Among my favorite sentimental art spots is the Boston Athenaeum, a combination library, museum, exhibition space, and cultural center at a corner of Boston Common and steps across Beacon Street from the State House. I write “sentimental” since I don’t get there often. But one of the best exhibitions I’ve ever seen was there in 2011: Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey, a retrospective of the Brahmin of the bizarre and weirdly comic. It was peak concentration and perfectly balanced between his alphabet drawings — “Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin” — and his outlandish, macabre take on “little Zooks of whom no one was fond,” so little that he’s loaded into a cannon and fired into a lily pond.
Gorey wasn’t actually from Boston but from Chicago. Still, he went to Harvard, lived on Cape Cod most of his life, and had a distinctly Brahmin sense of humor. When I was the newly appointed director of Phillips Academy’s Addison Gallery, I visited the Athenaeum and saw that it allows dogs, or at least dogs brought by members. What a revelation! From that time forward, no dog went unadmitted at the Addison, and none ever behaved as badly as some children and adults. Unlike Zooks, none tempted us to bring out the artillery.
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