Ghoulish, macabre, demonic, depraved, bizarre, eerie and weird have all been used to describe his work and the characters therein. Adorable, sweet, charming, humorous, enchanting, tender and captivating are also adjectives used to describe the same body of work, as well as the man himself, the extraordinary artist Charles Samuel Addams. His rare gift was the ability to enjoin such dichotomies in wonderfully crafted cartoons and drawings loved by millions worldwide.
Born in Westfield, New Jersey in 1912, Charles Samuel Addams' prodigal artistic talent lead him to become one of America's best cartoonists. In 1933, at just 21 years of age, The New Yorker magazine first published his work. Addams went on to become one of that magazine's marquee contributors until his death in 1988. His body of work spans almost 60 years of output and is estimated to contain several thousand works. Over 15 books of his artwork have so far been published, appearing in many languages across the globe. Addams works appear in a number of prestigious permanent collections including The New York Public Library, The Museum of the City of New York, The Smithsonian Institution, The Cooper Hewitt and The Library of Congress.
Charles Addams is most widely known for the creation of The Addams Family® of characters who formed the basis of the TV show that first appeared in 1964. Now famous, Morticia, Fester, Gomez, Wednesday, Pugsley, Grandma, Lurch and Thing existed in various forms and aspects within the Addams cartoons prior to the sitcom. It was in working with the idea of a television production, that Addams coalesced a motley group of unnamed characters into the specific personages he then collectively called The Addams Family®. These Family members appear in only about 80 initially published works, while the majority of his works are occupied by hundreds of other characters, from Aviators to Zoo Keepers. Addams themes deal as much with modern life as with ancient times and his topics span art, travel, relationships, the workplace, animals and children, to name a few.
Excerpt above taken from the Tee and Charles Addams Foundation found here: charlesaddams.com/history2#/charles-addams
In Search of the Dark Muse of a Master of the Macabre
by Janet Maslin
On the evidence of Linda H. Davis’s biography, Charles Addams was sociable and debonair. “A well-dressed, courtly man with silvery back-combed hair and a gentle manner, he bore no resemblance to a fiend,” Ms. Davis writes. (If anything, he bore a rubbery resemblance to the actor Walter Matthau.) So the macabre hallmarks of Mr. Addams’s famous cartoons cannot be said to tell his story.
Still, Ms. Davis tries to make them speak. She relies heavily on the Addams canon to enliven an otherwise surprisingly colorless portrait of the artist. “Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life” uses many drawings as illustrations, so that it redundantly paraphrases as well as depicts Mr. Addams’s most memorably ghoulish ideas. Its own efforts to address Mr. Addams’s dark side (“Was it all a cover, just a gag?” “Or was he working out unhealthy impulses in his cartoons?”) are considerably less interesting than his.
Ms. Davis conducted numerous useful interviews with Mr. Addams’s friends and associates. But her book also accepts an Addams persona that sounds cooked up for the benefit of feature writers. He is shown at home with a suit of armor and a bat figurine in a posed photograph at the front of the book, but the shelves behind him hold books about painting and antiques, as well as a novel by John Updike. The Addams who made a point of collecting crossbows and using a little girl’s tombstone for a coffee table was at least partly a character contrived for the public eye. It is left to Ms. Davis, in this first full-length Addams biography, to delve beneath the cobwebby surface of Mr. Addams’s world to find something real. She gets only as far as illustrating why the Addams gags about spousal murder made autobiographical sense. Mr. Addams was a figurative ladykiller, squiring Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine and Jacqueline Kennedy. But this book’s main drama revolves around his second wife, the one woman he might reasonably have wanted to murder.
Ms. Davis makes the childhood of happy little Charlie Addams (distantly related to John Adams and John Quincy Adams, despite the different spellings of their last names, and to Jane Addams, too) sound bland. Growing up in Westfield, N.J., he was “known as something of a rascal around the neighborhood.” One friend remembers that “there was always a little group of boys at his house, doing things.” He stood out slightly because, in the words of another, “his sense of humor was a little different from everybody else’s.”
His talent was apparent early: “From almost the moment he could hold a crayon in his chubby baby hand, Charlie had begun drawing with a happy vengeance.” And as soon as he saw The New Yorker, he thought, “Well, that’s the magazine I want to work for.” His career there began on Feb. 6, 1932, with a sketch of a window washer that earned him $7.50. Anyone wanting to know the full details of Mr. Addams’s freelance income will find them closely catalogued here.
In 1938 he began drawing the witch-goddess in the long black dress, a svelte vision he would later conjure in real life. Mr. Addams’s first wife, Barbara Jean Day, whom he apparently met late in 1942, looked like the cartoon Morticia Addams in the flesh. Their marriage lasted eight years and broke up after Mr. Addams, an inveterate hater of small children, balked at the prospect of adopting one.
Still, it was a happy union compared with Mr. Addams’s marriage to Barbara Barb (born Estelle B. Barb). The second Barbara, whom he married in 1954, combined Morticia-like looks with diabolical legal scheming. Ms. Davis describes the remarkable tug of war that began once Mr. Addams’s second wife, a practicing lawyer, began persuading him to sign away rights to much of what he owned. She wound up in control of the “Addams Family” television and movie franchises and even bewitched Mr. Addams into taking out a $100,000 life insurance policy.
“I told him the last time I had word of such a move was in a picture called ‘Double Indemnity’ starring Barbara Stanwyck, which I called to his attention,” wrote Mr. Addams’s lawyer, whom he dared to consult only on the sly. In the film, Ms. Stanwyck’s character plotted to murder her husband for insurance money.
The breathtaking malice of the Addams cartoons may have owed much to this struggle. But Ms. Davis offers little insight into exactly how such connections worked. “As a storyteller who loved the fantastical, he offered no analysis of the attraction except to say that a part of him had never really grown up,” she writes weakly about “Dear Dead Days,” the most bizarre of Mr. Addams’s books. While this biography cites some of Mr. Addams’s most ghoulish preoccupations, it never really grasps them and clings more easily to the banal. “He had remained the solid American boy he had always been, never taking himself too seriously,” Ms. Davis ultimately concludes. “Success, fame — none of it had changed him.”
One of the sadder events in Mr. Addams’s life was the transformation of The New Yorker’s policy regarding material for cartoon artists. When he began freelancing (and he was still a freelancer 50 years later), writers supplied some of the premises for cartoons. Later, these writers could illustrate their own work, and Mr. Addams, who died in 1988, had to rely more heavily on his own inspiration. “Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life” never quite fathoms what it was.
Source
Maslin, Janet. “In Search of the Dark Muse of a Master of the Macabre.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 Oct. 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/books/26masl.html.