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February 26, 2005
Remembering Ed Valtman
Earlier this year Ed Valtman, a cartoonist and founding member of the AAEC, died at age 90. [Please see the obituary on page 17]. President Matt Davies wrote the following tribute.
On behalf of all the members of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, I would like to extend our condolences to the friends, family and readers of fellow cartoonist, Ed Valtman. Though I myself never had the good fortune to meet Ed, he sent me a signed copy of his last book several months ago.
With hat in hand, I hope that he will accept this humble and heartfelt tribute in lieu of the "thank you" I simply didn’t send out in time.
How appropriate for a gathering of tribute and remembrance to such a talented and observant artist as Ed, who left a country whose leaders frowned upon individual expression, to take place in the land that gleefully adopted him.
A land where such people are celebrated and rewarded for their outspoken creativity.
And, as you all know, rewarded he was.
Of course, Ed was most famous for winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1962 – for his political cartoons drawn in 1961 [above right] – which, in a juicy symmetry, was a year in which he drew cartoons lampooning both Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, purveyors of the suppression of speech from which he had fled less than twenty years before.
But a Pulitzer only tells a tiny part of the story. He was warmly known in our organization as being one of its founding members, almost fifty years ago.
Several of our less junior members remember him for his gentle and generous personality. And one of them, Draper Hill, who was a good friend of Ed’s, reminisced recently over colorful cartooning
convention activities, including an evening at an AAEC cartoonist’s gathering in London in 1970,
at the Taverna Lord Byron, where Ed was last seen standing on a table, pen in hand, drawing on the pub’s ceiling …
We artists hold a special place in our hearts for our fellow creators, and Ed was also a particularly respected and accomplished abstract painter. He was also a master draftsman. At the 1967 World’s Fair, when other cartoonists dispatched there by their respective News organizations were running around drawing caricatures of one another, likely due to a lack of controversy (the crude fuel that makes an editorial cartoonist’s pen run), Ed drew a spectacularly beautiful architectural landscape of the fair, which the Hartford Times saw fit to showcase in an imposing spread.
He will be missed on the newspaper page. He will be missed at our yearly conventions.
Please allow us cartoonists to indulge in raising our collective ink stained hands to our brows in salute of a man who has provided his compatriots with a legacy that we are honored to uphold, and a friendship that will not be forgotten.
Matt Davies
February 5th, 2005