Nick Tanner in New York writes:
Where The Wild Things Are is one of those books everybody seems to know. Maurice Sendak's illustrations of the lumbering, leering monsters known as the Wild Things are some of the most unforgettable images in children's artwork, and his story of a boy's night as their ruler remains as eerie as when it was first created in 1963. The current exhibition of 50 years of the artist and children's author's work at the Jewish Museum in New York, the first for 10 years and one of the biggest ever undertaken, sets out to explore both the origins of Sendak's ideas and the darker directions they have taken in the last two decades. But for the casual visitor the chief attraction of this beautifully staged exhibition is the sudden shock of recognition provided by the illustrations - the monster with the cockerel's head, the boy in the aeroplane made of dough - and the ease with which it is possible to slip back into Sendak's moonlit world.
From his earliest work as an illustrator in the 1950s two influences appear to have dominated Sendak's imagination: the pop culture of his childhood in 1930s Brooklyn, and the deeper reserves of Eastern European Jewish art and story telling. The skyline and mass entertainment of New York are taken on a bizarre journey in the 1970 book In The Night Kitchen, in which a boy takes a midnight flight above a city of giant kitchen ingredients, pursued by three chefs who look like Oliver Hardy. In contrast, a group of finely detailed pencil drawings used as illustrations to Isaac Bashevis Singer's children's book Zlateh the the Goat (1966) are actually peopled with the faces of unknown European relatives from Sendak's family photograph albums, some of whom had died in the Holocaust. The contrast between the dreamlike skyscapes and the sharp personal detail of the portraits suggests not only the two main forces in Sendak's art, but also his great versatility, which encompassed stage and costume design as well as pen and ink and watercolour painting.
Sendak finally attempted to unite the two major influences on his work in the disquieting books Outside Over There (1981) and Dear Mili (1988), the latter his first to deal overtly with the experience of children in the Holocaust. We Are All In The Dumps With Jack And Guy (1993) pushed this recognition of harsh realities even further, with a narrative and swirling visual style that exposed child homelessness, disease and exploitation in comtemporary America. As the manuscripts on display make clear, finally facing these issues was a profoundly difficult act for Sendak, and each individual work bears the marks of a deep personal struggle. For those only familiar with Where The Wild Things Are, this exhibition reveals Sendak as a restless as well as a gifted artist, whose ability to catch the dreamlike quality of a child's interaction with the world was increasingly matched by a desire to call attention to that world's harsher realities.
Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak is showing at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, until August 15th, website at thejewishmuseum.org.
