At age twenty-two Garretto received steady work from Dorland,
Europe’s largest advertising agency. His work was published regularly in the
eight major British pictorial magazines, including the Tattlerand Illustrated
News, and frequently appeared in the major German weeklies. In Paris,
where he had married, opened a studio in his apartment, and eventually
sired a son, he was commissioned to do numerous advertising projects.
One such was the result of a meeting with Alexey Brodovitch, who was art
director for the department store Trois Quartiers. He was also asked to
become a member of Alliance Graphique, a loosely knit advertising
cooperative that included poster artists A. M. Cassandre, Jean Carlu, and
Charles Loupot, for whom Garretto did an Air France campaign.
By the 1930 s his friendship with publisher Condé Nast was so
close that this corporate chauvinist allowed Garretto to work for the
competition. In the meantime the war broke out and Garretto wanted to
return to Paris to be with his wife and child. Being Italian he was not
allowed to cross the border, and after various attempts at entry he returned
to New York. In 1941 Garretto was interned in the United States with other
German, Italian, and Japanese enemy aliens. He was eventually deported,
having agreed to an FBI proviso that he not make any anti-American
artwork for the duration of the war. This was certainly a little far-fetched
and unenforceable, but he did refuse to do caricatures for the Nazis with
whom he had no sympathy. Moreover, his stylized but critical caricatures of
Mussolini and Hitler did not make him very popular among party officials.
In 1944 he was assigned to Budapest to develop a literacy project so that
“defeated and conquered peoples” could learn the Italian language through
pictures. But when Italy capitulated to the Allies later that year, he was
interned as an enemy alien in Hungary for the duration of the war.
After the war he continued to make political and social caricature;
he also did fine art in the same style. Paul Rand, who called Garretto a
master of illustration, hired him to render the Dubonnet man. He
continued to do caricatures well into the 1970 s, but he stopped working for
American magazines in the 1940 s because after the war, he said, the art
directors who knew him had changed or died and his kind of design was
eclipsed by photography. In 1982 Lloyd Ziff, then design director for the
newly revived Vanity Fair, located Garretto at his home in Monte Carlo
and asked him to do some covers. He did a few, but they were rejected by
the editors in favor of a contemporary caricaturist whose drawing was
influenced by Garretto’s style. Although he was active until his death at the
age of eighty-six, Garretto never altered the style that defined his time.
tuis.
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