Famed illustrator and cartoonist Arnold Roth, a 1950 graduate of the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts), is one of five inductees elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. Roth’s work has appeared regularly in nearly every major American magazine from Time to Sports Illustrated to The New Yorker for the past 50 years.
Arnold Roth, Ode on Grecian Urge
Contemporary illustrator Paul Davis and posthumous honorees Mario Cooper, Laurence Fellows and Herbert Morton Stoops were also inducted at a black-tie dinner at the Society’s headquarters on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on June 25.
Throughout his career, Roth has created iconic cartoons, advertisements, album covers and book jackets. He wrote and illustrated six books from 1966 to 1998, including Pick A Peck of Puzzles, A Comick Book of Sports, A Comick Book of Pets and Poor Arnold’s Almanac, the complete syndicated series of a newspaper comic strip he wrote from 1959 – 1961 and 1989 – 1990; illustrated books by George Plimpton and William F. Buckley Jr.; and created dust jackets for the John Updike books Bech at Bay, Bech is Back and Bech: A Book.
“All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so,” Updike wrote in his introduction to Poor Arnold’s Almanac.
In the late 1950s, Roth’s cartoons began appearing in Playboy, which published 10 multi-page installments of his “An Illustrated History of Sex” series in the late 1970s. He was a regular contributor of cartoon features to Punch from the late 1960s until the end of the 1980s, and had multi-page features in almost every one of the first 25 issues of National Lampoon (1970 – 1972), until his last satirized the editors of the magazine.
A political cartoonist for The Progressive from 1981 – 1987, Roth received the National Cartoonist Society Advertising and Illustration Award in 1982, 1984 and 1985; Illustration Award for 1976, 1979 and 1981; their Magazine and Book Illustration Award in 1986, 1987 and 1988; their Special Feature Award in 1979; their Sports Cartoon Award in 1976 and 1977; their Reuben Award in 1983; and their Gold Key Award (Hall of Fame) in 2000. He served as the organization’s president from 1983 – 1985. He’s been recognized previously by the Society of Illustrators with numerous Silver and Gold Stars.
Roth drawings and paintings are included in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, International Museum of Cartoon Art (Boca Raton, Fla.), Museum of Cartoon Art (San Francisco), Rosenbach Museum and Library (Philadelphia), Karikature and Cartoon Museum (Basel, Switzerland) and many private collections.
Roth’s solo exhibition “Free Lance, A Fifty Year Retrospective” traveled to Philadelphia, Columbus, San Francisco, New York City, London and Basel, Switzerland, from 2001 – 2004. He has also staged solo exhibitions at the Philadelphia Print Club, University of the Arts, Century Association in New York City, and Swarthmore (Pa.) College.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Roth and his wife Caroline reside in New York City.
Since 1958, the Society of Illustrators has elected to its Hall of Fame artists recognized for their “distinguished achievement in the art of illustration.” Former society presidents select the inductees based on their body of work and the impact on the field of illustration.
Founded in 1901, the Society of Illustrators is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to “the promotion of the art of illustration – past, present and future.” It has over 1,000 members worldwide and is headquartered in an 1875 vintage carriage house on New York’s Upper East Side.
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