MWPAI Fun Facts, Round 3

Posted by Mary Murray on March 15th 2011 | 0 Comments

Tags: Museum

The Museum of Art’s 1946-47 exhibition schedule included drawings by cartoonist William Steig (later famous for creating the character Shrek) from his series “All Embarrassed,” “About People,” “Small Fry,” and “Lonely Ones.”

William Steig

Speaking of cartoons and what-not, in February 1948 the Institute hosted an exhibition of Milton Caniff’s “Steve Canyon” comics. In the Bulletin that month, Canyon was described as lean and squinty and “a fellow with an easy, insolent, Gary–Cooperish kind of grace that marked a breed of plainsmen and airplanesmen” (today perhaps he would be described as Clint-Eastwoodish). There was also a February 6 lecture by George Rickey, then head of the Muhlenberg College Art Department, titled “Aren’t the Funny Papers Art?” In March and April 2012, the Museum of Art revisits the theme of comics-as-art with the exhibition LitGraphic: The World of the Graphic Novel, a show organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

And . . .

Steven Canyon

Later this year, in September 2011, the Museum of Art opens the exhibition Ansel Adams: Masterworks. More than 60 years ago, in October 1947, the Museum hosted Photographs by Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, a show on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

What goes around, as they say.