ARNOLD ROTH: FREE LANCE A Fifty Year Retrospective

This coffee-table style art book accompanied the traveling Arnold Roth exhibition celebrating 50 years of cartooning. The exhibit showcased almost 100 pieces of Roth's work, drawn over the last 50 years, and travelled to approximately ten venues throughout the United States and Europe from September 2001 through 2004. The 66 works are in an oversize format and feature both black-and-white cartoons and strips and an abundance of Roth's gorgeous, vivid watercolor cartoon paintings, with such as examples of the newspaper strip "Poor Arnold's Almanac," and plenty of vivid watercolors. Roth's loopy, exuberant style recalls that of his British contemporary Ronald Searle and seems a likely influence on such younger artists as Ralph Steadman. Most of the drawings were commissioned for magazine articles, but clearly Roth is a cartoonist first; while the pictures serve the writings they accompany, nearly every one provokes a smile or a laugh on its own merits.

Roth is one of the most successful cartoonists of the second half of the 20th century, whose work has appeared in Playboy, Esquire, Time, National Lampoon, the Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated, Punch, Premiere, the Nation, Mother Jones, Harper's, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, TV Guide, Smithsonian, and many other national magazines. He is the creator of the classic newspaper strip Poor Arnold's Almanac (collected in 1999 by Fantagraphics), and he is perhaps best-remembered for the numerous album covers he illustrated for jazz great Dave Brubek. Roth was also a regular artist in Harvey Kurtzman's three post-Mad humor magazines, Trump, Humbug, and Help!

Out Of Print. Condition. Fine. Very little edge wear. Small crease bottom of the first page.