Dana Fradon, Prolific New Yorker Cartoonist, Is Dead at 97

Arthur Dana Fradon was born on April 14, 1922, in Chicago. His father, Norman, and his mother, Minnie, were Russian immigrants who struggled with odd jobs during the Depression but found some financial relief from New Deal social programs.

Dana was interested in politics and astronomy as a youth, but he also showed talent as an artist and ended up at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After serving in the Army, he graduated from the Art Students League in New York.

He drew some political cartoons for The New Masses, a Marxist political magazine, and learned about The New Yorker from Albert Hubbell, a writer for the magazine who was married to one of Mr. Fradon’s sisters, Marion.

His first cartoon was published in 1948, and for most of the next 55 years he drew almost all his cartoons for The New Yorker. He declined to contribute for a few years in the 1990s because he reportedly disliked some of the changes that Tina Brown made to the magazine when she became its editor in 1992. He returned after Mr. Remnick took over in 1998.

Over the years Mr. Fradon shared the magazine’s pages with an extraordinary group of cartoonists, including Charles Addams, Saul Steinberg, Peter Arno, James Stevenson, Robert Weber, Charles Saxon, Anatol Kovarsky, Frank Modell and Roz Chast.

Mr. Fradon said he spent two hours a day trying to think of cartoon ideas and sometimes had as many as 50 at a time.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/arts/dana-fradon-dead.html?emc=rss&partner=rss