Crazy Inventions By A Smart Guy

If the Norman Rockwell Museum is something of a shrine to American values—patriotism, family, and the white picket fence—then devoting one of its galleries to the madcap drawings of Rube Goldberg is like inviting the class clown into the pulpit.

The first person to have his name included in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as an adjective, Rube Goldberg is associated with needlessly complex contraptions that perform a simple task. But a closer look reveals that the cartoonist went to great lengths to juxtapose widely diverse elements and subject them to unlikely processes.

A Rube Goldberg invention might incorporate sunlight and a magnifying glass, an anvil dangling from a cord, a squirrel on a treadmill, and a curious policeman—all to make a peacock fan its tail and dust off the radio console.

The exhibition’s curator, Jesse Kowalski, points to a Rube Goldberg drawing in a Dadaist review from the 1920s edited by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. The spirit of Surrealism, famously described by André Breton as the “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table,” was in close harmony with the zany and anarchic humor of Rube Goldberg’s hugely popular cartoons.

Born in San Francisco in 1883, Goldberg graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in engineering. He toiled for six months in the municipal Water and Sewers Department before decamping to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1904 to become the paper’s sports cartoonist. By 1907, he had moved on to the New York Evening Mail, and by 1915 he was earning $25,000 a year thanks to syndication.

Phenomenally prolific—Goldberg is estimated to have produced some 50,000 comics and cartoons before his death in 1970—he also worked at the Famous Artists School as head of the editorial cartoons department, and the exhibition includes a fine wall of demonstration exercises in Goldberg’s hand, as cartoon characters progress from penciled sketches to inked outlines to fully conceived and shaded drawings.

Starting in the 1940s, Goldberg began to produce political cartoons, targeting the dangers posed by Stalin, Communism, and the proliferation of nuclear stockpiles. This work won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1948.

One of the exhibition’s particular pleasures is a video of Rube Goldberg drawing at his easel, the charcoal moving swiftly across the page as a complex and hopelessly wrongheaded model of a perpetual motion machine takes shape under the artist’s hand.

“The Art and Wit of Rube Goldberg” will be on view at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., until June 9. The museum is open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and weekends until 5 p.m. General admission is $20, $10 for students, and free for children 18 and under.