ITHACA, NY.- The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University presents “So it goes”: Drawings by Kurt Vonnegut, on view from August 22 to December 20, 2015.

Known for his insightful novels, Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) also created many drawings during the 1980s, often applying the same acerbic humor. The Johnson Museum is presenting the first museum exhibition of these works, drawn from the collection of his daughter Nanette, showing another side of this creative artist in conjunction with the campus and community reading of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cornell’s 2015 New Student Reading Project selection.

Vonnegut’s graphic art career began with illustrations he created for Slaughterhouse-Five and later in Breakfast of Champions. “These drawings evoke the work of illustrators Al Hirschfield and Edward Gorey but are also inspired by art-historical masters such as Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and Paul Klee,” said Nancy E. Green, cocurator of the exhibition and the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of European and American Art, Prints and Drawings, 1800–1945, at the Johnson Museum, “variously playful, cerebral, intuitive, and prosaic.”

Vonnegut used colored felt-tip pens because, as he explained, “Oil is such a commitment,” and watercolors are “too bland, too very easy.” This exhibition takes a look at more than thirty drawings that Vonnegut deemed were “as rare as exotic postage stamps” and offer new ways of understanding this beloved, quixotic author.

While a chemistry major at Cornell, Vonnegut wrote for the Cornell Daily Sun and once claimed that “working on the Daily Sun . . . [was] how I got my liberal arts education.” In 1943 he enlisted in the army, cutting short his undergraduate career as part of Cornell’s Class of 1944. He was taken as a prisoner of war during the Battle of the Bulge and sent to the Dresden prison known as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five), a name adopted by the POWs. The devastating firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 was the inspiration for his famous novel. All students in the Cornell Class of 2019 and new transfer students will receive a copy when they arrive on campus in August, and copies will be distributed to the Tompkins County Public Library for a community read.

As part of the Johnson Museum’s fall opening reception on Thursday, September 10 (5:30–7:30 p.m.), there will be a special “Conversation about Kurt Vonnegut” from 6:00–7:00 p.m. with exhibition cocurator Nancy Green; filmmaker Robert B. Weide, who is completing a documentary, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time; Ginger Strand, author of the upcoming The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic; and George Hutchinson, the Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture, Department of English, Cornell. The reception and talk are free and open to the public.

This exhibition was cocurated by Nancy Green, the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of European and American Art, Prints & Drawings, 1800–1945, at the Johnson Museum, and Michele Wick ’82, Research Associate/Lecturer in Psychology at Smith College.