Jim Shaw’s You Break It, You Bought It is derived from a classic New Yorker cover by Charles Addams, who is best known today for developing the Addams Family characters. When The Addams Family television show debuted in 1964, the editor of The New Yorker vowed never to run another cartoon of Addams’s ghoulish family, finding the sitcom unworthy of the magazine’s literary image. However, Addams managed to sneak one member of the Addams Family into this 1965 cover—the chubby kid photographer is unquestionably Pugsley Addams. 

Intrigued by Addams’s subversive gesture, Shaw re-illustrated and pays tribute to Pugsley as a symbol of all those who embrace and ridicule the divide between “high art” and “low culture.” This drawing is a preliminary sketch. Shaw framed the finished version under cracked glass as a gag on the idea that paintings are windows onto reality.

Label from Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One: Humor and Satire from the Collection, November 19, 2016–March 19, 2017