Patented Rube Goldberg

An award-winning, self-taught artist; a punch line; a canny social satirist and raconteur: The many facets of cartoonist Rube Goldberg, a man whose name is synonymous with wacky, chain-reaction contraptions, are explored in the Contemporary Jewish Museum's latest show, "The Art of Rube Goldberg." Culled from an archive of 50,000 drawings, the exhibition, lightly mapping his life and career, traces the development of his style, lacerating wit and vaudevillian humor dating from the turn of the 20th century.

The show features original artwork for cartoons with snappy titles like, "If the Hat Doesn't Fit, It Isn't Always the Hat's Fault," "Mike and Ike - They Look Alike," "Lala Palooza" and "Boob McNutt"; a cache of photographs and home movies; the invention drawings for which he's best known - more on those goodies later - and examples of his brief tango with the advertising trade and successful foray into editorial cartooning. "Peace Today," which depicts a huge atomic bomb teetering on a precipice above an abyss of global oblivion, won him a Pulitzer in 1948, while "The Great Upside Down Philosopher," a 1950 drawing of an inverted Joseph Stalin holding a paper that decrees top is bottom, black is white, far is near and day is night, high is low, cold is hot, yes is no, etc., has a curious resonance with our current political predicament.