Paolo Garretto

More of a 30's guy than 20's, but nice to look at...
Paolo Garretto was an Italian artist who became famous for his stylized caricatures of famous people in the 1930's and 1940's. His career started in 1928, and he was published in the British Caricature of Today magazine and the Italian satirical magazine Pasquino. He was recruited by Vanity Fair as cover artist (the portrait to the right was taken for VF by Lusha Nelson). The New York Times tells in its obituary from 1991 about his life's trials:

When World War II broke out, Mr. Garretto, an Italian citizen living in the United States, was interned as an enemy alien and deported to Italy. He was approached by the Nazis to produce caricatures of President Roosevelt and other Allied leaders. When he refused, he was interned as a political prisoner in Hungary from 1942 until the end of the war.

Interestingly, Garretto did several rather nasty caricatures of Roosevelt while in the USA. As a cartoonist myself, I find the principle sound. As long as he was not allowed to lampoon Mussolini, why should he attack the president of a state that granted him the freedom to do so?
Here are some of Garretto's portraits of my 1920's favourites, more at cartantica.it


Comrades & mortal enemies, Trotsky and Stalin


Marinetti and Marconi, bringing in the machine age


Former subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka and von Stroheim


And finally my top picks, d'Annunzio and Atatürk! I love that bald owlish head and those lynx eyes.