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Arnold Verga
Year of induction: 1997
Bio:
Arnold Varga was a piece of Pittsburgh. More important, he was a piece of Americana that walked and talked. He shook hands like an old service buddy. Listening to him was like catching darts. He exploded words. Exploded myths. Like the one that said great art directors of New York advertising’s golden age had to come from New York.
That was the beauty of Arnold Varga. His vision (despite desperately poor eyesight). The thousand beautiful things that happened every day, that we failed to see, Arnold saw and remembered. Then, with a childish simplicity, he recorded them in such a style that we will not easily forget them.
Arnold began performing this feat when he was 14. In 1959 he was named Art Director of the Year. That same year, his work was featured by Leon Arkus in a solo exhibition at the Carnegie Institute of Fine Arts, the first time commercial ads were shown there. He was represented in the New York Art Director’s Show constantly from 1955 on. He won 13 gold medals and “six or seven hundred” certificates of excellence. That’s enough to wallpaper an office, which, incidentally, Arnold once did, for a joke.
And he accomplished all this without serious art training or ever straying more than a few miles from his hometown of McKeesport, PA. He began freelancing for Cox’s department store there, then for the Joseph Horne Company; he did stints at Ketchum and BBDO before starting his one-man agency and finally retiring in the late 1970s.
Arnold’s caricature of Scrooge for Horne’s annual Christmas newspaper ad captured the public imagination so completely, the store was compelled to reprint it for sale as posters and cards. His chocolate chicken graphic created a run on the candy department. Today, Arnold’s illustrations for greeting cards continue to sell. “His work seems to persist in the memory,” observes Milton Glaser. Colleague Ray Werner describes Arnold’s gift this way: “It was more than art. It was coming up with an idea.”
In 1989, the Pittsburgh Advertising Club honored Arnold with a Lifetime Achievement Award, which not even Ray Werner or Arnold’s frequent collaborator Al Van Dine could persuade him to accept in person. When Graphis asked to devote an entire issue to him, he refused, saying too much had already been written about him. He died in 1994. In November 1996, he was inducted into the New York Art Directors’ Club Hall of Fame.
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