Columbus Museum of Art celebrates children’s book author-illustrator Maurice Sendak in a

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The body of work left by children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, famous for volumes including “Where the Wild Things Are,’’ is an American treasure.

For that reason alone, it makes terrific sense that the Columbus Museum of Art, a heartland institution with great strength in modern and contemporary American art, is the debut venue for the first major retrospective of Sendak’s work since his death in 2012 at age 83.

The museum is rich in works by artists including Columbus native George Bellows, the early 20th-century realist painter, and prolific illustrator.

Sendak’s art feels distantly related to Bellows because it’s based on keen observation and stunning draftsmanship. However, Sendak’s artistic power has less to do with documenting the roiling surface of American life, as Bellows did, than his ability to channel the turbulent psychological currents of childhood.

Sendak translated fear, anger, and wonder into indelible moonlit scenes of horned monsters with claws, serrated teeth, and soft furry bodies dancing with a dreaming boy named Max, in the 1963 book, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Another beloved book, “In the Night Kitchen,’’ 1970, features a nude boy named Mickey who dreams of getting mixed into cake batter by happy bakers before diving into a giant bottle of milk.

Facing childhood fears

Sendak’s work was in part a response to his own childhood. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928, into a Polish Jewish immigrant family, Sendak was acutely aware of relatives who lost their lives in the Nazi Holocaust. He was often sick and in bed, afraid of dying.

Sendak developed the view in adulthood that children should face their fears. It helped him sell tens of millions of books, but it also got him in trouble.

In 1969, child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim criticized “Where the Wild Things Are” in a Ladies Home Journal column in which he said Sendak failed to understand primal fears that could be unleashed when a mother sends a child to bed without supper, as happens to the angry Max.

Sendak fumed over Bettelheim’s comments for years, although, as writer Jack Shafer pointed out in a 2009 column in Slate, having notable critics probably helped Sendak sell books.

Sendak was one of the most decorated children’s book authors in modern publishing, with a slew of Caldecott medals, a National Book Award, and the National Medal of Arts, but he was also among the most canceled through banning.

The current wave of book banning led by right-leaning groups across the U.S. adds to the timeliness of the Sendak show, although his critics appear to have been motivated more by prudishness or fears that his books were too dark than by left-right politics.

Ohio as launchpad

Initiated by the Maurice Sendak Foundation in Ridgefield, CT., the show, which opened in October and is on view through March 5, is the biggest on the artist since his death. The Columbus museum is the jumping-off point for an international tour, although upcoming venues haven’t been announced yet.

With more than 150 sketches, storyboards, and paintings, most of them on loan from the foundation, the show charts Sendak’s career from his delightful early 1950s sketches of children at play to the original illustrations that appeared in his books.

It also examines Sendak’s numerous later-in-life projects. Among them are sets and costumes he designed for opera productions staged by companies across the U.S. and Europe, and a 1990s ad campaign for Bell Atlantic called, “Where Wild Things are Happening,’’ from which the show takes its name.

Numerous published works fill display cases in the exhibition, which should warm the hearts of Baby Boomers and their children. Also on view are posters, wall-size reproductions, dolls, photographs of a giant parade float, and a 14-foot-tall animatronic goose created for a production of Mozart’s comic opera fragment, “The Goose of Cairo.’’

Sendak’s collaborations included his 2003 book, “Brundibar.’’ With text by author and playwright Tony Kushner, it was based on an allegorical 1938 Czech opera about children who united against a village bully. Sendak also designed sets for a production of “Brundibar’’ performed at the Chicago Lyric Opera later in 2003 and again in 2006 at the New Victory Theater in New York.

In 2009, Sendak collaborated with writers Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers on a film based on “Where the Wild Things Are.’’ Costumes, a poster, and clips from the film are in the exhibition.

The show’s connection with Columbus is that it was curated by Jonathan Weinberg, the curator, and director of research at the Sendak Foundation, who also curated the Columbus museum’s nationally praised exhibition “Art After Stonewall: 1969-1989,’’ on view from March to October 2020. Fifty years after the Stonewall Riots in New York, the show explored the impact of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBTQ) Civil-Rights movement on the art world.

Weinberg said he wanted to see the Sendak exhibition launched in Columbus because it “was important to me to do it with people I had a connection with,’’ and because he reveres the museum.

Taking Sendak’s art seriously

Perfectly timed for a holiday road trip, the show celebrates Sendak’s cultural clout while making a case for taking him seriously as a capital “A” artist on a par with other American masters.

It’s an interesting point. The best children’s book illustrators are amazing artists whose work could be considered a gateway for lifelong art appreciation. Art museums might do well to recognize that connection.

In Sendak’s case, the exhibition underscores the roots of his work in everything from the Renaissance engravings and woodcuts of Albrecht Durer to the sometimes dark fantasies of 19th-century artists such as William Blake, Samuel Palmer, Henry Fuseli, and Francisco Goya.

The show places examples of Sendak’s work side by side with art historical classics such as a 1783 mezzotint print based on Fuseli’s painting, “The Nightmare.’’ The print depicts a slender maiden swooning while asleep on a bed in a body-clinging gown, as a dark, bug-eyed monster sits on her belly. A wild-eyed horse bursts through the curtains next to the bed.

Fuseli’s monster bears a certain resemblance to the line-dancing creatures in “Where the Wild Things Are,’’ but the Columbus show makes a different connection to Sendak’s work by showing how the artist parodied it in a 2002 drawing in watercolor and ink that substitutes a nude male for Fuseli’s maiden.

(Sendak lived openly in New York and Ridgefield, CT, as a gay man with his partner of 50 years, psychiatrist Dr. Eugene Glynn. Despite the criticism his books sometimes faced, Sendak was never targeted on account of his sexuality. “It didn’t come up; people didn’t ask,’’ Weinberg said.)

Other juxtapositions in the show highlight Sendak’s admiration for early 19th-century German Romantic artists including Philipp Otto Runge, Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, and Caspar David Friedrich.

“Maurice was obsessed with German romanticism,’’ Weinberg said.

Like the German artists, Sendak had a precise, elegant sense of line. Even as a teenager he could draw like an angel. His early self-portraits and drawings of family members and friends are filled with a natural confidence and clarity of characterization.

Sendak’s mature illustrations possess an almost neoclassical sense of polish, discipline, and finesse. As the show demonstrates, he worked his way up to finished illustrations through tireless hard work on preliminary studies.

He was a marvelous mark-maker who produced richly delineated textures for foliage, animal fur, flowing hair, cloth drapery, and other details through his utter control of pen and ink. The end results never look labored.

To compare Sendak’s originals with posters and reproductions in the show is to gain a deeper respect for his work ethic. Always, he seems to have focused on creating art that could be reproduced without going muddy. It was one of the many ways in which he delivered for an audience that was, and is, huge.

Museum on a roll

The debut of the Sendak show in Columbus is another reminder of the energy and enterprise brought to the museum by Director Nannette Maciejunes, who is retiring in January after having started work there in 1984 and after having served as executive director for 20…