WILD FOR WILD THINGS
Toronto exhibitions celebrate the work of Maurice Sendak in all its delightful weirdness,
Three years after Maurice Sendak’s passing, his unruly imagination is more celebrated than ever before. Earlier this month, Sotheby’s was selling the beloved, curmudgeonly children’s author’s watercolours for up to $950,000.
Thankfully, now in Toronto, you can see some of his original work for free. Sendak exhibitions at the Toronto Reference Library and the Osborne Collection are showing off his work, in all of its delightful weirdness. The Toronto Reference Library The reference library is the only Canadian stop for Maurice Sendak: 50 Years, 50 Works, 50 Reasons, a touring exhibition devoted to his 1963 children’s masterpiece, Where the Wild Things Are and its considerable legacy.
Family-friendly displays include a “Create-your-own wild things” app, life-sized recreations of hero Max’s sailboat and his bedroom table (including a disturbingly realistic plastic replica of his supper) and set designs from Spike Jonze’s 2009 movie adaptation.
There’s also a range of Sendak memorabilia, from high-school drawings of Macbeth to letters to his fans (he was once delighted to find an 8-year-old boy had eaten one of his drawings) — all bearing his own defiantly original stamp.
The entrance walls are adorned with giant-sized Wild Things, whose blown-up claws, horns and yellow, bugged-out eyes show off Sendak’s disdain for the terminally cute.
Nicole Dawkins, curator of 50 Years, notes that Sendak “more than anyone else was an advocate for literature for children — and for all people — that didn’t whitewash the experience of being a child.
He embraced the darkness inherent in growing up, and he often spoke critically of what he called Kiddie Book Land, “where everything was saccharine and perfect.” The Osborne Collection at the Lillian H. Smith In the 1960s and ’70s, Sendak be- friended the Osborne Collection’s then-head Judith St. John, who collected many of his prints and books; the former are on display at the TRL, and the latter at the Lillian H. Smith branch, laid out beside work that he himself admired.
This includes illustrations by William Blake, pointed19th-century satirists such as George Cruikshank and Walt Disney (Sendak found Mickey Mouse appealingly weird, with “bizarre proportions” and a “bewitching grin”).
Liz Derbecker, the exhibition’s curator, notes that, odd as it may seem today, Where the Wild Things Are was “considered quite threatening” by some critics when it was published.
Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim famously attacked it for, of all things, belittling “the incredible fear it evokes in the child to be sent to bed without supper.”
Some school teachers drew diapers on the naked male toddler from In the Night Kitchen, prompting 425 librarians to sign a letter opposing its “mutilation.”
Seeing Sendak’s work alongside that of his maverick heroes reminds us that, as Derbecker puts it, “Sedition is part of his aim.”
For more information about the exhibit go to the library’s website at torontopubliclibrary.ca/programsand-classes/exhibits/sendak-50. The Maurice Sendak: 50 Years, 50 Works, 50 Reasons runs at the TD Gallery at the Toronto Reference Library from Saturday to Jan. 31. The “Let the Wild Rumpus Start!” Celebrating Maurice Sendak exhibit at the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books at the Lillian H. Smith Branch runs until March 5.