Attempted Bloggery: Charles Addams: Striking Back at Modernist Architecture

Friday, June 27, 2025

Charles Addams: Striking Back at Modernist Architecture

Cartoonist Charles Addams, revered for his work in The New Yorker and, of course, especially for "The Addams Family," was a lifelong student of architectural form. His tastes ran to the gothic and the macabre; the Addams Family mansion, always a magnificent ruin but never drawn the same way twice, is a case in point.

But what were his feelings toward the modernist architectural movement? Well, his New Yorker cartoon of June 20, 1959, (created, incidentally, a full five years before "The Addams Family" television series) may offer a humorous hint.

Charles Addams
Original art
The New Yorker, June 20, 1959, p. 29

Addams chose a church upon which to vent the wrath of God. It's a real one, or it was, the Church of the Good Shepherd in Kansas City, Missouri. It was built, apparently, in the postwar period. If it still stands today, it has metamorphosed into something entirely more traditional in appearance.

Charles Addams
Framed and matted original art
The New Yorker, June 20, 1959, p. 29

In some ways, modernist architecture is too easy a target for a wit as sly as Addams's. Even sophisticated readers of The New Yorker may have taken umbrage at the most recent changes to the national landscape. With the Addams cartoon, we can take a certain delight as we identify with the irritation of the man upstairs.

Last year the original art was sold at Bonhams. The auction house correctly identified the building Addams so convincingly depicted, but seemed ignorant of the drawing's publication history.