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Sketchbook
July 9 & 16, 2018 Issue
The Addams Family Secret
How a massive painting by Charles Addams wound up hidden away in a university library.
Text by Paul Karasik
The cartoonist Charles Addams in front a mural he painted for a Hamptons hotel bar, which over the years wended its way from Long Island to a Penn State library and picked up the name “An Addams Family Holiday.”
Photograph courtesy Look Magazine Photograph Collection/Library of Congress

In a side foyer of a Pennsylvania State University library, behind glass, hangs a painting that often goes unnoticed by students on their way to the stacks. Even some faculty members who have taught at Penn State for decades don’t know it’s there. And it’s a masterpiece.

In 1952, Charles Addams, at the height of his skills as a cartoonist, painted a lush, monochromatic mural on canvas for a bar at the Dune Deck, a hotel in the Hamptons. (The work is nearly fourteen feet long and more than four feet high.) When the hotel changed hands, the new owners—one of them a Penn State alumnus—donated the painting to the university’s Palmer Museum of Art. A few years later, it was transferred to the library, where it hung in the Lending Services area, until it was relegated to its current location, in 2000. Somewhere along the way, it picked up the name “An Addams Family Holiday.”

The way it's displayed obscures the fact that this painting is both a great work by a major artist and a gag that would have fit right into The New Yorker of 1952. The mural, rendered in gray tones—from dense black to the white of the sand—looks just like a printed cartoon, only much larger.

The family members, who first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, in 1938, were not properly christened with individual names until the début of the “Addams Family” TV show, in 1964. Nonetheless, here they all are: Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Grandmama, Wednesday, Pugsley, and their butler, Lurch, at the beach.

Photograph by Jens Mortensen for The New Yorker

The gag follows a basic Addams Family formula: the collision of the drab with the macabre. On this beach, there are normal people and not-normal people. Nestled in the dunes are a regular beach house and a spooky old mansion. The members of the clan, engaged in the bizarre activity of being the Addams Family, are oblivious of the panic of the humans surrounding them.

Pugsley is burying something (or someone) in the sand. Lurch, with his cocktail shaker, is concocting a drink from the poison held by Grandmama. A picnic basket is filled with yummy dead bats. Morticia and Wednesday look on with approval, framing the focal point of the action: Fester grips a net and a spiked club, ready to help Gomez, who is holding a fishing rod and reeling in something. It’s that unseen catch at the end of the line that is panicking the bathers, who can’t get out of the water fast enough.

One can imagine Addams being presented with the venue for his commission, and sizing up the task. The mural was meant for a beach resort, so he set the scene at the beach. But, this being the Addams Family, he opted for a grim, overcast day for their outing. The next consideration was likely the horizontality of the space, so he devised a gag that is essentially horizontal.

The eye goes first to Gomez, and then moves to the far left of the mural, working back along the scene, reading it like a sentence.

The horizon line and the frantic swimmer conspire to push us urgently to the right. The wide-open eyes of the guy in the foreground look back to our entry point on the left. Were his legs to extend beyond the frame, he would be standing on the real floor in the real world, with us, so we relate to him and his distress.

From the point where the horizon line hits the shore, the composition opens up to the right like a fan, leading the viewer from character to character.

Our attention finally returns to Gomez, who, although this is the beach, is in his standard Gomez costume, but shoeless, with his pant cuffs rolled up. In contrast to his rigid relatives, Gomez—legs bent and necktie flapping—is the only Addams Family member who is in motion, as he wrestles with the bent rod, the tip of which reaches back, redirecting our gaze to the left, off-canvas, to that hooked something.

Addams does not spoil our pleasure by depicting exactly what Gomez is reeling in. Whatever it is, though, one assumes it must be worse than that limpid-eyed octopus slouching on the sand.

The library is being renovated, and so the mural will move again. “It’s a jewel,” Richard Riccardo, Penn State’s associate director of facilities planning, said. “And it’s lost down there.” ♦

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