Getting Fricking MAD in NYC

Just a short post today as we are travellng back home after our short but fun trip to NYC. Yesterday we spent in Manhattan, visiting the MAD offices, the Frick Museum, walking about the city and having a nice dinner.

Stopping by the MAD offices is almost a must of course. When you work and communicate all the time with people but never see them there is a certain disjointed feeling, so whenever I come to NYC I always pop my head into the office to say hello.

The lobby at the MAD Offices

Two usual idiots

Prints of some of the famous works of art MAD has mocked

Original Norman Mingo painting… the only one he did in oils for MAD

Another original Mingo from a famous back cover ad parody

Me and Dick DeBartolo aka “MAD’s Maddest Writer”

We finally visited the Frick Museum (actually called the “Frick Collection”), something The Lovely Anna has been wanting to do for a long time. It’s a relatively small collection of mainly French and Dutch renaissance and masters paintings, with some sculpture and 18th century furniture thrown in. I would highly recommend it for many reasons. First, even if you get bored at museums this one is very small and easy to walk through. I took my time and saw all of it in about 3 hours. That’s about the limit of my attention span for that knd of thing. Second, the work is awesome in it, and as it’s all tradtitional masters work by the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Dyke, Whistler and many others, there is no painting there that makes you wonder why anyone would think it was a good piece of art… these are no brainers in that department. Finally the “museum” is actually H.C. Frick‘s home (he was a steel magnate who was a rabid art collector) and the art is arranges with the sculptures and furniture in intimate, natural rooms very unlike the stuffy, roped off sterility of a huge museum.

Entrance to the Frick

Highly illegal picture of the interior garden of the Frick