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| From
the May/June 2003 issue of The Horn Book Magazine Field Notes
On opening day at the museum the vast, white foyer shimmered with goodwill and anticipation as a multigenerational crowd made its way to the galleries showing art by Carle and Maurice Sendak. There were pockets of camera crews conducting interviews, lights blazing into the faces of Sendak, Carle, and H. Nichols B. Clark, the museum’s founding director. Four wall-sized monochromatic paintings, their green, blue, yellow, and red canvases towering above the heads of the visitors, formed the preferred backdrop for photographers. In the auditorium, a film detailing the inception, design, and building of the museum played in a continuous loop. The impressively clean and well-stocked art room, with tall glass walls showing the apple orchard outside, provided tables to sit at and a constant supply of markers and large sheets of paper. As the day went on, families could be seen heading home clutching drawings of apple trees, smiling suns, and caterpillars. The building’s contemporary planes and sweeping curves hint at the clean, serious ambiance inside the museum, tempered by some child-friendly detail work. The galleries have white walls, high ceilings, butcher-block wood floors and — after the bright, sky-lit hallway — surprisingly low light. A sign explaining the necessity for the dimness (the sensitivity of works on paper) suggests that visitors take a moment to allow their eyes to adjust. The natural flow of galleries leads first to the large Eric Carle room on the left. Here there will always be an exhibit of work by the museum’s founder. Wooden benches and bins of books promote read-aloud breaks, while glass cases in the middle of the room show a tantalizing array of the paints, brushes, and tissue paper used by the artist. Next, there is a smaller room with more cases. (At the time of the opening, this room displayed the Australian illustrator Robert Ingpen’s preliminary and final work for Halloween Circus at the Graveyard Lawn. For those interested in how picture books are made, this was the exhibit that revealed how an illustrator works with text.) Finally, visitors arrive at the second large gallery, which will house four shows a year. Works by Maurice Sendak filled this space at the opening, with a Nancy Ekholm Burkert show following from February through March. Mitsumasa Anno’s illustrations are currently being displayed before continuing as a touring show, and a Leo Lionni exhibit will begin in mid-July. If the first exhibit, curated by museum director Clark, can be taken as an indicator of the quality of future offerings, there will be good reason for return visits. Grouped more or less chronologically, Sendak’s vast body of work was represented selectively, sometimes placed beside influential pieces such as a Dürer print or a painting by Winslow Homer. Informative cards accompanied each picture, guiding the uninitiated through the experience. Finally, some of Sendak’s set and costume designs were displayed, his work for The Magic Flute juxtaposed with Eric Carle’s radically different designs for the same opera, neatly folding the gallery experience back to its start. In its promotional material, the museum says that it “strives to engage, delight, and educate diverse local, regional, national, and international audiences by encouraging inquiry and heightening appreciation of the visual world.” In other words, they hope to provide an ideal first museum experience to each school group that visits. So I arranged to tag along with a group of first and second graders from Erving (MA) Elementary School. Despite the fact that this was the museum’s first school visit since the opening, it went without a hitch. The group assembled in the auditorium where experienced teachers Rosemary Agoglia, curator of education, and May Emery, art studio educator, talked about what would happen during the next three hours and fielded questions and comments from the children. (After booking a visit, schools receive teacher packets with age-appropriate project and lesson ideas to use before and after their field trip.) Then the children formed two groups, one group going initially to the galleries with Rosemary and the other to the foyer and studio with May. For the gallery portion of the visit, the museum has adopted the Visual Thinking Strategies method developed for the Museum of Modern Art to introduce children to art and museums in an empowering, non-intimidating way. Discussion of a picture is initiated with open-ended questions like “What is going on in this picture?” and “What do you see that makes you say that?” In addition, pairs of children are encouraged to become detectives and compare art on the wall with the art in Eric Carle’s books. This triggers a discussion of Carle’s methods and may also involve information about how books are made. Out in the foyer in front of Carle’s sixteen-by-eight-foot abstracts, May initiates a discussion of abstract art and warm and cool colors. The children vie with one another for creative answers to the question, What does this look like? (Yellow sand. Doritos. The desert. The side of a truck that’s yellow.) Then it’s on to the art room where each child receives a large piece of paper and a tray with water, sponge, brushes, and a few paints in either warm or cool colors. The idea is to create abstracts, but most of the children with yellow paint can be seen making suns, and those with green tend toward trees and bugs. But in May Emery’s art room every painting, whether abstract or representational, is praised for its own qualities. Afterward in the cafeteria a mother tells me her son’s favorite part was the art room. On a later visit, a harried parent leaving the gallery asks for directions to “the interactive part of the museum.” But truly there seems be something here for every child. Some will gravitate toward the observation and verbal interaction of the gallery segment, while others will prefer the quiet hands-on work in the art room. Although the museum is clearly concerned with its child audience, it also seems eager to gain entry into the exclusive Fine Art Museum club. For many illustrators, particularly those who started in the world of fine art rather than the world of graphic design or architecture, acceptance as an artist has been a continual struggle. When I was a college student majoring in studio art in the early 1980s, it was considered departmental suicide to create a painting that had any illustrative qualities. Representational work was beginning to be accepted again, but realism was suspect. If you couldn’t back up your style with a full psychological explanation, perhaps you would be better off in — gulp — design school! So just imagine the gratification an illustrator can feel taking her friends and family to this beautiful museum and saying, “See, this is what I do with my day.” Mainstream acceptance at last. The shows at the opening had a serious bent that defied one to use dreaded terms like kiddie lit or even illustration. “This,” the show gently implied, “is Art with a capital A.” But that begs the question: is it art? For my money, the answer is yes, but that’s because I consider the picture book to be an art form — a collaborative art form. The fact is that everything in those galleries by Carle and Sendak was created to interact with another element. The picture book illustrations were meant to collaborate with text to provide the kinetic experience of turning thirty-two pages in sequence. The set and costume designs were meant to work with story, music, lighting, and actors over a discrete period of time: one act or one scene. It is a testament to Clark’s curatorial talent that none of the art in these two shows seemed to be lacking another element. Instead, it was easy to walk along taking in each piece of art as a single image in a retrospective. Connections between images were encouraged. Wishes for connections to missing texts soon vanished. I wonder whether the museum will present future shows in the same way. When I worked as manager of a gallery exhibiting and selling the original art from picture books, I had my first taste of the difficulties in setting up shows for some of the best collaborative illustrators. Just as a good picture book text may sound thin and incomplete when read without its art, some of the best illustrations suffer from lack of context when framed and placed on a wall. The artists chosen for shows this year will do fine on their own, but will the museum eventually run out of work that can stand alone without text? And will this criterion force them to reject shows by exceptional collaborative artists like James Marshall or Paul Galdone? I see this beautiful museum and can’t help projecting my own wishes onto its white walls. Rather than demonstrate to the public that illustrations shown on their own can look just like real art, couldn’t we also show why the picture book is an art form? Could we show how the art and text play off each other? Could we show how type and design are used to create a subliminal atmosphere? How page turns are used for dramatic effect? Or would it spoil the mythical picture book experience — the illusion that books emerge fully formed like Athena from the forehead of Zeus? I think not. This is the era of DVDs with audio commentaries that reveal each movie to be a tremendously complex combination of art and business; that give insight into directing, casting, producing, art directing, cinematography, editing, and marketing. Isn’t it time to provide a similar experience with picture books? And what better place than in the auditorium, galleries, and art studio of a museum dedicated to picture books? Perhaps I’m falling prey to the cardinal sin of book reviewing: discussing the book you wanted to see rather than the book that is in front of you. Go to the Carle museum’s website (www.picture bookart.org) and you will see that they have accomplished everything they set out to do with skill and panache. Their goal is not to present the entire picture book experience. Instead, the museum “collects, presents, preserves, and interprets picture book art from around the world recognizing its importance as an art form.” Clearly, there is only so much one can expect a school group to do during a visit, and perhaps adding another module would complicate matters and diffuse the focus presented in the Visual Thinking Strategies method. Or maybe there’s a simple solution already near at hand. As the crowds thinned on opening day, I wandered into the museum’s small library to rest my feet and happened onto a storytime that tied together my most basic wishes in one child-friendly package. Megan Lambert, a part-time museum employee who is not normally present during school visits, proved that children as young as two or three can be kept entertained by the details of picture book creation. While reading Eric Carle and Bill Martin Jr.’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? to a large group of children of various ages, she managed to explain pacing of text and art, the basics of layout, and even book production (jacket, binding, gutter). She kept it interactive, and the kids were fascinated. And I, a former preschool teacher, had a feeling of satisfaction akin to hearing a sublimely performed concerto: I was witnessing a perfect group time. Of course, this performance would not work unless each child was already familiar with the book being demonstrated. But group times, like parents at bedtime, are often faced with demand for repeat performances of the same book. WITH CARLE WINNING the 2003 Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, this is truly the Year of the Caterpillar. So go to his apple orchard and see the butterfly that emerged after years of dreaming, thinking, and assembling top-notch advisors. The building is beautiful, the art is beautiful, and despite what may sound like criticism, I can’t seem to stay away from the place. Even if you’re not actually a picture book illustrator, if you have anything at all to do with children’s books, walking through the doors of this museum will surely make you stand up a little straighter.
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week before Thanksgiving, in the near-winter mud and snow of western
Massachusetts, a spotlight was thrown onto children’s picture
book art. Beleaguered picture book creators sat a little straighter
at their drawing boards, basking in some well-deserved attention.
The eagerly anticipated opening of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture
Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts, certainly made the news. Everywhere
one turned that week, on every channel and in every Sunday supplement,
there was the benevolent, Santa-bearded face of Eric Carle.
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