Inside the World of Charles Addams
Episode 20 | 2m 30sVideo has Closed Captions
"Inside the World of Charles Addams," now through Jan. 8, 2023, at Cheekwood.
Best known today for The Addams Family television series, movies and animated features, Charles Addams was a significant contributor to The New Yorker for over five decades. He was also considered one of the great humorists of the 20th century. Cheekwood Estate and Gardens will feature dozens of the artist's works in "Inside the World of Charles Addams," through Jan. 8, 2023.
Inside the World of Charles Addams
Episode 20 | 2m 30sVideo has Closed Captions
Best known today for The Addams Family television series, movies and animated features, Charles Addams was a significant contributor to The New Yorker for over five decades. He was also considered one of the great humorists of the 20th century. Cheekwood Estate and Gardens will feature dozens of the artist's works in "Inside the World of Charles Addams," through Jan. 8, 2023.
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship(quirky music) - [James] We want you to laugh and enjoy it, and we expect to hear a lot of laughter in the galleries when people are visiting the Charles Addams Show.
- [Narrator 1] Now, through January 8th, Cheekwood Estate & Gardens is offering a glimpse into the world of Charles Addams.
Best known for creating the wildly popular Addams family, his body of work stretches far beyond macabre movie stars.
- He had a prolific career.
He's one of the great humorists of the 20th century, and he began working as a cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine in the mid thirties.
One of his groundbreaking cartoons, which will be on view in the exhibition is, and I'm sure many people have seen it, someone is skiing down a hill, and they see a set of tracks on either side of a tree, and they're not quite sure how they got around the tree.
Well, that was one of his first cartoons for The New Yorker.
That's gonna be in the exhibition, the original drawing.
And it's all his original drawings.
It's not as if it's a tear sheet from a magazine or something along those lines.
A lot of times he's doing amusing little puns, other times they're a sort of double entendre.
He has a very dry sense of humor, and that really comes out in his work.
The majority of his work goes through The New Yorker, but he worked for other publications, and sometimes he just had other cartoons, or drawings that he did that might end up in a book.
And then, of course, in the early sixties, some of his characters that he had been drawing are adapted for the famous TV show.
The Addams Family is quite popular.
And then later on we begin to see Addam's Family movies, and cartoons, and it just proliferates.
So it is truly an exhibition that is interesting for a very broad range of ages, from, you know, someone who saw the TV show, people who read The New Yorker.
You know, this could be someone in their nineties, and someone in their early teens could enjoy the exhibition.
It's not an exhibition you can quickly run through in 15 or 20 minutes.
You wanna look at the drawings, you wanna read the captions, and we want you to laugh and enjoy it.
- [Narrator 2] This NPT Arts Break is made possible by the generous support of the Martha Rivers Ingram Advised Fund of the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee.
And a grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission.
