“An Addams Family Holiday.”

“An Addams Family Holiday.” Photograph courtesy Look Magazine Photograph Collection/Library of Congress

Yours truly has laughed for many years with The Addams Family, a close knit klan with a delicious connect to the macabre. It seems we see Addams' work everywhere from print to video as his sense of dark humor and often unseen sense of kindness and loyalty pervade his work no matter what media in which it resides. :)

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.

Laughter is good for the soul is it not? :)