Pages

Monday, July 01, 2024

What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine exhibit explored by Bruce Guthrie

by Bruce Guthrie


I did an overnight visit to Stockbridge, Massachusetts to visit the new "What, Me Worry?  The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine" exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum.  

Stockbridge is about 370 miles -- 6+ hours and many, many tolls -- from downtown DC. For those who are thinking that's a long way to drive for an exhibit, keep in mind that this area of Massachusetts has lots of other sites to justify the trip.  In the immediate area of the museum, you have Chesterwood (sculptor Daniel Chester French's house and studio), The Mount (Edith Wharton's mansion), Arrowhead (Herman Melville's house), Alice's Restaurant, and the Guthrie Center at Old Trinity Church ("but Alice doesn't live in the restaurant, she lives in the church nearby the restaurant, in the bell-tower, with her husband Ray and Fasha the dog").

On the drive up, you'll pass lots of places like Hyde Park where you can tour FDR's house, Eleanor Roosevelt's cabin (Val-Kill), and Frederick Vanderbilt's mansion.  (A ranger there once told me a fascinating story of why FDR, who hated the Vanderbilts, decided to have the NPS acquire it.) And you'll drive past Poughkeepsie which was about the only line from the "French Connection" movie that I can't forget ("Ever picked your feet in Poughkeepsie?").

Anyway, the exhibit...

It features 150-ish pieces of original artwork from MAD magazine.  These span the entire history of the magazine so there are pages going back to Superduperman (1953) and Woman Wonder (1954).  Artists shown include a who's who in cartooning -- Harvey Kurtzman, Don Martin, Dave Berg, Jack Davis, Frank Frazetta, Kelly Freas, Sergio Aragones, Norman Mingo, Angelo Torres, Wally Wood, Peter Kuper, Keith Knight, Tom Richmond, Sam Viviano, James Warhola...  Lots of original cover paintings (including the one done by the non-human ape, J. Fred Muggs) are exhibited, as well as inside pages.  The intricate detail on some of those early inside pages is amazing -- you need to examine the pages closely to appreciate them.

George C. Scott as General George Patton
There are special sections dedicated to Spy Vs Spy, Al Jaffee's fold-ins, and Mort Drucker gets an entire room.  (The latter features a surprising number of originals from NoVa's David Apatoff and Nell Minow -- David was one of the advisors for the exhibit.)  The fold-in section has an interactive kiosk where you can select a MAD cover, see the unfolded fold-in, and then watch it fold-in.  

There are a few exhibit cases including one which contains letters MAD wrote to Norman Rockwell in 1964 asking him to do a cover for the magazine.  (You have to appreciate the letter saying "we are enclosing some material on our little idiot boy.")  The magazine offered him $1,000 to do a charcoal sketch, but Rockwell declined.

Another case has antecedents of the Alfred E. Neuman character.  MAD, which started using the character in 1954, didn't create the character.  It was used in print advertising as far back as 1894.  Even the phrase "What, me worry?" was based on text appearing in previous ads.  In 1965, a copyright case made it to the Supreme Court.  The widow of Harry Spencer Stuff, who had copyrighted the image after using it in a 1914 cartoon, sued the magazine for the use of the image.  The court, which back then cared about precedent, said the image was in wide use before Stuff's copyright and his copyright was therefore invalid.  So the figure is apparently in the public domain.  ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_E._Neuman )


The exhibit briefly mentions the size of the magazine.  I had always heard that the only reason it shifted to magazine size was to avoid conflicts with the Comic Code Authority.  An exhibit sign says "Harvey Kurtzman was intent on recreating MAD as a magazine -- a shift that Bill Gaines supported to keep his editor from defecting to Pageant, a monthly journal, for higher pay."  

When the museum does temporary exhibits like these, it usually does a side exhibit showcasing some of Rockwell's pieces that fit into the theme.  The connected exhibit this time is "Norman Rockwell: Illustrating Humor" which features about 20 of his original paintings or studies (which are usually done full size, so they're amazing on their own).  
 
In the separate "The Art of Norman Rockwell: Highlights from the Permanent Collection" exhibit, the museum includes a number of paintings which are critical to our current appreciation of Rockwell including the original "Four Freedoms" paintings, "The Problem We All Live With" (Ruby Bridges integrating the New Orleans school), and "Murder in Mississippi" (the painting he did after Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were murdered in Mississippi -- the 50th anniversary of that lynching was this June 21). 

The 64-page catalog for the exhibit is done to look like an issue of the magazine.  Priced ("Our Price Cheap! (-ish)") at $19.52 (the year the magazine started), it features lots of essays by folks like Steve Brodner (exhibition co-curator), Dick DeBartolo, David Apatoff, Peter Kuper, and Sam Viviano (lead advisor).  Like the magazine, it includes marginal drawings by Sergio Aragones and a new MAD Fold-In by Johnny Sampson plus some of Al Jaffee's classic ones.  It has some pieces that are not in the exhibit.  In other cases, the catalog shows the final printed page with word balloons which aren't always on the original pieces shown in the exhibit.  It's a great supplement, not a substitute, to the exhibit.   You can order it online at https://store.nrm.org/books-and-video/exhibition-catalogues/mad-exhibition-magazine.html



Random observations about the audience...  The loudest laughs were from a large crowd watching a video of "Airplane" that was playing in one of the galleries.  I didn't see any non-white attendees when I was there. One woman complained to her companion about how few original Norman Rockwell paintings were in the Norman Rockwell Museum, saying they had to come back when there wasn't a traveling exhibit there. (The museum ALWAYS has traveling exhibits.)  Given the magazine having been around for 70+ years, I saw folks rediscovering the art they grew up on and studying the newer pieces that they had missed.  Younger folks seemed a little out of place but they probably don't know who Norman Rockwell is either.  
 
The exhibit runs until October 27.  The website includes an offer to other museums to "Host this Exhibition!" so maybe it will be appearing at other venues in the future.

Web sources:

Norman Rockwell Museum pages:

What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine


Norman Rockwell: Illustrating Humor

The Art of Norman Rockwell: Highlights from the Permanent Collection

I did my own obsessive thing of course, photographing pieces and signs.  Most photos turned out.  In some cases, I had trouble figuring out which wall text corresponded to which piece so there is a problem with duplication.  I had to divide the main exhibit into three separate pages but I'll combine them later after I resolve the wall text.  Plus there's another one for the "Norman Rockwell: Illustrating Humor" component.  For now, these are my pages:

What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine

Norman Rockwell: Illustrating Humor


Or, if you have the patience to see all 910 (!) images shown on the same page, try:
http://www.bguthriephotos.com/graphlib.nsf/(Merge)?OpenAgent&merge=MA_Rockwell_2024_MAD&opt=event

 


Former local cartoonist David Hagen, who designed ComicsDC's logo











Frank Frazetta artwork


Peter Kuper artwork


Al Jaffee artwork

Al Jaffee caricature

Mort Drucker artwork for Saturday Night Fever

 

No comments:

Post a Comment