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Art of darkness

Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak demonstrates an illustrator's skill at interpreting other's ideas but also an ability to shape a vision of his own.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published February 5, 2006

[Images from the Tampa Museum of Art]

Maurice Sendak, final illustration for Brundibar, 2002.

	[Times photo: Melissa Lyttle]
	Close-up of a costume Maurice Sendak designed and painted for a ballet adaptation of his children’s book Where the Wild Things Are.
	Maurice Sendak, preliminary drawing for Outside Over There.
	Pen and ink drawing for The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm.

TAMPA - Let the wild rumpus transcend.

Those toothy monsters who transmuted Max's anger . . . the resourceful Rosy who beguiled the hours for her friends . . . the uninhibited Mickey who romped through the Night Kitchen on behalf of cake lovers everywhere . . . saviors all of that tenuous twilight passage between waking and sleeping, when parents soothe their children's anxieties with a bedtime story.

Thank you, Maurice Sendak, for the many times you made "good night" a benediction instead of a drama.

"Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak," an exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art, celebrates this unlikely dream-weaver with dozens of illustrations, from preliminary sketches to final color separations, along with videos and a load of memorabilia detailing his creative process.

Enjoy it as an homage to singular talent.

Or go deeper, into Sendak's journey of self-discovery and a torturous grappling with his faith that has yielded some of the most profound children's literature written.

The heart of darkness beneath the sunny surfaces of childhood is Sendak's metier. Now, we take for granted juvenile stories that confront complex emotions. But Sendak early on gave them faces and names, creating a body of work that redefined the genre.

Issuing from a self-described "traumatized Jew trying to make sense of the 20th century" are young characters who meet challenges large and small with independent pluck and fierce imaginations. They rise to an occasion when they must but want most of all to be welcomed back to a safe haven by someone who loves them "best of all," as Max realizes in Where the Wild Things Are.

Yet Sendak is difficult to categorize, as the exhibition shows us. It's divided by his stories and theatrical work and, in subtle sidebar ways, the preoccupations that generated the stories. He constantly challenges narrative and illustrative styles, creating, as one critic wrote, "crosscurrents that affirm children's need for fantasy while gently pushing them in the direction of grown-up behavior."

Sendak was born in Brooklyn in 1928, the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants. His own childhood was colored by a series of illnesses that left him in fragile health.

"I was a miserable kid," he has said. "I couldn't make friends. I couldn't skate great, I couldn't play stoopball terrific. I stayed home and drew pictures."

The greatest pall hanging over his youth was the death of most of his relatives in the Holocaust. On the day of his bar mitzvah, the family learned his paternal grandfather had died.

He didn't have much access to books, visit museums or take art lessons until high school. When he graduated, he studied at the Art Students League at night and worked for several visual display companies, including F.A.O. Schwartz. There he familiarized himself with the children's books department, fascinated with the classic illustrators. In 1950, a buyer, when she learned of his artistic talent, introduced him to Ursula Nordstrom, the legendary children's book editor at Harper and Bros. who gave him freelance jobs drawing for her authors. His breakthrough came in a collaboration with Ruth Krauss on A Hole Is to Dig. A New York Times review called the illustrations perfect.

Through the 1950s he worked steadily, defying the trend in bold graphics and colors, taking inspiration from artists he admired, especially 19th century ones.

This exhibition begins with the 1963 publication of Where the Wild Things Are, the book that put him on the map both as an illustrator and author. In its early version, Sendak used horses in a tiny sample book he made, but he changed the title characters to monsters because he felt he couldn't draw horses well enough. Costumes from a ballet based on the story and filmed excerpts of it are on view with original art and the typed text of the book with Nordstrom's annotations.

Wild Things was controversial at first. Publishers Weekly opined, "The plan and technique of the illustrations are superb, but they may well prove frightening, accompanied as they are by a pointless and confusing story."

The story tells of a young boy named Max whose disruptive anger gets him banished to his room without supper. Instead of venting more, he lets his imagination take over and is transported to a forest full of "wild things" over whom he presides as king. Homesick, he relinquishes his crown and returns to his room where his supper waits, "still hot."

Sendak distilled the narrative to fewer than 350 words. His illustrations act as visual adjectives and adverbs that detail the extent of Max's naughtiness, the fantastical inner landscape he creates to work out his frustrations and his poignant homecoming, when he has vanquished his anger as a wild thing. It won the prestigious Caldecott Award and has been a bestseller for more than 30 years.

In the Night Kitchen followed seven years later, Sendak's most joyous book to date. Protagonist Mickey falls out of bed and into a vat of cake batter in an oversized kitchen drawn as a Manhattan skyline and populated by three Stan Laurel lookalikes as chefs. Like Max, he is full of self-confidence, but he has none of Max's angst, creating an airplane from bread dough and diving into a milk bottle. It's a joyous romp through the big city, illustrated with bright colors and clean lines, created as he was saying goodbye to New York and moving to woodsy Connecticut.

Outside Over There, published in 1981, sharpened Sendak's formula of tight prose and lavish illustrations but was utterly original in its execution. He took the German romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich as inspiration in portraying the characters and settings, and the story involves a darker theme of abandonment. Ida, the young heroine, grudgingly cares for her infant sister while their mother pines for their absent sailor father. When the baby is abducted by goblins, Ida must lose her own detachment to save the child and in the process comes to understand that with love comes responsibility, even though her mother has not gotten that point by story's end.

We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy (1993) returns to the city that has become an unsettling nightmare, bearing the influence of Maus (1986), Art Spiegelman's acclaimed graphic novel about the Holocaust. The narrative in Jack and Guy, a reworking of two Mother Goose rhymes, tells of two homeless men determined to save a baby and kitten stolen by giant rats. They bumble and stumble until the moon intervenes and helps them retrieve the pair. The men decide to keep the baby, even though their home is on the street, and "bring him up as other folks do." It is an uncomfortable read, and Sendak injects the illustrations with subtle chaos and references to the Holocaust. Its end is ambiguous; the protagonists' miserable lives will probably be unchanged despite their heroism. Life offers no rewards for good behavior, kids.

Sendak confronts the Holocaust more directly in Dear Mili, published in 1988, and Brundibar, a collaborative book and opera with Tony Kushner published in 2005.

Mili retells a Wilhelm Grimm story about a child sent into the forest by her mother to escape war who winds up hiding for 30 years, going home only as her mother is near death. She plays among ruins that look like a cemetery and is protected by guardians and overgrowth that camouflages and menaces as she watches other children march toward a village resembling Auschwitz.

Brundibar is an adaptation of the children's opera by Hans Krasa, originally performed in the Terezin concentration camp. A separate gallery is devoted to Brundibar, with opera costumes and small set mock-ups accompanying book illustrations. Two children must earn money to buy milk for their ailing mother, tended by a doctor who makes house calls wearing the Nazi-dictated Star of David. The Holocaust allusions are overt, with a sadistic hurdy-gurdy man (standing in for Adolf Hitler) who constantly thwarts their efforts. Again, children must confront fears and threats that their adult caretakers cannot banish. And again, through newly found courage, they succeed. The illustrations are yet another departure for Sendak, who uses a cartoonish style and alternates neon colors with somber tones to contrast the repressive ghetto with teeming city streets. It is a sweeter tale than Jack and Guy, but it, too, explores the limits of love and sacrifice in a world designed to crush such impulses. We know the milk is a temporary balm for a family likely to be transported to their deaths. Brundibar, though banished, has the last word in a haunting coda, warning that evil never disappears, scrawled across a reproduction of the original invitation used to beckon Terezin prisoners to the opera's debut.

Sendak's illustrations for Isaac Bashevis Singer's fables, his set designs for Mozart's The Magic Flute, along with more video footage and his Durerlike drawings for The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm, burnish his reputation as a gifted interpreter of others' visions. Sendak has few illusions about the human race, especially in its adult form. He continues to have critics who consider his view of childhood antithetical, frightening, even brutal. And many adults continue to dislike his books, considering them scary, even brutal.

Sendak has said, ". . . I'll bet my pictures don't surprise kids. Children know there are mothers who abandon their children (for example), emotionally if not literally. Sometimes they have to live with this fact. They don't lie to themselves. They wouldn't survive if they did. And my object is never to lie to them."

The exhibition, using material from Sendak's archives at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, was organized by the Jewish Museum in New York, where it was enthusiastically received by the public and the critics in 2005. It's big; if you go with children, you should time the visit to their rhythms. A reading area with cushions allows children to plop down with Sendak's books while you take a more prolonged look at the material.

This exhibition is not high-concept art. Sendak is always an illustrator, serving his or another's story. But he excavates as deeply as any abstract expressionist into psyches that are never as innocent or ignorant as we might hope.

The rumpus here shakes, addles and roils. But ever so gently.

REVIEW: "Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak" is at the Tampa Museum of Art, 600 N Ashley Drive, Tampa, through April 23. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $8 adults, $6 seniors, $3 students and free for children 6 and younger; by donation from 5 to 8 p.m. every third Thursday and 10 a.m. to noon Saturday. (813) 274-8130.

[Last modified February 2, 2006, 12:31:03]