Pictures and Picture Books on the Wall

We may live in an age of mass-produced and democratizing images, but they have not yet reduced our attraction to the unique, the rare, the exquisitely exclusive. Perhaps it is because so many of the images and artifacts of our culture have been rendered commonplace, familiar, and undistinguished that we are drawn by what Walter Benjamin has called the "aura of the original" work of art—elitist as those objects may be. Certainly the 1980s generated successive waves of works with such auras, ranging from the King Tut reliques to the Gauguin retrospective, from Andy Warhol's day-glo installations to the Dreamtime paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists. Happily, too, this general fascination with the original and the iconoclastic also reached the work of artists who are best known for their children's books. Along with television documentaries about such figures as N. C. Wyeth and Maurice Sendak, the decade produced major exhibitions on the art of the picture book (see Gillian Avery's review in CL 18 of Brian Alderson's Sing a Song for Sixpence, the catalogue for the British Library's 1986-87 show about the history of this genre) and the work of a number of its most important practitioners. Perhaps most fittingly, the 1980s concluded with the show of a very young Chinese artist whose paintings, though not designed for picture books, nevertheless reaffirmed the narrative power of pictures.

Still, despite these impressive exhibits of the last few years, the art of the picture book is intended to be seen between the covers of a book, joined to a text on paper that one can literally touch and to the intimate experience of reading. A well-known picture from a famous children's book like, say, Edward Lear's drawing for "The Jumblies" may seem lost and feeble when it is framed and hung on a gallery wall. The pictures that Lear used to illustrate his nonsense verse were designed to have their mercurial life in an inexpensive children's book—not the carefully preserved existence of the elegant imperial folios that contained Lear's extraordinary lithographs of birds from the Earl of Derby's private menagerie at Knowsley Hall.

Of course, what we gain from these exhibits and from the sumptuous catalogues that have emerged from them is a fuller understanding of an artist whose work we may meet in and most frequently associate with the picture book. With Lear one quickly discovers, in the comprehensive exhibit that wound its way through the long narrow halls of the Royal Academy of Arts during the summer of 1985 and in Vivien Noakes's catalogue of the show, that the bird pictures and the nonsense, important as they are in our estimation of Lear today, were only a small part of Lear's oeuvre, though the former built his reputation and the dozen or so volumes and numerous editions of the latter paid his bills. At the time of his death in Italy in 1888 Lear left more than seven thousand watercolors and three hundred oil paintings, the majority of them landscapes from his many years of travel around the Mediterranean and farther east to such faraway places as Philae, Bassae, Benares, and Poonah. The nonsense drawings and verse were a wild, eccentric subtext, a shadow to the "serious" art that Lear was busily about; the nonsense emerged as a private safety valve from the arduous demands of his work and travels and the exasperations of his own emotional life. Their personal character helps explain why the first books of nonsense were published anonymously and why Lear wrote only close and trusted friends his famous letters with...