Some people have literary sensibilities. Others are more inclined to be visual. Edward Gorey, the magnificent illustrator who died on Cape Cod in 2000, was lucky enough to have the two faculties perfectly combined, and better yet, supplemented by a level of schadenfreude so shot through with innocent mirth as to make it seem almost magnanimous.
An example: Gorey’s 1977 book, “The Loathsome Couple,’’ included a drawing with the caption: “That year Mona Gritch was born to a pair of drunkards.’’
Like so many of Gorey’s best drawings, it is a tour de force of cross-hatching. The scene itself is egregiously dismal, calling to mind Walter Sickert’s Mornington Crescent nudes: cast-iron bed, sex gone wrong, deep-set funk.
The baby’s mother is sprawled on the bed, the father is flopped at its foot, and the poor, dear, bare-bottomed brat has fallen on the floor. Four bottles punctuate the room like dark markers of anarchy.
And yet we laugh. We laugh and laugh. It’s wonderfully funny.
Gorey’s inimitable drawings, which combine gothic deadpan with wistful Victorian nostalgia, are the subject of the most enjoyable exhibition in Boston this winter. The venue, the Boston Athenaeum, is ideal — a place where those with visual sensibilities (the Athenaeum was for a long time Boston’s preeminent art museum) and those with more literary inclinations (it is the city’s oldest independent library) feel equally at home.
In two rooms, “Elegant Enigmas: the Art of Edward Gorey’’ treats us to 180 objects, mostly original drawings for Gorey publications drawn from the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust. (The show was organized by the Brandywine River Museum, in Chadds Ford, Pa.)
Gorey resisted attempts to categorize him. He claimed to be asexual, saying, “I am a person before I am anything else,’’ and applied the same principle to his creative activities: “I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist. . . . I am a person who does those things.’’
Nonetheless, he was, as curator Karen Wilkin writes in the exhibition catalog, prone to identifying with authors rather than artists in his drawings. (A paradox? Sure.) In the alphabet rhyme “The Chinese Obelisks’’ (1970), for instance, he is “A’’ — “an Author who went for a walk.’’ The shoulders of said author are hunched forward, he’s dressed in a thick fur coat, and he leaves a crumpled piece of paper in his wake.
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