MARY PETTY and ALAN DUNN - opposites who were both New Yorker cartoonists

I've been downsizing lately, and that includes giving up a lot of cartoon hardcovers. Oh, I've scanned a few favorites from each book, and I've still kept my Addams and Steig, but Alan Dunn was one that will hopefully amuse somebody else. That is, if there's anybody who still cares about wry New Yorker cartoons back in the days when there was a real cartoon editor and the artists actually knew how to draw.

Dunn's style was rather "atmospheric." Pre-stipple (Drew Friedman) it seemed like everyone in a Dunn cartoon was operating through a haze of dust or air pollution.

As I scanned a few cartoons, and read about him, I was surprised to learn that he was married to Mary Petty. No, I never did acquire one of her anthologies. Her work was, well, flighty and SUNNY. Dunn got nine New Yorker covers, and his wife nearly four times as many. One reason was that Mary's works were so breezy and colorful:

Dunn (1900-1974) who also worked for the "Architectural Record," was the first to find success at The New Yorker, and he encouraged self-taught Mary (1899-1976) to submit her art. She got her first cover in 1927, the second year of The New Yorker's existence. She would offer new cartoons through 1966.

Very few New Yorker cartoonists seemed to be famous to the general public. They didn't kibbitz on Jack Paar's show. They didn't appear in many art galleries (the days of prized "original art" cartoons would only come in this age where everyone worships anything Marvel, and stubbornly refuses to toss their "silver age" and "bronze age" comic books on the grounds that they are all both art and fine literature). They were rarely interviewed in magazines.

Dunn and Petty lived quietly on the Upper East Side, in a three-bedroom apartment that also served as studio space for their art. They had no children, and remained elusive, except for letters. Their papers are housed at Syracuse University, which guarantees that nobody will bother to go through the time and trouble to go up there and access them and try to take some notes on their correspondence with mostly forgotten names such as Peggy Bacon, Isabel Bishop, Warren Chappell and Eric Hodgins. One wonders what either of them wrote to Alan Watts and what he wrote to them.

Dunn and Petty were a bit of an enigma to others at the magazine that gave them so much income. James Thurber was once asked about Mary, and his response was she was "born in a brownstone house on West End Avenue. Her father was a professor. She did not have a particularly happy childhood. That's all, brother." The childless couple seemed to have an uneventful existence until December 1, 1971, when Mary was viciously mugged. The elderly woman apparently did not fully recover physically or mentally. A few years later, Alan Dunn died, and Mary may have already been confined to a nursing home in New Jersey. She died there two years after her husband's passing. They were opposites in cartoon style, but very compatible in real life.