Goldberg was an American cartoonist, sculptor, and inventor. He is best known for a series of popular cartoons depicting complicated gadgets that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.
Background
Born in San Francisco, he and his siblings were reared, after the early death of their mother, by their highly disciplined father. As a reaction to his father's flamboyant nature and his older brother’s strong sense of self-confidence, Rube grew up shy.
Education
His fascination for cartoons manifested itself early. When he was eleven, he paid for professional drawing lessons from a man who painted billboards, Charles Beall. Beall also emphasized discipline, but he immediately recognized Goldberg’s inborn talent. By the time Goldberg was twelve, he had won his first art prize.
His father had no appreciation for Rube’s burgeoning talent, and although he gave up on the idea, of sending his son to a military academy, he did coerce him into studying mining engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. While a sophomore, Goldberg studied art under William Morris Hunt, from whom he acquired the philosophy that “humor comes from everyday situations because nothing is as funny as real life.”
Career
Upon graduating, he worked at mapping sewer pipes and water chains for one of San Francisco’s sewer experts. After only six months, he quit and, despite his father’s admonitions, took on a very low-paying position with the San Francisco Chronicle art department, beginning, like most early cartoonists, with the sports page. He left the Chronicle for the Bulletin, but the possibility of greater prospects in New York challenged him to overcome his father’s apprehensions and leave the relative security of his position in San Francisco.
In New York, after many rejections, he got a position with the Evening Mail in 1906, and his career as a cartoonist received a great boost. In the following years he created Boob McNutt, Professor Lucifer Gorgenzola Butts, Fifty-Fifty, Life’s Little Jokes, Ike and Mike, Foolish Questions, and his great, hilarious Inventions. During his lifetime he created over 50,000 cartoons, including one Invention a week for twenty years.
Goldberg’s cartoons were based on his perceptions of the foibles of humanity. His special sense of the comic depicted situations in which technological advances invented for the well-being of mankind backfired into uncontrollable monstrosities.
His cartoon heroes were often featured with cigars; he himself smoked five cigars a day for sixty-five years, claiming they were his “incense-and-myrrh.” After he married, the women in his cartoons evolved from overweight, big-mouthed caricatures to sensible individuals.
After a dry spell between 1928 and 1934, Goldberg regained his creative momentum and joined the New York Sun as political cartoonist in 1938.
At the age of eighty he decided to move from newspaper work to sculpture, and devoted the rest of his life to making small sculptures that showed the same humorous wisdom as his drawings. Three exhibitions of his bronzes were held at the Hammer Galleries while he was still alive, and Hammer continued to exhibit his work posthumously.
Personality
Over his objections, he became increasingly known as the philosopher-humorist.