Mass. institutions at center of Bob Eckstein’s new museum book

Bob Eckstein has not always been what you’d call a lover of museums. For instance, when he was 8.

“Yeah, it took some time to come around to them,” admits the illustrator, writer, and cartoonist for the New Yorker, New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Smithsonian Magazine, and many others. “I think every kid’s the same way: We all get dragged to these museums that we wouldn’t pick ourselves. 

“But there’s so many museums out there,” he says. “You know, in this country there’s over 7,000 museums, on every subject, so there’s something for everyone. And now that we can go and pick our own places, I love museums.”

That’s a fact that’s readily apparent if you take a look at Eckstein’s new book, “Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums,” which features 155 beautifully painted depictions of more than 75 museums in North America — including nine in Massachusetts — accompanied by stories that help get to the essence of what makes them so special.

But creating the paintings wasn’t as difficult an undertaking as it sounds, according to Eckstein. “What I did was based on what the museum called for — I simply was the background music to the beautiful museums. And I just kind of tried to lend my skills to what was needed,” Eckstein says. “But I was very much a secondary person in this whole process, in the sense that the museum itself told me what style I should try to do.

“The drawings themselves are idealistic, and sexy versions of the museum,” he explains. “The museum doesn’t look necessarily like that. But it’s an interpretation of the essence of it, and makes it very glamorous.”

We caught up with Bob from his home in New York City to talk about how “Footnotes” came together, and, in particular, how so many Massachusetts museums wound up amongst its pages.

Boston.com: The text that accompanies the illustrations in the book is not by any means boilerplate information about what you’d find at these museums. They really are stories, and you collected them from various sources, right?

Bob Eckstein: Yeah, what I did was try every which way to get a story. And that meant sometimes secretly from workers anonymously. It meant sometimes going to visitors who have been there who are fans of the museum. And I also went to the heads of the museums and sat down with the curators, and told them about my project. But often what would happen is, I’d get someone who totally got me and would share with me a gem of a story. Like the one I got for the Philadelphia Museum, in which somebody on the staff got fired for having sex on the artwork right before the museum opened. 

Was that wrong? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing …

It is. It is wrong, according to the employee handbook! The employee handbook says you’re not allowed to touch any of the artwork. And the person who was in charge of HR said to the person that she fired, that means you certainly can’t have sex on the art. Fair enough. 

The stories, too, are trying to go a little deeper than you would see on their website. It’s something like, oh my God, this story is amazing. I know it’s a secret. Another story would be at the Met. A friend of mine tried to not steal artwork, but to break in and put his artwork on the wall, so he could say he was in the Met. So stories like that was what I was looking for. 

And the way to get the best stories for the book was that I had collected way more than I used. And I only use like a third of the stories that I had collected. So these are just the best vetted stories that I knew would tantalize, and inspire people to go visit a museum and make the museum have another dimension that you wouldn’t normally think of.

There are nine Massachusetts museums featured in the new book. Do you have a particular favorite or favorites?

Well, Massachusetts has the best museums. It’s as simple as that. They have the most in the country. They have over 800 museums in Massachusetts alone. And my favorite artists are featured in those museums. There’s the MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) all the way on the western corner of Massachusetts, which has, well, some of the best fine artists, the contemporary artists there — like [Anselm] Kiefer, who is the German artist who has his own exhibit hall at that location, which is absolutely amazing. And if you get a chance to see the documentary about him, you’ll get a sense of that. 

But then back to Boston, of course, which has amazing museums like the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which has some of the most amazing stories, including the largest heist ever in the history of art. And you go there and you learn that the place will not replace these stolen paintings … so you see exactly where these paintings are missing. But of course, there’s a beautiful garden and location and just a really special place. 

And then going back to the Fine Arts Museum, well, oh, that’s just amazing — I don’t even know where to begin. The stories I have for that are just wonderful. One of the stories is how Vincent van Gogh had a painting which they discovered very recently had another painting hidden below it. And through the new technology of X-rays, they found this missing painting. And the story in my book explains why that is.

But my favorite museum in the Boston area, hands down, is the Peabody Essex Museum. 

That’s up my way on the North Shore — I was happy to see that that made the cut.

Well, not only [did it] make the cut, I made sure it got its due by giving it three pages. And I didn’t know where to begin, so many stories to share. But I illustrated one of the real features of that museum: They relocated a Chinese village house, piece by piece inside the museum for you to see. Seeing how they lived in this time of, I think, 16th century, it’s just amazing, you could see how much of a different world it is. You’re actually there in the kitchen and the living rooms from this old village.  But that’s just one little part of the museum. The museum is just spectacular. And it touches on a subject that I love, which is marine [history].

I have to ask about another Boston Museum that people might be less familiar with, the Museum of Bad Art. Which is an actual place.

Yeah, that museum is really something else. I mean, that’s another one that touches a nerve with me, because in my own home, we have a collection of bad art. We’re trying to find the worst art ever. That’s what I mean by “There’s a museum for everyone” — even people who are anti-art. Here it is the Museum of Bad Art. And I plan to go back there sometime soon. I want to go back to all these museums, but especially to the Boston museums. It’s close enough to New York City for me to drive to. And there’s such a concentration of great places that I really want to make a loop and go back to a few of them.

And out west from Boston is the Norman Rockwell Museum.

You know what, Norman Rockwell has a special spot for me, in my heart. I mean, I appreciate what he did. But I was never that much of a Norman Rockwell guy growing up that I had him as an influence. Not really at all. I appreciate it. And they appreciate me. I’ve spoken there twice. And I’ll probably be doing another event there. So I’m a real big part of that museum myself. And it’s a beautiful museum. But at the same time, it’s a style of art that my mindset is not in right now. My mindset is in abstract art, contemporary art, things that are just unusual.

An example of that was the Museum Of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, where you go in, and everything there is just so unusual and so new. And then at some point, I realized that the museum wasn’t real. That the museum itself was a piece of artwork. It was really an installation of what a museum could be. And to me, this touches on my comedy geek side — I like comedy. I write comedy. I used to write for Mad and National Lampoon and Spy. And I still write humor for a living. And I love Andy Kaufman. And this is the Andy Kaufman of museums. This is someone pushing the envelope, and surprising me totally.

I wonder if your book might inspire people to go visit the museums close to them. I think the average person has probably visited more museums in faraway cities than they have the ones in their backyard.

That’s a great point. I also see the book as being a sort of must-read for summer for your vacation plans, because we all have to sort of shift what we’re going to do for our vacations … Because a lot of people are strapped, budget-wise, and airfare has gotten very expensive.  But I do want people to feel like there’s other ways out there. So like you said, there is a vacation closer by than you think. We’ve taken for granted maybe some of these beautiful places we can go.

New England sites featured in ‘Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums’

• Beauport Sleeper-McCann House (Gloucester, MA)
• Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, MA)
• Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, MA)
• Mark Twain House and Museum (Hartford, CT)
• MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA)
• Museum of Bad Art (Boston, MA)
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, MA)
• National Museum of American Illustration (Newport, RI)
• Norman Rockwell Museum (Stockbridge, MA)
• Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA)
• Shelburne Museum (Shelburne, VT)
• Wenham Museum House (Wenham, MA)

For the full conversation with Bob Eckstein, listen to the latest episode of “Strip Search: The Comic Strip Podcast” below.

Clarification: This story has been edited to remove an erroneous report about the empty frames where the stolen paintings had hung at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. According to the museum, “we have chosen to display them because 1.) we remain confident that the works will someday return to their rightful place in the galleries; and 2.) they are a poignant reminder of the loss to the public of these unique works.”