Creative Person; 12; Robert Osborn

Okay. Any tea, creative person's vibrato is born, take one. The creative person has a special gift. This is private vision of the world. The artist through words, images, music, ideas touches our view of the 20th century. I think the life is difficult, and the turn has been much easier for the two of us and with the two boys.

It's difficult, but it's consequently very rich. If you've come to some solution with the thing, you're in relation to reality, then it becomes exceedingly rich. As I say, I find I keep coming back to it all the time, is the sense of each day so that you're noticing each day, so that you're paying attention to it, and really partaking of the day. The light in the day, the grasses, the changes of color, everything going on. Everything going on, a program about the cartoonist Robert Osborne. This is Saul's very Connecticut, where the Osborne family have their home, and where he works.

Osborne is a mid-westerner from Wisconsin, where his father was a lumberman. He first came to this area in 1929 to teach at the Hotchka School for Boys in Lakeville, just a few miles down the road. After the war, he and his wife moved up here permanently and built their home.

In this place, he has done the work that has brought him critical recognition. Of course, the great thing about living out here in the country is that every single moment of the day is a pleasure. Think of that compared to living in New York City, in which half the time you're so angry with the frustrations of the city, and this doesn't happen out here. Get up in the morning, get up a light, or change the weather, or something this sort is happening all the time, and then after decent breakfast, looking out at the landscape, you sort of wander up to the studio and start working.

And all the day working, but looking out at these constant changes in nature, and surely this is one of the things I've discovered in my life, it's all irreplaceable. When I see the people that are forced for economic reasons to live in cities, these ugly environments, you're just grateful every single day that you're able to live out here in the country. I think it really does affect one's whole concept of life. This to me looks like a really marvelous life, and so much that I see going on in America doesn't look to me like a marvelous life. Of course, we had to work pretty hard to have this thing take place. There was a lot of drawing go to a clock in the morning for my wife and I didn't finally bring this off, but here it is, and it's, as I say, every single day that goes by, grateful for it, and then try to enjoy it. By the time I was six, I apparently was drawing pretty well, or using a jigsaw well, and my parents were complementing me on these things,

and of course, this encouraged one, you came along, and we were drawing a lot of cartooning while you were in, I went to a normal school out in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and then went to the high school there, and drawing all the time and making posters for dances and this sort of thing. I went off to the University of Wisconsin and drew there for the comic magazine and transferred from Wisconsin to Yale, and for four years you drew all the time. And up to this point, I thought that I was going to just be a cartoonist, and of course then at Yale you began to be fairly fancy and think, well, I must be an artist, and I went over to the Yale, finally got into the Yale Art School, got one course there, and I was thrown out after two weeks, took me two years to get in to get this course, and because I turned a piece of sculpture that we were drawing into a character, George Bernard Shaw, that professors said, he said, young man, what would happen if everybody did this, and I said I didn't know, and he said, I think that you would better get up and leave.

It is a truism that social criticism reflects the hopes and fears of its time. On a cartoonist produces social criticism, it is usually called satire. Osborne satires with their clarity of intent and their level of craft nailed down the spirit of their times like no other. For example, the work of his published in 1960, during the eighth and last year of the Eisenhower administration, the book called The Volgarians. Moisturize your lips, and we will examine the present corruption of our greatness, and see to what ends our natural riches and our freedom have been plucked.

This exploratory operation will be undocumented, yet in its process we will see what over weaning desire for money and comfort is during to America. America once had the clarity of a pioneer axe and the purpose and audacity of the women and men who crossed this land, and died with a blood seeping through their block skins, because they had enormous will and belief in themselves and courage. Historically speaking, this happened not too long ago. Out of their struggle they created a democracy and made it work. This is a hard thing to do, even in a land as richly endowed as ours. Such was its climate of freedom that a mode of thought unique in the world began here. And native ingenuity unbound could fabricate as did the rights. The entire elegance of man's first plane and fly it with prestated certainty of success. Or Henry Ford could say to some stockholders seeking fatter profits. Business and industry are first and foremost a public service.

We are organized to do as much good as we can everywhere for everybody concerned. I do not believe we should make such an awful profit on our cars, but such visions were not held for long. The overriding purpose of production became the making of money rather than the creation of superbly designed and economically built products which were needed and therefore meaningful. The seduction of America had begun and a culture of forming nonsense now engulfs us all with its beymal, vitiated, cute, odorless, dainty, syrupy voice, breathy, bloodless, sudsy message, which are no way can enlighten or elevate. Because those business-like businessmen with crippling 19th century conventionality and conservatism and lack of imagination seem blinded to their worthy and absolutely necessary role in our national life today. They have polarized instead on the endless but meaningless moving of consumer goods for profits, possessions and to a lesser degree power.

To this purpose, they hire Madison Avenue and those idea men with a relentless electrified year-searing jab cell, which now perforates our entire life with its jingles, coupons, hill-billy, twang, nauseous, coziness, pseudo-art son, pseudo-art son, recruitment son, everything, to the tune of eleven billion dollars a year, or they plaster our cities and our roads with the chaotic anarchy of their signs and spawn an ugliness across the once endless beauty of our land. Their TV clots the very air with scenes of genuine sadism and raw physical brutality for all the young to see, while radio pulses are kind of made up sex which mocks true sex and surely love and sounds more like pretend deep breathing exercises for a class of chirping new-bile girls, but the sellers may interrupt with gurgly folks he talked to sell the latest taste sensation or even travel along cancer father. The key to all is the smile, wide, youthful, brilliant, and everything is good and glad, day after endless day, hour after hour, page after page, program after program, and the fact and the factuous are interchangeable and label the full life, grown men are shown behaving like children to play, all giggly with cuteness and delight,

until we sicken and die of it, smiling, no doubt, and sociable. For the captains of industry and their pitch men see nothing amiss in all this, and somehow believe that they are thus advancing the American dream to its fullest fulfillment, and no one need look at harsh reality with its complete logic and power, its pain and distress, or the relentless uncompromising demands it puts upon us all, if we are to survive. If all that we do looks childish and winsome, what is happening to America does not. We pretend to be vigorous, yet we have directed so much of our effort to irrelevant private consumption and sensuous pleasures, and have so failed to make a considered use of our total resources,

but our national posture is anything but balanced and anything but vigorous. Our sense of purpose ebbs away and is no longer clear to all of us and therefore to the world. We sit, like well to do toads, dumbly complacent. Our great public needs go unsolved and even unattended. Our heavy trinkets weigh us down and have immobilized us. Yet we dare speak of dynamic obsolescence, which means wearing out early so that you must buy another sooner in a world which has an average yearly wage of $100, and serious needs beyond belief. We are failing to fully educate and develop our greatest resource, which is humans. We spend only one half of one percent less on alcohol than we do on education. We pass no education bill worthy of the name. Now do we pay our teachers admiring salaries at every point we cry, poverty, and we'll not face squarely the crucial difference between what we are willing to pay and able to pay?

Surely this is not the performance of a great people intent on greatness. We are settling by default as no great nation has ever settled for a conforming, unthreatening, medium, massive mediocrity. So the sadness comes when the hard one fortunate destiny of our highly endowed land is squandered on innervated bloat and trim. And the will which drove the acts, the curious originality and imagination which lifted the right's plain. The humanity of Lincoln are being leached out by all that is venal and misconceived in America. The pompous symbol of this failure is everywhere at every street corner, and it is not the image we once had for ourselves and created without guile before the world. We found her in a pudge fudge and flounder in the plush slush of opulence and its spun sugar, nothingness.

We accept its smiling blandness, its rig falsehoods in livery fixes, until our children cannot say for sure what is wrong with cheating. Most serious of all, we think no more of liberty than only of our rights and forget that we have equally important obligations, duties and sacrifices to make. Even to the point of dying for freedom and its lawful order. At the time being, we have lost our way. And to those men of lonely courage who were our ancestors, all this would seem incomprehensible and somehow disrespectful of the gift they made us. For they knew the pompous fool was soon cut down by men of stronger purpose in the darkening woods. If all this seems unduly critical and bleak, take hope. In many areas we still do well. Only our failures grow daily more apparent. But with a force like that of mounting spring, demand solution and begin to generate once more a public purpose, to which our private works will be regressed however painfully within the meaning of our national life.

And the insurgent force will be you and people like you, standing fearlessly for your best beliefs and pressing it every turn for excellence. Being resolute in purpose, the alien decay of our souls will cease. And sensing anew the hopes of all men, we shall again come proudly to the ramparts, to sing the majesty of freedom. Till his early 40s, Robert Osborne had been a painter. He had studied intensively in America and Europe, supporting himself primarily by teaching. Then in 1939, things changed. I was working terribly hard. I was painting 14 hours a day, at least. And yet slowly it came over me. I wasn't good enough. And this is, of course, rather hard moment to face. And that you have to admit that it doesn't say enough.

And at this point, let's see, I made two or three cartoon books on how to shoot dogs, and how to shoot quail, how to catch trout, and my outer amazement. Well, let's see, at this point, I've been living on $500 a year. I'd sell two paintings a year for about $250 and I was able to do this. But suddenly, he produced these cartoon books, and they sold 40,000, just like that. And you couldn't... There's, of course, indicated to you as it probably this is what you really did. Well, and you better pursue it. The war came. He joined the Navy, and they elected to use him as a cartoonist. He spent four years at nothing but cartooning, and produced over 30,000 drawings. Though often hilarious, the purpose of the drawings was strictly instructional. His intent and his comment had to be clear, as it is today. I had the feeling that the American is so concerned, he's so willing to sacrifice anything to make money that he ends up with his steady jumble, which one person is put up a billboard. Another person is put up a hot dog stand out north theater of a movie theater.

And all of this, and no control, no planning, the American always resists this. He thinks of himself as sort of a lone person out there on the frontier. Nobody's going to tell him how he's going to lay out his town, or what he can do with the land around the town, or how this land could best be used. It doesn't bother him that his environment is just being eaten away in this desire to make money. He accepts it, and he's after sort of a Beth, the whole process, so that he'll make money. Robert Osborne owns two automobiles, a vintage rally from England and a Volkswagen. He is interested in cars and irritated by them, quite irritated. Of course, the thing about the Detroit car designing, they pretend you see that they're doing these marvelous designs, and they tell all the American public that they're doing all these marvelous designs.

Actually, they're again, these vitiated copies of the real thing. Let's take the Ferrari, the Aston Martin, these things superbly designed cars, and then the people on Detroit start copying these things, and of course they don't get it quite right. All you have to do is look at a Ferrari, and you can see that whoever's doing the designing for Ferrari knows exactly what he's up to, what the wheel well is about, all of this. These people on Detroit now pat themselves on the back and say, look, we're doing the fast back, we're doing this, we're doing that. All of them are imitations of European cars, and yet they now pass them off, so they were really doing a great creative job. As I said, they make them look like the South American robbers that you put on when it's raining, you know, and they have this funny creases on the side, and they put creases down the side, or then they start moving the fenders up, at that time, when they ran the fenders up this way on the rear, finally so large that you could spike people, hurt people with them, and then they decide maybe that isn't right, or they just to fake out the people that have bought those, then they take the fenders off.

But you watch, pretty soon they'll have those fenders on the very front of the car, and they won't be the least upset by this, and yet they talk, so they were designers. I'm sure it doesn't worry to try, they probably make so much money all the time on anything, that they aren't genuinely concerned with the design of the car, but the tribe will go on making these larger and larger things, and talking nonsense in the advertising, and I don't know again, I always wonder that adult man can push this sort of thing, or be satisfied in pushing this sort of thing. Osborne wanted to be a painter and became a cartoonist, he is at ease with the whole thing, at ease with himself and with life.

It is important to just make the statement, no matter how you make it, so that you can get your feelings out, and get them down. I think that the actual essence, the important point, is that they're coming to terms with oneself, but then after one finally comes to terms with oneself, then everything begins to happen, and it is only after that coming to terms with oneself, the things do begin. To me, it is interesting, that out of the cartoons, slowly, you begin to understand, you begin to produce some things that I think of as art, and that these emerge from the cartoons.

I know I'm very much for the contemporary, I learned long time ago, that it is perfectly ludicrous to try to hold back from the stream of the way things are going, and saying,

oh, say, is on with the man, or old cubism was the thing. What really fascinates me is that you have this steady development, that you have the abstract expressionist, or that you have pop art, and that you have off art coming along, and that this steady development in change and the flowing thing, and rather than holding back against it, goodness, let's keep our eyes open and look, and not be prejudging it, or not taking our standards and putting it on pop art, or op art, or the next movement to come. It seems to me the instance you stopped looking, you were beginning to die, and in the wrong sense. I suppose the final pleasure of living out in the country is that, first of all, one's living a much simpler life. It seems to me, somehow closer to nature, everything goes on, the shooting, the fishing, the walking around.

I do a lot of shooting, I enjoy it. I'm afraid there's this whole aggressive part of me that gets out there, and afraid takes it out on these birds. I wish, however, that people were doing it on birds, not on one another, and I was at the feeling that people had done this for a long time. Some of the sporting thing has been pursued, and, let's say, the aggressive thing goes on this, or goes on the shot, particularly when you make a good shot, or if you make a double, which is fairly rare for me, but when one does, you actually feel a whole aggressive part of one being expanded. There's one feels the same thing on the bull fight, that you go and somehow get this out on, it's a rather formalized thing,

and I think that we do have to come to terms with the aggressive part of us, what we're going to do with it, and so that I'm trying not to expand it against other human beings. Actually, one doesn't enjoy the killing part. If we didn't eat these for dinner, I'm sure I wouldn't do it. It's a strange contradiction that you like the birds, watch them all year long, and then comes this one time of the year, and you're asking about a month and a half, which are permitted to shoot these superb birds, incidentally. This partridge is the best eating, this is the best meat that I know, you can't buy anything, to compare with a well-cooked partridge. A person is like a painted chicken by comparison with this. It has wonderful wild taste, different from any of the beefs that we slaughter out in Chicago.

Also, these birds are pretty hard to kill. I get about probably, oh, good year I'll get maybe six during the whole season. This means a lot of walking, a lot of looking, a lot of bothersome enjoyable hours, a lot of fresh air, a lot of sunrises, a lot of sunsets, and you're out really part of the country and enjoying the country. My more humane friends say yes, but the birds aren't enjoying it, and I know it, and I used to worry about it. I'm getting sold now that I really don't worry anymore about it. I simply enjoy it. The dependence of doing, actually just doing what you know, doing what you really feel, and that any time you imitate something else, you know, it's, it's, it's just, we consider, it's as though you kept pouring, pouring water into it, and it tends it out, no conviction at all. In connection with this strange thing, for instance, it took me about 30 years before I could finally leave a nose off a cartoon,

and you kept putting the nose in, and you thought this was necessary, and then one day I just simply found that, actually, the cartoon was clearer without a nose than with this extra added object. And from such things as this, Robert Osborne creates art that will survive. This is N-E-T, the National Educational Television Network. Thank you.