Wild Things, the Maurice Sendak show at the Denver Art Museum, is an absorbing show that only indirectly addresses some of the very complex issues that surround the artist. This is not too surprising; For one thing, the show was set up as one of those blockbuster, cattle call audience building shows, and at a very friendly price. Seeing it is pretty distracting, as these things go, which is too bad as the questions raised by Sendak’s work are various, and have really not been settled since his death, in 2012.
My own experience with Sendak is somewhat oblique. Born after the first rush of Baby Boomers who screeched for the Beatles, then famously turned into craven curmudgeons during the Reagan years, I was too young to stay up for 1964’s Ed Sullivan show, but too old for 1963’s release of Where the Wild Things Are. By then I had already moved on to “Franklin W. Dixon” and was soon to find Marvel Comics and JRR Tolkien. My introduction to Sendak probably came in the 70s, when his engaging, colorful cartoons, and iconoclastic take on childhood fit in nicely with our suburban hippie pot dreams. Sendak’s cartoons, influenced by Walt Disney and Crockett Johnson, but darker and lush with hatching, appealed to me.
As such, I knew little about Sendak’s history: troubled Jewish childhood, gayness, successful author/artist, dogged with the label of children’s book illustrator. The show presents him as a sort of artistic social worker, giving kids a voice in a troubled world. In a way, he was that, but he also to an extent, was the kid, and an angry one at that. Alexander Theroux in an essay published just after the Wild Things author’s death in 2012, explores these issues in greater depth than the DAM show does.
The Comics Journal, the feisty catch all publication for all of the cartoon arts’ aspiration, whim and grievance, seems to have attracted Sendak’s favor as a place to vent. The show takes Sendak’s innovation with picture books, his fierce pride in Jewish heritage and homosexual values almost in stride, but Sendak saw in the Journal a place to articulate a manifesto of childhood identity and artistic growth. The Journal treated him as a giant in art, without the qualifying tagline, “Children’s author,” which Sendak hated. I’m not sure the DAM show allows him to vent as much as he clearly needed to. How are we to reconcile the stacks of plush toy characters in the gift shop, with the dark German Romanticist soul of his work? He loved the Brothers Grimm, and complained about sweetened versions of the Nutcracker, which he saw as significantly darker than most interpreters presented it. The show touches on this darker side, without really exploring it, as Theroux does in TCJ #301, a brick sized issue mostly devoted to Sendak.
So I’m not sure I would have enjoyed this show as much (twice!) without the back story provided by TCJ. Their interview with him allows him to vent on the Holocaust, censorship, and the pitfalls of family more than the DAM show does. Still, it’s a good overview and exhaustive in its visuals, with plenty of original art to link with whichever notion of Sendak’s creative genius one happens to subscribe to. What was Sendak- overgrown child genius, or kindly storyteller? I’m not sure the show explores the question. If only there weren’t so damn many distracting kids running around!
Given the agenda of expanding the museum’s reach, creating traffic in galleries, and addressing family issues in a conservative society, it probably treads a fine line, and certainly does present a comprehensive view of his work. And the kids will certainly be better off for having seen it, with the Puritan repression so active against libraries right now.
#reading #readingisresistance #artshows #comics #cartoonart
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