This story starts in 1964. Alfred's associates — the self-described "usual gang of idiots" at humor's MAD magazine — offered the artistic Rockwell $2,000 for a definitive oil painting of the magazine's imbecile mascot. Rockwell, well known for his scenes of Americana in both the Saturday Evening Post and Look magazines, considered the proposal.
In the end, he turned down the MAD men. "I'm scared," Rockwell typed to magazine art director John Putnam on July 2, 1964. "I think I better back out of this one.
"After talking with you, and my wife who has a lot more sense than I have, I feel that making a more realistic definitive portrait just wouldn't do," Rockwell added. Sixty years later, Alfred has evened the score. The juvenile delinquent's grinning visage is framed in galleries at the celebrated Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.
Rockwell's summer exhibition — "What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine" — opened earlier this month and will run through Oct. 27. "MAD was a groundbreaking magazine that influenced generations of readers and set the bar, and the tone, for contemporary humor and satire," said Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, the museum's chief curator and co-curator of the MAD exhibition.
"We are delighted to present original selections from the magazine's brilliant, irreverent artwork that captured and lampooned nearly all aspects of American life," Plunkett added. "And we are grateful to the collectors and artists who have made originals avai.
