"Never overlook the art of the seemingly simple": Crockett Johnson and the Politics of the Purple Crayon

When Barnaby, the first collection of Johnson's comic strip, was published in 1943, Dorothy Parker wrote, "I cannot write a review of Crockett Johnson's book of Barnaby. I have tried and tried, but it never comes out a book review. It is always a valentine for Mr. Johnson." That Parker, known for her caustic wit, could summon only praise explains in part why few have written about Johnson—indeed there is only one moderately extensive piece on him, running a mere eight pages in length.¹ His work tends to be optimistic, a fact that may frustrate critics, whose job is, after all, to be critical. They may also be daunted by the diversity of his creative output. To readers of children's literature, Crockett Johnson—the pen name of David Johnson Leisk—is best known for his seven books about Harold and the Purple Crayon. But Johnson, who was born in 1906 and died of lung cancer in 1975, wrote or illustrated twenty-four others and did much more besides. In the '30s, he wrote editorial cartoons for the New Masses. In the '40s, he contributed a comic strip to Collier's Weekly and wrote the syndicated "Barnaby" comic, which gained national attention in magazines such as Time, Life, and Newsweek as well as praise from as diverse a group as Parker, Duke Ellington, Louis Untermeyer, and W. C. Fields.² During his last decade, Johnson took up abstract painting, some of which was exhibited in museums.³

If any concept unifies his vast and diverse body of work, it is this: outwardly upbeat narratives and visually simple drawings investigate the ideological implications of the imagination. Johnson described his style of illustration as "simplifiedoding all arbitrary decoration" (Kingman, Foster, and Lontoft 126) and, truly, simplicity defines his style to such a degree that, often, one character looks like the next: the boy from Ruth Krauss's The Carrot Seed (which Johnson illustrated) looks a lot like Harold, and both could be cousins of Barnaby (figure 1).⁴ If this "simplified" style also explains the critical neglect of Johnson, then we should heed something else Johnson said: "Never overlook the art of the seemingly simple" (quoted in Animating Harold).⁵

Figure 1.

The boy from The Carrot Seed, Barnaby, and Harold. The Carrot Seed (Harper, 1945): text copyright © 1945 by Ruth Krauss, illustrations copyright © 1945 by Crockett Johnson, copyright © renewed 1973 by Crockett Johnson. Harold's Trip to the Sky (Harper, 1957): copyright © 1957 by Crockett Johnson, copyright © renewed 1985 by Ruth Krauss. Both used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. "Barnaby" is from Crockett Johnson's Barnaby (Holt, 1943), p. 47.

Following his advice, this essay examines the ideas that lie behind Johnson's "seemingly simple" artwork. To recover the politics of his books for children, I trace his social concerns—and his methods for addressing them—across his career, from the New Masses cartoons, through "Barnaby," up to the children's books In the 19 1940s, Johnson blurred the boundaries between imagined and material worlds to deliver particular arguments on specific political topics, but, in the 1950s and 1960s, he used this same device to advance a more general critique of societal structures of power. Using perceptual shifts to ask, how do you know what's real? Johnson invited his readers to raise larger questions about U.S. policy and society. For example, his emphasis on a socially constructed world challenged cultural stereotypes of gender. Suggesting that the "real world" is susceptible to the imagination, his works encourage the child's (and the adult's) impulses to explore alternatives to that world. And yet, though the imagination has power in Johnson's work, this power is not always cause for celebration: it can critique or reinforce the "real world"; it can both empower and threaten.

Figure 2.

Johnson, "Aw, be a sport. Tell the newsreel audience. . . ." From Robert Forsythe, Redder than the Rose (Covici, Friede, 1935), p...