Cartoonist

Last week a Manhattan art gallery put on a show of the most popular form of art in the U.S.: newspaper cartooning. Reeves Lewenthal's up-&-coming Associated American Artists Gallery (TIME, April 21) picked for its show one of the best and most widely reproduced editorial cartoonists in the U.S.: the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick.

The 45 cartoons in the show were a cross section of rabid Isolationist Fitzpatrick's daily stint, from bulge-jawed Mussolinis and neurasthenic Hitlers to war-racked skeletons, the bums and shady politicians of St. Louis' own legendary Rat Alley. Fellow cartoonists took their hats off to Fitzpatrick's slick technique of getting his points over without capsizing his cartoons with explanatory captions. Fitzpatrick's muscular draftsmanship and Dore-like spaciousness (see cut) are, if not art, something close to it.

Daniel Fitzpatrick, 50, worked up into cartooning the hard way. Born in the industrial city of Superior, Wis., he was kicked out of high school at 16 because he spent his time drawing instead of studying algebra and history. In Chicago he found he could make money turning out comic strips for the Chicago Evening News at $1 apiece. Before he was 21 the Evening News had hired him to do front page cartoons. A year later he heard that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's cartoonist had quit, got the job, started out with a cartoon attacking the old-fashioned wooden railroad coach by depicting one as a coffin on wheels. Today, after more than 27 years with the Post-Dispatch, sandy-haired, white-mustached Fitzpatrick is one of the four top-rank daily political cartoonists of the U.S. and the most belligerently individualistic of the four. (The other three: the New York Post's Rollin Kirby, the Baltimore Sun's Edmund Duffy, Scripps-Howard's Harold M. Talburt.) Behind the scenes at the Post-Dispatch his editorial opinions sometimes clash with those of his bosses, Publisher Joseph Pulitzer and Editor Ralph Coghlan.

Feared by almost every public character in St. Louis, he complains: "The trouble with my job is I have no friends." But his admirers stretch as far as Russia: in Moscow the Museum of Modern Western Painting has eight Fitzpatricks hanging among its Renoirs and Gauguins.

A little overwhelmed at being considered an artist (he has tremendous respect for the big names of U.S. painting, once spent a summer studying with Henry Varnum Poor), Cartoonist Fitzpatrick spent his time last week in a happy whirl of chats and drinks, bought a painting by Max Weber. As a concession to Art, Fitzpatrick had hung two oil paintings among his cartoons: one a Daumier-brown picture of a group of card players, the other a dour, Picassoesque self-portrait (see cut). Of the latter he said sadly: "It was done in one of my blue periods, during a hangover."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.