Whoops Sisters Man

In Manhattan, last week, a town jester named Peter Arno held his first art exhibit. Artist Arno is a social satirist. Frothier, less pungent than such satirists as Beerbohm and Bateman, he nevertheless makes sprightly comments on violations of taste and decorum. He lies in wait for those moments when civilized people burst through their shimmering camouflage of gentlity and blatantly expose rage, sex, silliness.

One of his pictures shows a giant-bosomed, giant-toothed dame in frightening decolletage playing blind man's buff and shrieking DON'T HELP ME! DON'T HELP ME! to a row of gallants cringing away from her fat lurches. Another shows a scared young gentleman making a hasty escape from a roadster in which sits a sleek, lascivious wench. The young gentleman cries NO, NO! NOT THAT! A third displays a lady in taxicab whose face expresses explosive frenzy as she shouts at her indolent escort YOU'RE SO KIND TO ME, AND I'M SO TIRED OF IT ALL! Artist Arno painted these scenes in black writing ink with washes of lampblack. His lines are brisk, graceful. They grotesquely exaggerate his figures, deftly point his themes.

It is natural that Artist Arno should find his niche in an urbane journal of fripperies and follies. Such a journal is the weekly New Yorker which, since its inception four years ago, has contained his work. The New Yorker has more to say about polo and modistes than about multilateral treaties. It is a chic Baedecker for those who will be chic. It was in this magazine that Artist Arno exploited-his famed Whoops Sisters, a pair of blithe Victorian crones who swept with muffs and bonnets about the city, never had their shoes off while the fleet was in, stood behind a nude statue in a museum and peered around for a front view crying WHOOPS! IT'S A GIRL! Last year these fantastic scare crows began to disappear. Their departure was hastened by a dull novel written about them by their creator. Since then Artist Arno has kept his satire closer to reality.

Artist Arno was christened Curtis Arnoux Peters. He is a robust, dark fellow, as conservative in appearance and dress as a discreet haberdashery poster. In 1922 he graduated from the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn., where he was voted "Most Musical" and "In Worst with the Faculty." Then he took his banjo to Yale, found plenty of pianos there, alternately drew for the Yale Record and devised original syncopation. At the end of his freshman year he left college, subsequently studied at the Yale art school and Manhattan's Art Students League for a period of a month apiece. These months he considers wasted. He gathered jazz orchestras which played in a New Haven grill and Manhattan's Rendezvous. He began to decorate night clubs as well as play in them, and gradually abandoned the tonal for the graphic art. He painted ornamental screens full of bearded Russians of red-coated huntsmen with filigrees of bugles and hounds. But the New Yorker encouraged his satiric sense and he found his metier. Last year he married Lois Long, onetime night club and restaurant expert of the New Yorker. They have a small daughter.

Artist Arno, no publicist, discourages the inquisitive by mingling truth with legend. "My art studies," he states, "have been principally pursued in dark alleys. ... I met with overnight success which ended the next morning. ... I have an oil painting in the Yale permanent collection, where no one will ever see it. ... At the age of three I was seduced by an old lady with a long grey beard."