Twelve framed original cartoon drawings hang along an innocuous-looking corridor, the one that leads to the men's room on the third floor of the New York Public Library. Since 1992, this marbled alley has been called the Charles Addams Gallery and is the endowed site of a rotating exhibition of drawings by Charles Addams selected from the 116 that are owned by the library.
It serves as a pleasantly sinister shadow of the large-scale Addams show the library mounted in 1994. Although it would be more appropriate to hang Addams's macabre drawings in some subbasement tunnel leading to a cobwebbed dungeon reserved for those who have never paid off their overdue book fines, the Charles Addams Gallery is one of the small hidden treasures of New York, a continuing memorial to a master of that once proud art form, the gag cartoon.The concise storytelling picture, often accompanied by a tersely captioned punch line, was perfected by The New Yorker, whose pages Addams regularly haunted from 1933 until his death in 1988 (and even after, since - appropriately - posthumous drawings have continued to appear).
When I was a kid, the Addams panels were among the few run by the magazine that I actually "got" and laughed at.
Addams was an aberration to my unsophisticated eyes, an escapee from the irreverent world of Mad magazine. I had no problem understanding, say, the drawing of his famous family of ghouls about to spill a bubbling caldron of molten lead down from their Victorian roof onto an unsuspecting cluster of Christmas carolers.
It took years for me to begin to understand the concept of subtlety.
The overriding impression given in Addams's work is of solidity. He's not part of the Modernist tradition that smashes down the invisible fourth wall. You look through his picture window at a very convincing, if somewhat warped, world.
Addams drawings are solid in every sense. One of Addams's favorite sermons is the lack of childhood innocence. It's the theme of the drawings in this current display, called "Little Devils."
Pugsley, the Addams Family little boy, gleefully shoves a toy school bus into an onrushing toy train; a little tyke in a sculpture class sticks pins into a sculptured voodoo doll that looks exactly like his art teacher.
In a beautifully choreographed favorite sequence of mine, a little boy swallows a brew mixed from his chemistry set and turns into a junior league Mr. Hyde, then mixes up another concoction and returns to "normal" when he hears his mother approaching.
Addams described his search for ideas as "mauling cliches." In the process, he came up with some rather durable archetypes. Everyone knows what you mean when you refer to an "Addams house," an "Addams Family" or an "Addams situation."
In fact, with Stephen King and Anne Rice at the top of the best-seller lists, with mass and serial murderers as movie folk heroes and with basic "Addams black" still the defining color for cool clothes, it's tempting to say we live in an "Addams world."
Tempting, but not quite accurate. Addams held a mirror up to his world, and, like all mirrors, it showed everything in reverse. The goofily sinister Gomez may count six "little piggies" on Wednesday's right foot at bedtime, but he's a loving parent, if a dysfunctional one.