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Robert Chesley OsbornWWII Pilot Dilbert in a Touring Car1965
1965
About the Item
A crayon illustration of Dilbert, the WWII pilot, off to see the world with his attentive passengers. Signed "Osborn" lower right. Also, dedication lower center: To Lane Slate with admiration. Bob Osborn 5/20/65. (Lane Slate was an exceptional producer of documentary films for NET (National Educational Television),
He may have begun his film career by working in the mail room of Louis De Rochemont’s production company (The March of Time was a well-known De Rochemont series). In 1962, he formed a working relationship with writer James Salter and they produced a ten minute documentary, Team, Team, Team, which won a prize at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. We traveled over the country, flying, driving, checking into motels, the mindless joy of America, beer bottles lying by the roadside, empty cans tumbling like paper.) Displayed in a plexi-glass frame. Image, 21"H x 28"W.
Robert Osborn was the definition of late bloomer. He was approaching forty years old when he began drawing cartoons for the Navy, his first major body of work. He created between 2,000-3,000 drawings for posters and military training booklets, many of them featuring Dilbert, a goofball pilot who did everything incorrectly. It’s a crime that these drawings have not been collected nor reprinted anywhere since their original publication seventy years ago.
For more than 50 years, Mr. Osborn's sardonic and often savage drawings in books and magazines have arrested readers with their images of bloated power, violence and death. At the same time, he could be wittily ironic about society's pretensions, spoofing subjects like psychiatry, suburbanites and social climbing.
Asked how he thought of himself, he said he was primarily "a drawer" and an artist with moral convictions. A large man (6 feet 2), with strong opinions, he was fearless about using his pen to express his political positions. He was known for the swiftness of his line; it was deft as well as diabolical. The drawings of his that he liked best had a natural flow; he said they "seemed to come right out of my subconscious."
Garry Trudeau, the creator of the "Doonesbury" strip, has called Mr. Osborn "one of the very few masters of illustrative cartooning." In the introduction to the 1985 book "Osborn on Conflict," the artist Robert Motherwell said Mr. Osborn's drawings were "so alive that they seemed to writhe on the page with an uninhibited energy," adding that "Osborn's art is a call to responsible action." Mr. Motherwell and others compared his work with that of Daumier and Goya as well as contemporaries like Saul Steinberg and Alexander Calder, his closest artist friend.
In The New Republic and other magazines, Mr. Osborn often ridiculed Presidents from Lyndon Johnson through Ronald Reagan. His portrait of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy made him look like a rejected model for Frankenstein's monster. He was active in political causes, including nuclear disarmament.
He was born in Oshkosh, Wis. He attended the University of Wisconsin before transferring to Yale University, where he was art editor of The Yale Record. After graduation, he studied painting in Rome and Paris. Back in the United States, he taught art and philosophy at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn. Soon he moved from painting to caricature.
In 1938, while tutoring students in Austria, he was taken to a Hitler rally, an experience that was burned into his memory. He said, "I was sickened and convinced that before us was a demon," and he decided to go to war "if that was the only way to rid the world of his evil." At the outbreak of World War II, he enlisted in the Navy with the hope of becoming an aviator. He was assigned to an information unit under the command of the photographer Edward Steichen and learned the art of speed drawing for training manuals. As a Navy officer, he created a cartoon character named Dilbert, a blunderer who violated rules of military safety. During the war he made 40,000 drawings for Navy training manuals.
In 1946, he achieved his first public recognition for "War Is No Damn Good!"; it was said to be the first antiwar book of the nuclear age. He went on to draw for Harper's, Fortune, Life and Look, and became a regular contributor to The New Republic.
He wrote and illustrated many books, including "Low and Inside" (1953), "Osborn on Leisure" (1957), "The Vulgarians" (1960), "Mankind May Never Make It" (1968), "Missile Madness" (by Herbert Scoville and Mr. Osborn, published in 1970), "Osborn on Osborn," an autobiography with pictures (1982), and "Osborn on Conflict," a book of 40 brush drawings published in 1984. In a lighter vein, he also wrote a trilogy of books about catching trout, shooting quail and shooting ducks. His illustrations appeared in a score of socially conscious books including "Snobs," by Russell Lynes; "The Exurbanites," by A. C. Spectorsky; "Trial by Television," by Michael Straight; C. Northcote Parkinson's "Parkinson's Law," and "The Insolent Chariots," by John Keats.
His drawings of Charles Chaplin formed the basis of an art exhibition in 1987. Reviewing that show in The New York Times, John Russell said, "Few people have a nimbler, wittier or more versatile way with pen and pencil than Robert Osborn." His work is in the collections of the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution.
Through the years he continued to draw for the Navy, publishing his cartoons in Naval Aviation News, replacing the character of Dilbert with a wise old Navy pilot named Grampa Pettibones.
- Creator:Robert Chesley Osborn (American)
- Creation Year:1965
- Dimensions:Height: 22 in (55.88 cm)Width: 29 in (73.66 cm)Depth: 2 in (5.08 cm)
- Medium:
- Period:
- Condition:Crayon on paper. Plexi-glass box frame.
- Gallery Location:Soquel, CA
- Reference Number:
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