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Reviewed by:
  • Look! Look! Look!
  • Deborah Stevenson
Wallace, Nancy Elizabeth Look! Look! Look!; by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace and Linda K. Friedlaender; illus. by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace. Cavendish, 200640p ISBN 0-7614-5282-6$16.95 Ad 5-8 yrs

In this fictionalized art lesson, a family of mice borrows a newly received postcard from the resident human family and carefully examines the portrait (a late Elizabethan oil of one Lady Clopton) reproduced thereon. Using smaller cut-out frames, the mice focus on various aspects of the picture, noting the lady's face and jewels, the patterns on her dress; they match colors in their colored paper to hues within the image; they evoke the image in their own creations in line and in shape. The exercises performed are some solid entrées into the examination of a painting (co-author Friedlaender is the curator of education at the Yale Museum of British Art, where the original of Lady Clopton's portrait resides) that blessedly give young art viewers something to do in looking at art instead of endless open-ended questions to answer. Unfortunately, the exercises aren't always presented as clearly as they might be (it would be great if the illustrations kept a tighter relationship between element and painting, indicating where the noted colors and blown-up sections of pattern are found in the portrait); the mouse story-frame is superfluous, and the pedestrian cut-paper mice figures are largely blandly cute and flat. (The "Make a Self-Portrait Postcard" exercise that occupies the final two spreads of the book doesn't relate well to the portrait examination, either.) This is nonetheless a useful art-investigation book for the youngest museumgoers, and it would be particularly effective as an introduction to an assignment that allows them to employ the mice's investigative technique with art around them in calendars, posters, or postcards. A glossary with helpful visual examples is appended.

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