JUNIOR BACON The doodle in question looked a lot like this, only brilliant

The Magna Doodle was plucked from a chest of toys in the museum’s coatroom, formerly a child’s rumpus room when the museum was home to a family of Austrian squatters in the late 1800’s. Such a discovery is considered to be “a fucking mind-blower,” Cooper-Hewitt Director Paul Thompson said in a telephone interview. “I didn’t even know they made those things back then.”

The Magna Doodle was found in a chest of toys that also included a Magnetic Wonder Whiskers toy that may have belonged to Michelangelo, and an unidentified drawing toy that involved using a solid plastic pencil to draw on a sheet of static cling film that was erased when you peeled the sheet away from the backing, Thompson said.

The museum, part of the Washington-based Smithsonian Institution, purchased the Magna Doodle within a group of five magnetic art toys in 1842, for $1. The purchase was ridiculed by some at the time, but honored as it fulfilled the wishes of then-Director Hyram McWinter, who often said “If it’s artsy, I want it.” By often we mean like every five minutes, it drove people crazy.

Museum scholars guessed the work might have been done by a 16th century magnetic artist Benny del Bacon, who often fobbed off his doodles on the art community of that day as “pre-surrealist deconstructionalism.” Somehow it got into the wrong box and was almost sold at a museum garage sale, only to be saved by a demanding child who lived in the Cooper-Hewitt at the time.

“It’s the old cliche: Renaissance master doodles a masterpiece on a child’s magnetic toy, museum buys it on accident and almost sells it for nothing before snotty little Austrian kid steals it off the nickel table and hides it in his toy chest for 100 years,” Thompson said.

It was first identified as a Michelangelo in April by Sir Clifford Buford, director of the National Galleries of Scotland or something, during an unauthorized surprise inspection of the Cooper-Hewitt. Buford, an Italian Renaissance scholar and air hockey freak, was rummaging around the coatroom of the design museum looking for a nice umbrella when he came across a toy chest simply labeled “Piss Off.” One particular toy inside the chest caught his eye. ‘My Crap, this is a Michelangelo!”’ he exclaimed, not anticipating being quoted later.

While the experts agree on the artist, there is no agreement on how the doodle fits into the larger body of Michelangelo’s work.

The Manimal’s genitalia is only inferred, but the doodle clearly shows where they should go, said Sarah Lawrence, the museum’s expert on the Italian Renaissance magnet-based arts. However, a cat doodled in the background features an alarmingly oversized penis, raising questions about Michelangelo’s state of mind at the time of the doodling.

“You recognize a Michelangelo as you recognize a friend,” Buford said by courier fox from Florence. “If you’re familiar with a friend, and you’re walking down the street, you wave to them. They may wave back, or they may duck into a shop to avoid being seen with you on the street. I rather think Michelangelo’s doodle waved back. Either that, or these things here are ass cheeks; probably this Gwyneth person’s. Though I’d always heard he was gay.”

The Magna Doodle will go on display at the Cooper-Hewitt museum in about a year, next to a wild scratch-paper doodle Picasso did while on the phone with his mother, Thompson said.

the commune news drew a great picture of a horse once, and the commune news doesn’t care what anyone else thought about it. Ivana Folger-Balzac is apparently impervious to bullets, knives, and any insult known to man.

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