The machine-making, cartoon-drawing Pulitzer prize-winner is the focus of a new exhibition, which also shines a light on the relevance of his political art

Theres a cartoon hanging in the Queens Museum in New York a drawing of a man with a shovel, digging through piles of paper.

The papers symbolize government corruption, but they wind up in the dump. The caption explains: Senate investigating committee digs up huge mass of evidence which passes before startled eyes of indignant but apathetic public, and then slides into obscurity, making room for next investigation.

From Donald Trumps tax returns to the Ukraine scandal and the impeachment inquiry, this has never felt more relevant. But the cartoon is from the 1940s, by the New York cartoonist Rube Goldberg, and its on view as part of The Art of Rube Goldberg, a survey which opened this weekend and runs until 9 February.

The pioneering 20th-century artist created more than 50,000 cartoons in a career that spanned seven decades. This is the first retrospective in 49 years to look at Goldbergs work. It also highlights his overlooked career as a Pulitzer prize-winning political satirist.

Political cartoons were not his main output, but some of his work remains so relevant, said the museums assistant curator, Sophia Marisa Lucas. He was seeking to find humor in some things, as a clever opportunity for relief.

A traveling exhibition organized by Art & Artists the retrospective features Goldbergs views on society in the 1930s and 1940s, skewering Adolf Hitler, commenting on the inflation of the US dollar and addressing the dire effects of war.

Goldberg wasnt primarily a satirist but made a significant impact with his political cartoons. He received a Pulitzer prize in 1948 for a drawing called Peace Today, showing an atomic bomb teetering towards the brink of destruction.

Rube Goldberg, Foolish Questions postcards, 1910. Illustration: Rube Goldberg

Goldberg was born in San Francisco in 1883, moved to New York City in 1907 and got a job at the Evening Mail in 1908 with a cartoon series called Foolish Questions. It was based on the premise: Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

In one cartoon, a woman asks her husband, who just came in from the rain: Why, dearie, did you get wet? He answers: Of course not the rain is dry today. The series was so popular, readers started mailing in their own foolish questions for Goldberg to answer in the series, which ended up in a book and merchandise such as a deck of cards.

The exhibition follows progression of his hand, said Lucas. From the cartoons he did at the beginning of his career, it segues into his social commentary. Goldberg commented primarily on human nature.

Throughout the 1910s, Goldberg was a standup comedian in New York, toured with a troupe of comics for a vaudeville show and used slapstick in his cartoons. A new section in this particular exhibition is devoted to vaudeville one of his biggest influences.

What we did differently here, for this exhibition, was pull out another section on the influence of vaudeville on his work, said Lucas. Its history that felt buried but had a significant influence.

As Goldbergs cartoons became syndicated by national newspapers in 1922, he started to earn $200,000 a year and reached an audience of millions.

Rube Goldberg, Professor Butts invention drawing (postage stamps), 1929. Ink on paper. Illustration: Rube Goldberg

From 1914 to 1964, he ran a series called The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts. Before becoming a cartoonist, Goldberg studied engineering, and here put his knowledge to work. He turned seemingly useless tasks into complicated chain reaction invention machines (in one, a car gets a windshield wiper from a dogs wagging tail; in another, theres a 20-step way to brush your teeth).

It didnt stop on paper, either. Goldbergs invention machines made it to Hollywood. He created a feeding machine that allowed Charlie Chaplin to sip on soup without raising his arms in the 1936 film Modern Times.

Much later, his breakfast machines were featured in blockbuster films, including Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, where a toy train pushes plates along a kitchen, while in Pee-wees Big Adventure, a statue of Abraham Lincoln flips pancakes (which end up stuck to the ceiling).

Goldberg didnt get into political cartoons until the 1930s. You see signs of his political cartoons in his early work, but its more about personality, bureaucracy, the human condition, said Lucas.

In 1938, when Goldberg was 55, he became the New York Suns political cartoonist, producing three cartoons a week on topics including corruption, poverty and crime. They werent the latest news; it was reflections on tax cuts, the war, broad issues, said Lucas. Not urgent daily news.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, he commented on government austerity throughout the second world war, primary elections, lying presidents and the Middle Eastern conflict. He showed an American taxpayer getting bonked on the head and compared vote counting to a carnival game. When all clerks are unconscious, the election is over, Goldberg wrote.

One cartoon from the 1940s, called The Numbers Blues, shows a man standing sheepishly under rows of numbers hovering above his head from his phone number to social security and bank account imagining himself as a jailbird.

Political cartoons were easier for me than the inventions because they were almost pure idea and the draftsmanship was relatively simple, Goldberg once said, I could do two political cartoons a day, but an invention sometimes required a week.

Rube Goldberg. Photograph: Oscar White/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

His creative process might have been easier, but the world around him became complicated. During the second world war, Goldberg faced intense criticism for his political cartoons and received a lot of hate mail. Since he was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Germany, he advised his two sons who lived with him in New York, George and Thomas, to change their surname from Goldberg to George.

In the last chapter of his newspaper career, Goldberg left the Sunin 1949 to become a cartoonist for the New York Journal, staying until his last cartoon was published in 1964, when he was 80.

Once drawing became too difficult in old age, he turned to sculpture. Along the way, he also made books and hosted his own radio and TV shows.

Three weeks before he passed away in 1970, Goldberg had a retrospective at the National Museum of American History in Washington. Photos from the opening show the artist, aged 87, in a sharp suit and bow tie, white-haired and in black-rimmed glasses, chatting with guests alongside his wife. The exhibition was calledDo It the Hard Way, and as one of his last masterpieces, he created a cartoon foretelling the future in 2070, he predicted women would still be fighting for equal rights.

The walls were covered with Goldbergs drawings. Large cutouts of speech bubbles hovered above them, as if life itself were a cartoon.

He was a commercial cartoonist for major publications, maximizing the opportunity in the golden age of newspapers, said Lucas. But his main goal is that he was a humorist.

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Her-my-own-knee #hermionegranger #harrypotter

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The Harry Potter star has refused to rule out resurrecting the Boy Who Lived, while Hathaway is keen to pull on Catwomans leathers once more. Both should proceed with caution

When a 53-year-old Sean Connery resurrected the role of James Bond in 1983 after a 12-year break, even the title of the movie in which the debonaire Scotsman strapped on his Walther PPK and took on the forces of Spectre one last time seemed to hint at the projects questionable nature. Never Say Never Again turned out to be a decent enough revival for Connery; certainly preferable to Octopussy, the official Eon-produced Bond film that emerged the same year with an even older Roger Moore as 007. But the history of Hollywood icons digging up the roles that made them famous and applying spark plugs hasnt always been as laudable.

Harrison Ford gave Star Wars: The Force Awakens a kind of gnarly, yet soulful gravitas last year as the returning space scoundrel Han Solo. But he wasnt quite so good when nuking the fridge in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Sylvester Stallone won widespread praise, and an Oscar nomination, for his return to the role of aged blue-collar brawler Rocky Balboa in Creed, but fans of the one-time heavyweight champ had to sit through at least three featherweight Rocky instalments before being treated to one last knockout uppercut.

It is therefore entirely understandable that Daniel Radcliffe continues to play it safe, like a newly arrived Hogwarts student who asks the sorting hat to place him in Hufflepuff, when asked about the possibility of returning to the role of an all-grown-up Boy Who Lived in a mooted future movie adaptation of JK Rowlings stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Im never going to close the door; that would be a stupid thing to do, he told the Hollywood Reporter this weekend. But I think Ill be happy enough and secure enough to let someone else play it.

Theres a part of me thats like, some things are better left untouched, added Radcliffe. If we went back to Potter, theres a chance wed make what Star Wars: The Force Awakens was to the original Star Wars, but theres also the chance that wed make Phantom Menace. So I dont want to go back to anything like that and maybe sour what people have already loved.

The casual observer might wonder what Radcliffe could possibly have to lose should Warner Bros and right now reports hinting at a new Potter film are merely rumours decide to move ahead with a new instalment in the second highest grossing movie saga of all time. But the 27-year-old actor has carved out a quietly impressive film career since shedding his Hogwarts uniform, even if his CV so far lacks even the barest sprinkling of true awards season magic dust. In wizarding terms, hes bumbling along rather nicely as a sort of Hollywood version of Neville Longbottom ever-present, strong in supporting roles and with the occasional moment of personal glory to celebrate, even if hes unlikely to ever win the Hogwarts house cup.

And yet Voldemort-levels of danger surely loom should Radcliffe decide to dig out the stick-on lightning scar one last time. The nature of the Potter sagas remarkable achievement, in maintaining the same young cast throughout eight movies and a decade in filming time, rather masked the odd wooden scene from its key trio. But critics and fans might be less forgiving were they to drop their wands as fully mature actors. Is it any wonder Radcliffe views the prospect of a new instalment with suspicion?

On the other hand, by the time the Englishman has matured enough to play a middle-aged Potter in a decades time and should that one great role that establishes him indubitably in the Hollywood firmament fail to come his way in the meantime its hard to imagine him continuing to play hard to get.

The situation regarding Anne Hathaways suggestion that shed be keen on slipping into Catwomans slinky leathers once again in the new DC expanded universe of superhero movies seems more complex. Hathaway has complained in recent times that shes not getting the roles she once was thanks, she believes, to Hollywoods systemic ageism towards even those female stars who remain in their early 30s. But would she really want to damage the legacy of her wonderfully vivacious turn in The Dark Knight Rises, filled as it was with old school Hollywood poise and seductive, femme fatale elegance, by reprising the role in a very different era that has so far failed to convince the critics?

Where Christopher Nolans Batman trilogy pitched a Gotham City closer to reality than any previous big or small screen iteration, the recently released Suicide Squad suggests Warner Bros wants its new universe populated largely with larger-than-life, mega-powered meta-humans. These films draw their energy from video game tropes and thoughtless CGI carnage rather than the sumptuously plotted, Michael Mann-inspired gangster noir of Nolans The Dark Knight, or the camp yet menacing supernatural stylings of the Tim Burton era. It is therefore a little hard to see where Hathaways stunningly effervescent yet relatively understated Catwoman fits in.

The other way to look at it is that Warner/DC might benefit from sprinkling a little Nolanesque magic on its faltering shared superhero universe. We should not forget that the studio allowed Superman to be reimagined with real world stylings as a direct consequence of the Dark Knight trilogys success in Man of Steel, though that template has been conveniently jettisoned for subsequent films. But just as Hathaway would be well-advised to think carefully before milking (sorry) one of her best-known roles, Warner probably knows it has come too far with its new, as yet rather fractured comic book vision to suddenly change direction now.

In the early 1980s, Connery was forced to roll back a 1971 promise that he would never again play the role of Bond when the opportunity arose to return to Her Majestys Secret Service for one last adventure. Both Radcliffe and Hathaway have sensibly learned from the Scotsmans mistake: given the right circumstances, returning to past glories might just send both actors careers to new levels.

And yet theres a reason the phrase Never Say Never Again is part of the English lexicon purely for its Bond associations. The rather better-known adage is the less ostentatious but rather more trenchant never look back.

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