[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 160 (Monday, October 22, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Page S13191]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         HONORING EDWARD KOREN

 Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, today I acknowledge a Vermont 
artist who is widely recognized and widely loved, Edward Koren.
  This year the Vermont Council on the Arts is bestowing its Governor's 
Award for Excellence in the Arts on this renowned graphic artist.
  Mr. Koren carries on the long tradition of artists who publish their 
work in the mass media, using the techniques of drawing to comment on 
the lives that men and women lead. His distinguished 19th century 
antecedents include Honore Daumier in France and Thomas Nast in the 
United States. Edward Koren is a cartoonist of the first order, having 
published more than 900 of his works in The New Yorker. His cartoons 
have appeared in other publications as well, ranging from The Nation, 
to the New York Times.
  His work is remarkably distinctive, often focusing on shaggy figures 
engaged in everyday affairs. Their shaggy, hairy features are a 
personal signature; they embody the way he uses lines, the way his pen 
moves on paper. To see one of his cartoons on a page is to recognize 
it, instantly, as a ``Koren,'' even before one knows its subject or 
reads the accompanying words or his name at the bottom of the cartoon.
  Koren examines people in the midst of everyday life, revealing that 
he understands that reality consists not of something invented by 
movies or policy analysts but rather what we encounter every day. He is 
a satirist of pretension, and deftly explores the neuroses of our 
times. Koren is a great chronicler of what the poet Wallace Stevens 
called ``the malady of the quotidian.''
  David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, recently told the Burlington 
Free Press that ``Ed Koren is one of the great original voices of 
cartooning . . .. I love his work, always have.''
  Edward Koren's work has been widely recognized by museums as well as 
the media which so often publish his cartoons. His work is in the Swann 
Collection at the Library of Congress, and also in the permanent 
collections of the Fogg Museum at Harvard, the Princeton University 
Museum, and the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University.
  Mr. Koren and his wife Curtis live in central Vermont. He long ago 
moved to our State for reasons he articulated recently:

       I was captivated intensely by Vermont. There was a deep 
     sense of community. I kept thinking, this is unusual in this 
     society, this country. I had never come across this kind of 
     closely compacted community. I was fleeing huge, giant-scaled 
     cities without a real cohesive sense of place and connection. 
     It turned out I was a country guy.

  Not surprisingly, Mr. Koren is a captain of the Brookfield, VT, 
Volunteer Fire Department.
  He is well deserving of the honor of receiving the Governor's Award 
for Excellence in the Arts.

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