Testimonials
“Eugène Mihaesco arrived in the U.S. in January 1971 to try his luck for the third time in his career. The first time was in Romania, the second in Switzerland. He came here at age 34, without any working knowledge of English, let alone any money. Today, 200 published drawings later, his influence on magazine and newspaper illustration is unquestioned. Mihaesco’s style in drawing is reminiscent of the work of 19th-century illustrators. Like Grandville, Doré, and Tenniel, he is an absolute master of the pen. He uses it like a third hand, and sometimes his work is so tightly executed that he has a hard time convincing people that he didn’t merely paste together some old steel engravings. Salvador Dali christened Mihaesco a ‘surrrrrrrrrrealist’ and I suppose that suites him fine.”
J.C. Suares – “Print- America’s graphic design magazine”, November 1973
“Romanian born and a spiritual New Yorker, Mihaesco, best known for his drawings, cartoons and collages in The New York Times, Time magazine, The New Yorker and other major periodicals, is an exponent of his homeland’s innate absurdist sensitivity and Dada sensibility, as well as a proponent of a classical European mode of satirical illustration. Multilingual in the literal and metaphoric senses, he is conversant in the language of Dadaism, Surrealism and Symbolism, applying all to his imaginative lexicon of images and ideas. Mihaesco exemplifies a form called conceptual illustration, whereby the artist is not slave to a text. Rather, by interpreting and transforming the author’s reportage or commentary into personal metaphor and symbol, and by reacting to the essence of an article, a supplementary, thought-provoking image is created, which when successful offers another level of understanding. These are sometimes lyrical and other times acerbic; sometimes they are symbolic distillations and other times narrative continuities. But rarely are they literal in the traditional sense.”
Steven Heller – “Arts Magazine”, Summer 1984
“ Over the last decade, the drawings of Eugène Mihaesco have operated as a benign virus in the bloodstream of more than one of our most distinguished publications. Not so much ‘an illustrator’ as a conversationalist in pen and ink, he has consistently had something to say that is at once witty, oblique and poignant.”
John Russell – “The New York Times”, March 13, 1981
“Eugène Mihaesco’s work illustrates the new tendency which replaced the satirical rendering of politicians or of representatives of a given party or class by graphic comments that neatly capture the state of our modern world or illuminate matters of social, economic, cultural or even philosophic importance (…) The new style has been greatly furthered by an American institution, the so-called Op-Ed (opposite editorial) page of the prestigious American newspaper The New York Times (…) One of the media of expression employed by Mihaesco is a technique which we might call imitation collage. He draws objects and figures, which look as though we had seen them somewhere before, as though they had been borrowed unchanged from magazines or shop catalogues dating from the nineteenth century. In reality they are all his own inventions, but they derive a new dimension from their mimicry of the woodcuts and prints that have come down to us out of a dusty and now rather curious-seeming past (…) The printing requirements of the Op-Ed page of The New York Times imposed special demands on collaborators: all drawings must be pure black and white. Mihaesco has here made a virtue of necessity. He has succeeded in handling his pen-and-ink technique so skillfully that surfaces which in reality are pure black convey the impression, when reproduced, of being in a delicate grey (…) The principal virtue of Mihaesco’s drawings remains his striking ability to translate a complex train of thought into a picture with such succinct precision, and at the same time to strike familiar chords that many of us have cherished from days of our childhood.”
Manuel Gasser – “Graphis” nr. 176, 1975
“There is nothing innocent about Mihaesco’s art although it’s easy enough to smile at his images — even to see them as highly personal and witty cartoons. And neither is his vision of reality an easy one: The very worst this century has been able to do to itself lurks deep under the calm, even though eccentric, exteriors he shows us. What we see is merely the top layer of highly complex, emotionally charged, and multilayered reality descending, in geological fashion, to depths incorporating a multitude of things and experiences.”
Theodore F. Wolf – “The Christian Science Monitor”, March 12, 1981
“ Mihaesco is that rare creature, an imaginative and wildly inventive cartoonist who is also, at various times, an artist; a social, political, and cultural analyst; a philosopher, wit, and satirist; and an all-around poker-of-fun at human foibles.”
Theodore F. Wolf – “The Christian Science Monitor”, January 13, 1983
“For Mihaesco, an artist who experienced at first hand the policies of a repressive government, the opportunity to present his ideas and images freely has been artistically liberating. His concise, metaphorical drawings reflect a unique perspective. They display a sharp and satirical wit, informed by an outsider’s piercing sense of the absurdities of human condition.”
Deborah C. Phillips – “ARTnews”, May 1981
“I try to plant a stick of dynamite in the very small space between pen and paper. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to call it a time bomb, because the effect is more insidious. I like my pen and ink drawings to have that kind of delayed reaction — to affect people a day or two after they see them, in sudden unexpected ways.”
Eugène Mihaesco – “ARTnews”, March 1981