Charles Addams's New York
Review by GAIL S. MYHRE
April 17, 2010
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| Charles Addams (American, 1912-1988). Aquarium (1980). Watercolor on board. 61 x 48.3 cm (24 x 19 in.). Published on the cover of the New Yorker, May 5, 1980. © Charles Addams. Permission of Tee and Charles Addams Foundation. |
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Charles Addams (American, 1912-1988). Untitled (1976). Ink on board. 35.6 x 35.6 cm (14 x 14 in.). Published posthumously in Half Baked Cookbook (Simon & Schuster, 2005). © Charles Addams. Permission of Tee and Charles Addams Foundation. |
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| Charles Addams (American, 1912-1988). Do Not Feed the Squirrels (1988). Ink on board. 55.9 x 33 cm (22 x 13 in.). Published in the New Yorker, August 29, 1988. © Charles Addams. Permission of Tee and Charles Addams Foundation. |
Although illustrator Charles Addams (1912-1988) is most famous for the ghoulish family that bears his name, his success in the oeuvre of his choice did not originate with them. Indeed, they begin to find their way into his drawings merely as incidental players, walk-on roles among the larger cast he placed on his favorite stage: the City of New York itself.
Charles Addams sold his first cartoon — a drawing of a hockey player titled I forgot my Skates — to the New Yorker magazine in 1933. He continued to draw for this publication and others for over 50 years, and his drawings appeared in such magazines as Collier’s and TV Guide. Of the 3,000 pictures he made in his lifetime, only about 250 depict the joyfully creepy extended family that became his most popular creation. But in Addams’s New York, the supernatural and the surreal were commonplace occurrences to be seen on every street corner and found in every office. Even the city herself could take on the most unusual aspects without being rendered unrecognizable, as with his drawing depicting the skyline in green topiary or as the decorative castle at the bottom of an aquarium tank.
Addams’s New Yorkers behave much as their real-life counterparts: they eat in restaurants, they walk in the park. However, the inhabitants of Addams’s city have rather more unusual encounters than one might expect in the more concrete New York. An old man’s head appears on a platter behind one of the glass doors in the Automat, while a Godzilla-sized squirrel hides in the shrubbery behind a sign admonishing: PLEASE DON’T FEED THE SQUIRRELS. Even the invisible man rides the subway once in a while – one can tell because he reads the newspaper.
The exhibition Charles Addams’s New York, on view at the Museum of the City of New York from March 4 through May 16, 2010, gleefully parades this artist’s strange and wonderful city before us in more than 80 drawings, cartoons, sketches, watercolors and pencil sketches, published and unpublished, in color and in black and white. Although this may seem like a modest size for a display of such breadth, the exhibition has been carefully curated to best showcase Mr. Addams’s work. Wall decorations include faux flocked wallpaper such as might be found in the Addams Family’s Victorian manse, and photo-enlarged renditions of some of this illustrator’s more interesting characters cavort along the wall mouldings. At the center of the main gallery, a smaller room has been created which is dedicated to the popular Addams Family themselves. This exhibition within the exhibition includes pieces of ephemera, including magazines and books in which the Addams Family has been featured as well as an unexpected treasure, an overlarge set of papier-mâché masks of the entire group made for Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus.
Additional articles belonging to Mr. Addams, as well as some of his personal items, are gathered at the rear of the main gallery behind the “Family Room”. These include Mr. Addams’s drawing board — made of plain wood, much scarred and stained from a half-century of imaginative use. The pieces are arranged in such a way as to make it easy to imagine Mr. Addams bent over his odd creations, and possibly snickering.
Though Charles Addams cultivated the oddball public persona reflected by his unusual cartoons, using a mortician’s draining table for a living room centerpiece and exhibiting animal taxidermy on his shelves, the man himself was described by a biographer as being simply a "solid American boy"1 who never really grew up — which probably explained his gleeful delight in the arcane and the macabre. He did unquestionably possess a sense of humor most piqued by life’s aberrations, and he enjoyed the myths which surrounded him as a result of his work. He also enjoyed Aston Martins, cigars and beautiful women. He dated such celebrities as Greta Garbo and Jackie Kennedy. During his lifetime, Mr. Addams published 10 anthologies of drawings, two books and worked as an illustrator, curator and writer, while his charmingly ghoulish Family found its way into a prime-time television sitcom, an animated cartoon series and two movies.
The Museum of the City of New York is a wonderfully appropriate venue to showcase Mr. Addams’s work. It mounted the artist’s first solo exhibition in 1956, and in the early Sixties Addams donated 63 original drawings, including finished cartoons and preliminary sketches, to the museum’s collection. The exhibition’s timing is serendipitous as well, coinciding with the Broadway debut in April of The Addams Family: A New Musical. Visitors touring New York this spring who appreciate the black wit Mr. Addams so deftly wielded may expect a creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky time indeed.
1. Davis, Linda H. Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life. New York: Random House, 2006.
