Wolfe’s stuff

“I feel very comfortable predicting that art historians 50 years from now, assuming we’re in a world kind enough to indulge art historians, will look back upon illustrators as the great American artists of the second half of the 20th century,” Tom Wolfe once remarked. Although widely known for penning bestsellers such as “The Right Stuff,” “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “The Painted Bird,” his snarky critique of modern art, many are not aware of Wolfe’s work as a longtime illustrator.

The National Museum of American Illustration in Newport, R.I., is paying homage to the satirist with the exhibition “Tom Wolfe: In Our Time,” the first showing of Wolfe’s drawings. The collection of 37 pen and ink illustrations is gathered from his 1980 book of the same title in which the writer in the trademark white suit took aim at well-coifed anchormen, new left revolutionaries and the varying shirt collars of presidents.

“All these years we never realized he was an illustrator,” said Laurence S. Cutler, co-founder and CEO of the museum. This revelation was brought to his attention during preparations for the museum’s 10th Anniversary Gala in 2010, at which Wolfe was a speaker.

“In the course of the conversation about his speech, he mentioned the illustrations he did for Harper’s,” Cutler said. “He lives just a couple blocks from us in New York City, so we went by and took a look, and they were fantastic.” Cutler’s wife, Judy Goffman Cutler, the museum’s director-curator, is also co-founder and executive director of the American Illustrators Gallery in New York City. The couple originally founded the museum to house their art collection from the “Golden Age of American Illustration” (1895-1945).

Wolfe, 80, the leading figure of the New Journalism movement, began illustrating as a cub reporter for a newspaper in Springfield, Mass. The book “In Our Time” was a compilation of his illustrations and accompanying essays initially published in Harper’s as a monthly series. Wolfe comments and dissects the narcissistic ‘70s, which he famously labeled the “Me decade.”

One image of a weaselly looking rat-tailed husband rowing a mousetrap can be viewed as metaphor for the divorce epidemic of the era -- the long-wedded man who shucks his wife for a “New Cookie.” “The Seven Graces of New York” is a series of images devoted to stereotypical New Yorkers such as “The Cabdriver” and “The Maitre d’.” “Tom used minimal props in his drawings, but the combination of his pictures with his words were acerbic,” Goffman Cutler said. Few examples of his drawing have emerged after the 1980 book.

“In Our Time” runs through Labor Day. Wolfe’s fourth novel, “Back to Blood,” is due next year.