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A Sendak appreciation.

Article Excerpt
Since his mid-thirties Sendak has drawn the attention of major reviewers and cultural pundits, Salman Rushdie, John Updike, John Gardner, and Bruno Bettelheim among them. Over the years there have been many raised glasses of champagne, more than a few raised eyebrows, and possibly some raised voices.

The collection of essays by Maurice Sendak, Caldecott & Co., can be bracketed on the shelf by those two luminously admiring critiques, Selma G. Lanes's The Art of Maurice Sendak and John Cech's Angels and Wild Things. In time, there will be others. [See excerpt from Tony Kushner's The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to Present on pages 709-713 of this issue.] Though these volumes, comprehensive in scope, can only touch on some of Sendak's influences, match some of Sendak's homages with their inspirations, they do begin to suggest the debt the artist owes to others.

Lanes and Cech identify various source material: Albrecht Durer for The Juniper Tree; the frontispieces by Ludwig Grimm of the original editions of the Brothers Grimm's Household Tales. The inaugural exhibit at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in 2002 highlighted influences on Sendak by Thomas Rowlandson, an eighteenth-century caricaturist. I've had the chance elsewhere to note the dizzying variety of visual quotations; they include, in part, Andrea Mantegna, William Blake, Samuel Palmer, Philipp Otto Runge, Randolph Caldecott, William Nicholson, Wilhelm Busch, Hans Tegner (or an artist whose silverpoint etchings are attributed to him), Winslow Homer, Vincent van Gogh, the photographs of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the contemporary photographer John Dugdale. And on and on. And that's just a start.

I can imagine Maurice Sendak spoofing the gripes of his critics: Durer? Blake? What's a kiddie book artist doing leafing through the portfolios of the big boys ?

The artist as scavenger is an ancient notion. No other...

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