Tucked away in a stately but human-scale former carriage house on the Upper East Side, the Society of Illustrators is a gem of an art-viewing spot. With eclectic works hung salon-style right up the 19th-century staircase, this is no high formal temple of art, but rather an intimate setting to encounter wonderful drawings.
Something Else Entirely: The Illustration Art of Edward Gorey is especially relaxed. We enter the third floor with a polished wood bar on one side and patio doors leading to a sunny balcony and cafe tables on the other. To the supple beat of jazz, I ordered a latte at the bar and perused 80 original Gorey drawings ranging from 1950 to 2000. I can’t imagine a better afternoon in the city. Still, I left wishing the exhibition had made a stronger argument for the power and enduring relevance of his vision.
“I’ve been murdering children in my books for years,” Gorey quipped in a 1977 interview. The artist, an epic New York enigma (proto-Goth, ballet superfan, fur-fashion icon who never had kids himself), created such indelible images as a pair of tiny legs emerging from under a vast rug, rendered in scribbles, within a gloomy Edwardian interior. “G is for George smothered under a rug,” we read, and all the fears life ever threatened us with flood in.
What I find so remarkable about Gorey is the finely tuned aesthetic line he walks while quite literally killing his darlings — the children that populate his work. He was a master at detaching the ghastly scenarios he crosshatched so that they became both deadpan and winkingly absurd. But I’d peered into the shadows of his oeuvre, which includes Dadaesque murder mysteries, creature fantasies, and even promiscuous adult stories (though the author claimed to be practically asexual), before. I was looking forward to a deeper immersion.
That’s the challenge of the show: It’s confined to drawings in his capacity as a successful illustrator (his day job) rather than selections from his own 116 books, the stuff of his nighttime imaginings. This is obviously an appropriate focus for the Society of Illustrators, and of interest to those in the industry.
Still, his idiosyncratic visions sometimes shine through even these workaday creations. His illustrations of English-French poet Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children (1907) — his half-century predecessor and clear influence — blend seamlessly with his own obsessions. Other drawings, like those for A Clutch of Vampires (Raymond T. McNally, 1974), share his atmosphere of gleeful morbidity. (Gorey won a Tony award for his stage design of the 1977 Broadway play Dracula). His New Yorker cover of two cats luxuriating amid a magnificent botanically patterned bed, submitted in 1992 and published posthumously in 2018, showcases both his ailurophilia and his inventive pen-and-ink maximalism. But all in all, we aren’t in the same uncompromisingly eerie movie as that doomed little boy crawling into the abyss. A rich eclecticism prevails here, but it doesn’t feel like his freak flag is flying at full mast.
Seeing his work in person provides a rich reward anyway. The shimmer of black ink, the cut-and-paste and hand-drawn printer’s crop marks — these transport us to a time before computers, the heady midcentury New York City publishing days in which Gorey pranced around like illustration royalty in his double-breasted coyote- and seal-fur coats. We also get to witness his evolution: The early oblong heads (E.T.’s cousins) and long pointed feet give way, by 1959’s Monkey’s Paw, to the deadpan figures that became his hallmark. We can certainly see why authors were overjoyed upon receiving news that Gorey would make pictures for their books.
The Society is showing much of this material for the first time, and that’s commendable — as is showing Gorey as a hustling illustrator making do in the economy, rather than a mythic visionary brought to us by rich patrons. I’m skeptical of exhibitions that simply echo rather than complicate an artist’s mythology, and this exhibition certainly complicates Gorey. But what’s missing here is the work we can’t unsee — like little George from 1963’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies (the most famous of his own books), or perhaps even more, the proto-punk scratchings of Beastly Baby, self-published in 1962, which depicts a parent’s repudiation of their infant in the most gruesome and brutal way. This is precisely the sort of probing the limits of free expression that his paid work was meant to support. Perhaps this exhibition is unwittingly showing us precisely how important it is for an artist to not have an assignment (or to stubbornly insist on their own).
A friend of Gorey said the artist “journeyed vastly between his ears.” It’s this mysterious depth which has caught the imagination of subsequent generations of goths, steampunks, and artists like Tim Burton. More importantly, in this time of waking each day to deluges of real-world horror and images of dark absurdities, Gorey’s passion work is the strangest of comforts.
Something Else Entirely: The Illustration Art of Edward Gorey continues at the Society of Illustrators (128 East 63rd Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through January 3, 2026. The exhibition was organized by the institution.
