The Earnest Absurdist
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Dorne's story is an up-by-bootstraps tale, raised in poverty and apprenticing himself to Saul Tepper, who agreed to take on the assistant as long as he didn't have to pay him. Within a few years, Dorne was one of the highest paid advertising artists in the country, due to a street-smart combination of learning the industry tricks from the inside, tough negotiation, and wielding what must have been the fastest brush in America. He would regularly turn out drawings of fully-stocked refrigerators for Frigidaire overnight, and he brought the absurd stories by William Hazlett Upson about adventures at the Earthworm Tractor Company to teeming life. At the height of his success, he wanted to share his knowledge with young artists, and started his own school on the correspondence model. The teaching material for his Famous Artists School, derived from the working methods of the top artists of the 1940s, remains a rich trove of advanced training for illustrators today. His company grew successful, sprouted other schools, and Dorne won a Horatio Alger award in the early 1960s for his self-transformation. It seems that his most lasting legacy was not graduates of FAS, but as the spiritual father to a generation of Mad Magazine artists, such as Will Elder, Jack Davis and Mort Drucker, who must have delighted in Dorne's exaggerated and elongated figures, his patchy blacks, his cast of thousands, and his general madcappery. Dorne's work has always been scarce, and so the discovery of this cache is a delightful event. Roger T. Reed |
