Art: Illustrator of the offbeat

As a creative personality, Edward Gorey (1925-2000) is almost impossible to classify. For a museum audience, he is either an illustrator who writes or a writer who draws.

For good measure, we can throw in costume designer - he won a Tony award in 1977 for the Broadway production of Dracula. He also created "theater pieces," sometimes performed with puppets.

Gorey wrote and illustrated dozens of books, many of which seem to be directed at children, and yet his macabre, offbeat sense of humor often seems inappropriate for, or potentially incomprehensible to, little shavers.

He is perhaps most familiar to the broader public through illustrations for the New Yorker magazine and the animated introduction to the PBS Mystery! series, which features a damsel in distress and falling masonry.

One thing's certain about Gorey: He is an acquired taste, and not necessarily one easily acquired, at that. Everything about his work is arcane - his panoply of Victorian-Edwardian characters rendered in an appropriately 19th-century visual idiom; his complex and nonsensical wordplay, and the fact that his narratives are absurdly fantastical.

If you want to take a crack at Gorey - and he's well worth the effort - the exhibition of his drawings at the Brandywine River Museum is the place to begin. The aptly titled "Elegant Enigmas" features about 180 original drawings, most of them book-scale (Gorey drew every image at the size it was to be reproduced).

All but a handful of the drawings and related materials are lent by the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust, which operates the artist's former residence in Yarmouth Port, on Cape Cod, as a house museum. The show, complete with catalog, was organized by Brandywine, which specializes in American illustration; it will travel to several museums.

Although he studied briefly at the School of the Art Institute in his native Chicago, Gorey was self-taught as an illustrator. (He majored in French at Harvard College, from which he graduated in 1950.)

During most of the 1950s, he worked for Doubleday Anchor books in New York, creating book covers and sometimes text illustrations for works by authors such as H.G. Wells, T.S. Eliot, and Edward Lear.