friend who can talk simply and honestly of trees and cats, of art and men and misery and hell, of beauty and poetry, philosophy and pancakes, giving each of the things he touched on the charm of brevity and wit...
...That's a libel...
...So he joined up with the radicals and drew forceful pictures for the old Masses, Life, the Metropolitan, the Nation and other journals with enough daring and good sense to publish them...
...Laughing At Himself Art Young talks with honesty and feeling about all these people, and then right on the next page he talks with feeling about pumpkins and shag-bark hickory trees, and you find, as he did, that pumpkins and people are equally fascinating, so why get up-petty and talk only about stupendous things like the fourth dimension...
...That's wrong...
...It is a drawing of himself talking in a hall to an audience of one snoozing man, a woman, an usher, and another man on the point of leaving for a beaker of bock...
...I hate shams and stupidity and selfishness and bloated exploiters of people...
...life, for him, was a gem of many facets and colors, and it was hard to be cocksure about anything...
...He looked, though he strove to achieve a villainous frown, like a pink and amiable frog...
...The last time I saw Art, more than a month ago, he was a bit put out with what people have been saying about him all his life...
...Brevity And Wit There's not much use in trying to write a biography of Art...
...He's done a better job himself in his series of books and collections of caricatures...
...Reading that book is like taking a walk with a good friend...
...Art didn't do that...
...Sometimes the roster sounds like a roll-call of a forgotten army of great and curious souls...
...The best of them, to my mind, was On My Way, published in 1930...
...Art tried to look like a. big hater...
...In all the years I knew Art Young he never was more than two jumps ahead of the sheriff...
...And other faces bob in and out of the book's panorama: Mark Twain, Lester Ward, Eugene Field, Oswald Garrison Villard, Max Eastman, Ex-Governor Peck of Wisconsin, James Whitcomb Riley, Emma Goldman, Frank Harris, Arthur Brisbane, Eugene Debs, Gen...
...And the net result he pictures in one little drawing...
...His face wasn't made for the role...

Vol. 8 • January 1944 • No. 2


 
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