Art of Rube Goldberg by Jennifer George

Author:Jennifer George
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams Publishing

The Weekly Meeting of

the Tuesday Ladies’ Club

OPPOSITE. The Weekly Meeting

of the Tuesday Ladies’ Club. Top

left: October 2, 1917. Top right:

November 13, 1918. Bottom

left: March 12, 1918. Bottom right:

August 20, 1918.

F

or years my parents’ den was hung with dozens

of Rube’s cartoons, matted and framed and

mounted close together, a mosaic of pen-and-ink that

covered the room like wallpaper—and which I largely

ignored. However, there was one cartoon on the wall that

every now and then I’d glance at, notice more carefully,

and admire. It depicted a group of fashionable women

outrageously plumed in fur and feathers, hats and heels,

and other than the strange contraption that seemed to be

churning out pretzels on the left side of the drawing, the

cartoon seemed completely out of character with what I’d

known of my grandfather’s work. Had I bothered to read

the fine print of the cartoon and its penciled caption at the

bottom, I would have been prepared for the treasure trove

of drawings I was to find in a long-forgotten portfolio in the

Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley

(my grandfather’s alma mater, and where the bulk of his

life’s work is stored).

The Weekly Meeting of the Tuesday Ladies’ Club, a

large single-panel cartoon that ran on Tuesdays from

May 1, 1917, to September 27, 1921, chronicles the activities

of New York City’s society ladies at the dawn of the

twentieth century. Imagine HBO’s Girls meets Gibson

Girls, as seen through the prism of my grandfather’s

sharp, satirical mind. It’s no accident that the Ladies’ Club

series was created at the beginning of Rube’s relationship

with Irma, when his observational eye was focused on

the opposite sex. And what followed was vintage Rube,

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