Gorey Exhibition Shows Combination of Humor and Macabre

The work of Edward Gorey, artist, author and award-winning costume designer, is celebrated in “Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey” at the Brandywine River Museum in suburban Philadelphia. The first traveling exhibition of Gorey’s work, it features 180 drawings, sketches, notebooks and other items. From the Gaea News:

In Edward Gorey’s world, malevolent forces hover around Edwardian mansions, fashionable people cluster uneasily in drawing rooms and scores of tiny tots come to unspeakable ends — all narrated with dispassion and illustrated with macabre pen and ink drawings.

The work of Gorey, artist, author and award-winning costume designer, is celebrated in “Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey” at the Brandywine River Museum in suburban Philadelphia. The first traveling exhibition of Gorey’s work, it features 180 drawings, sketches, notebooks and other items.

Gorey wrote dozens of books ostensibly for children with titles like The Glorious Nosebleed, The Fatal Lozenge, and The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas. He sometimes pops up as a character in his own work, dressed in a gigantic beaver coat that hangs in a case in the exhibition.

The artist is perhaps best known for the satirical animation that opens the long-running PBS “Mystery” series. A lady swoons on a wall as mustached men in bowler hats creep by a mansion on a dark night. Later, conversation in a drawing room is hushed by the sound of shots as a body sinks into a lake outside — and a trench-coated detective writes it all down.

Gorey can tell truly ghastly stories, such as the mutual destruction of The Deranged Cousins or the child-killing career of The Loathesome Couple, but with an impartial narration that keeps the chills at bay. In a 1996 interview for a retrospective of the “Mystery” series, he said he didn’t consider himself a horror writer like Stephen King.

“Only very occasionally do I try to shock in a mild sort of way,” he said. “I’m very squeamish, really.”