NANCY EKHOLM BURKERT

MOST BIOS OF NANCY EKHOLM BURKERT, illustrator of John Updike's A Child's Calendar, sum up her career as follows: she is the original illustrator of Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, which was her first published illustration work for children, and she received a Caldecott Honor in 1973 for Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs. This is not a shabby biography. But there must be more to the career of the illustrator chosen as the second artist ever to be given an exhibition at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art after none other than Maurice Sendak.

NANCY EKHOLM BURKERT was born February 16, 1933 in Sterling, Colorado. By the time she was twelve she had lived in five states, settling in Wisconsin in 1945. "Because I felt very alone as a child," she wrote in 2007, "drawing became my companion, and my bridge to the World." She wrote and illustrated her first picture book (unpublished) in high school while also serving as editor of the year book and taking art courses at the Wustum Museum. "As a child...my picture books provided my only source of visual art," but as she grew her influences became much broader. She majored in art at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and completed a masters on a George S. Kaufman fellowship for female graduate students. During that time she studied the old masters and came to admire the Flemish masters of the 15th and 16th centuries in particular. It was her discovery of Eastern art that was most revelatory, however. "I discovered my affinity with Asian art, especially early Chinese painting. My preference is for linearity, which can express for me grace, rhythm and harmony...the Spirit I feel in everything."

Above: From Hans Christian Andersen's The Nightingale

When she speaks of linearity, she means actual line work, a focus on meticulous detail developed line by line. Click on the below image to examine the corduroy hat in this portrait of her daughter.

Burkert received the commission for her first illustrated children's book, James and the Giant Peach, after a picture book she had written and illustrated was accepted at Knopf. The book was in rhyme and detailed the story of an "aerial lady" and "what happens when kites break their strings and disappear; sort of a great lost-and-found in the sky." Like the book written in high school, the story of the aerial lady never saw publication.

To achieve the level of detail Burkert demands, the artist does exhaustive research both in the field "on location" and in books and museums. She often spends as much time on research as creating the pictures. Snow-White took her three years to complete, and her labor of love Valentine & Orson required seven years.

Above: Images from Meindert De Jong's The Big Goose and the Little White Duck, researched in the Wisconsin countryside.

Such rigorous and time consuming practices has resulted in a relatively small output of only ten books and a scattering of magazine illustrations.

Above: Endpapers from Edward Lear's The Scroobious Pip completed by Ogden Nash

In addition to her work as an illustrator, Burkert has curated museum exhibitions such as Drawing: The Fundamental Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1981 and an exhibition on representations of peace in children's books, which showed in New York as well as Milwaukee. In the 1990s, she founded a program called Bread and Books that brought books to needy children and their families in Milwaukee soup kitchens.

  

Above: From Acts of Light, selected poems of Emily Dickinson

Amazingly, all of Burkert's books save Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs are out of print. I have posted additional samples of her work on my Flickr account. Follow the links to see more art from Meindert De Jong's The Big Goose and the Little White Duck and from the selected poems of Emily Dickinson Acts of Light. And in case you missed it, all of the art from Updike's A Child's Calendar. I hope that Ms. Burkert would consider this renewed exposure a belated birthday gift; she turned seventy-seven yesterday.

My primary sources for Nancy Ekholm Burkert's biography were Michael Danoff's introduction to the 1977 monograph The Art of Nancy Ekholm Burkert and Burkert's own "letter" in the book Artist to Artist: 23 Major Illustrators Talk to Children About Their Art. I also consulted the Wisconsin Library Association's Notable Wisconsin Authors website, an honor Burkert received in 1995.

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.

JOHN UPDIKE: A CHILD'S CALENDAR

JOHN UPDIKE was one of the most decorated American authors of the second half of the twentieth century. He won two National Book Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, three National Book Critic Circle Awards, two O. Henry awards, the PEN/Faulkner, the PEN/Malamud, the William Dean Howells Medal, and others. He published, depending on how you count, seventy books in his lifetime, comprised of novels, short stories, poetry, criticism, drama, and non-fiction. But most important to We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie, he also published five children's books. The first of those books to be wholly of original material (the others are adaptations and will be discussed in a future post) is A Child's Calendar (1965).

A CHILD'S CALENDAR is a collection of twelve simple poems, one for each month. They attempt to be distillations of those months, ostensibly from a child's point of view. However, they seem more concerned with the sun, sky, and earth than most children probably are ("hot dogs, fries, / And Coke" yes; "The blushing, girlish / World unfolds" less so). As James Dickey wrote in his New York Times review "there is too much sense of clever over-simplification about [Updike's] verse; one is aware of the adult straining for the child's approval, and I should think that the child would also sense it."


Dickey did note that "A Child's Calendar is an attractive little book," which is something of an understatement, illustrated as it was in 1965 by Nancy Ekholm Burkert, Caldecott honor recipient and original illustrator of James and the Giant Peach. And Burkert was only the first Caldecott artist to illustrate the book, which was reissued in 1999 with illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman whose edition was itself a Caldecott Honor book.

What is perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book as an Updike text arises out of the existence of the two editions. It is hinted at in a note in fine print on the copyright page of the Hyman edition: "The text for this new edition incorporates a number of changes by the author." Those changes, for the most part, deal with updating the text for modern readers, eliminating references to burst milk bottles in January (replaced by parkas) or ashes spread on icy streets in February (replaced by salt). While these "corrections" have some nostalgic interest, an ah-how-the-world-has-changed, they also reveal something about how Updike specifically sees the world as having changed. A change of "ice-cream cones" to "hot dogs, fries," or "The playground calls," to "Little League" seems unnecessary (not counting edits made to retain a rhyme, of course) as the originals would still hold interest for children today. Those changes suggest, perhaps, new observations of grandchildren instead of observations of his own children. But the most important change appears in "April."

The original in 1965 reads:

Each flower, leaf
And blade of sod--
Small letters sent
To her from God.

In 1999:

Each flower, leaf,
And blade of turf--
Small love-notes sent
From air to earth.

Why the elimination of God? Especially when the next two lines in both versions are "The sky's a herd / of prancing sheep," which in the original reads like an allusion to God as shepherd and His faithful as a flock, but in the second is just a hackneyed metaphor for clouds. And even more odd is the choice in the final verse to retain the cultural aspect of religion, "At church, they bring / The lilies in," after having so deliberately removing the Deity in the first part of the poem. All of this is further complicated by the poem for November, which contains in both editions the lines "Tall God / Must see our souls." Why eliminate God in the first instance, while not casting Him out of the book as a whole? Unfortunately, the simple children's text does not offer a solution.

THE MOST DISTINCTIVE ASPECT OF BOTH EDITIONS OF A CHILD'S CALENDAR is the illustrations. Nancy Ekholm Burkert and Trina Schart Hyman are simply two of the best children's book illustrators, and both of their interpretations of Updike's text have much to recommend them. Hyman took her cue from Burkert with both editions featuring a spot illustration on the page with the poem and a full page illustration on the facing page. Beyond that, Hyman truly put her own stamp on the material, but not without inserting other quiet homages to Burkert. The upper image above is Burkert's spot illustration for "December." The lower is Hyman's spot illustration for the half title.

Below: Nancy Ekholm Burkert, April (l.), Trina Schart Hyman, March (r.)

Below: Nancy Ekholm Burkert, February (l.), Trina Schart Hyman, November (r.)

Below: Nancy Ekholm Burkert, July (l.), Trina Schart Hyman, July (r.)

HYMAN'S EDITION is still in print, and I encourage everyone to track down a copy. I have posted all of Burkert's illustrations on my Flickr set here, but for those of you who don't also have access to the Burkert text, I've included an appendix below of all of the textual changes between the editions (hopefully that will format properly in whatever reader you're using). Updike, while writing copiously on everything, has done frustratingly little writing on children's literature (as near as I can tell). If anyone knows of anything that he's written that might be relevant, please let me know.

Coming Soon: Nancy Ekholm Burkert

APPENDIX

January: Milk bottles burst / outside the door.
                And parkas pile up / Near the door.
February: And ashes fly / From the old town truck.
                 Though road salt flies / From the old town truck.
April: Each flower, leaf / And blade of sod-- / Small letters sent / To her from God.
           Each flower, leaf, / And blade of turf-- / Small love-notes sent / From air to earth.
June: The playground calls, / The ice-cream man, / And, after supper, / Kick-the-Can.
          There's Little League, / Hopscotch, the creek, / And, after supper, / Hide-and-seek.
July: America: / It makes us think / Of ice-cream cones, / And Coke to drink.
         America: / It makes us think / Of hot dogs, fries, / And Coke to drink.
September: Burning brush, / New books, erasers, / Chalks, and such.
                    Drying grass, / New books and blackboard / Chalk in class.
                   (Also "And" to "While" in third stanza)
November: In its distress
                    Nevertheless
December: Downtown, the stores
                   The toy-packed shops

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.

GOOD NIGHT, WENDY: LEO LIONNI

PEOPLE OFTEN ASK whether We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie ever goes the other way, ever examines adult work by children's authors. The answer, as of today, is yes. This is the first in an occasional series entitled Good Night, Wendy (originally called I Won't Grow Up in my introduction) that will uncover children's writers' forays into grown up matters. The title is taken from one of the last lines in J. M. Barrie's 1904 play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a farewell that is ostensibly only temporary but one that Wendy knows will eventually separate them permanently as she grows up and Peter Pan doesn't. (Interestingly, the character Peter Pan was originally introduced in an adult novel by Barrie, The Little White Bird (1902), possibly a later entry in this series.) As always, the name of any author or artist discussed will be added to the Authors/Artists menu on the right, but there will also be an entry in that list for Good Night, Wendy, if you should wish to read through these entries as a group.

IT MIGHT BE HARD TO JUSTIFY classing Leo Lionni as a children's author at all. Yes, he wrote and illustrated forty picture books. Yes, four of those books received Caldecott Honors--Inch By Inch (1961), Swimmy (1964), Frederick (1968), and Alexander And The Wind-Up Mouse (1970). And yes, his first picture book, Little Blue, Little Yellow (1959), just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, having never once fallen out of print. But Lionni didn't compose Little Blue, Little Yellow until he was almost fifty, and by then he had had many solo shows of his paintings in Europe, and was world famous in the advertising and graphic design world--first as an ad man at N. W. Ayer where he worked on campaigns for Ford, Chrysler, and Ladies Home Journal, and then as the artistic director of Fortune. He had also designed the catalog for Edward Steichen's famous 1955 photography exhibition The Family of Man, another book which has never fallen out of print, and had designed the American pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair (Expo 58). This was a man with a full adult career that is almost so overwhelming that every capsule biography (including this one) struggles with what to leave out. So, when children's books were only one small part of such a long and varied career, was Leo Lionni primarily a children's author? As most people know Lionni only as a children's author, the answer would be yes. But as there was art outside of the children's books, there were other books too: criticism, autobiography, and one  book length work of fiction.

IN 1959, Lionni decided that he would retire from commercial art at fifty and move to Europe to focus on his painting, and with the success of Little Blue, Little Yellow, he was able to enact that plan. He produced on average a picture book a year and spent the rest of his time on the fine arts. In the early 1970s, after a focused period of portraiture and experimentation with various materials, Lionni set to work on "a 'normal' painting." He relates the endeavor in his autobiography Between Worlds (1997):

"In those first moments the canvas felt frighteningly large...I believe that hands have a memory of their own, for it was in my empty, brushless right hand that the urge to paint was most acutely felt, and despite my loyalty to the human image, I found my mind's eye forming meaningless shapes to fill the empty vertical space. My strong ideological commitment to the human image had always prevented my occasional flirtations with abstract expressionism from affecting this basic believe. So far as I can remember, this was the first time I was seriously tempted to let an imagery develop freely from the inside of the painless process out rather than from a carefully planned scenario."

What resulted was a giant orb that, in a flash of inspiration, morphed into an exotic tree that had never before existed. That tree became something of an obsession for Lionni. He began making hundreds and hundreds of sketches of imaginary plants.

"The drawings were mostly of what from a distance might have looked like ordinary shrubs, flowers, cactus leaves, and branches or parts of these, but at closer range they revealed the telling details of organisms that could have grown only in the soil of the imagination."

Many of these sketches became large bronze statues, others became paintings, and a large group of them served as the illustrations for Lionni's only adult work of fiction, Parallel Botany (1977).

But to call Parallel Botany fiction is not quite right. Like Lionni's career, the book defies neat classification. It presents itself as a scholarly dissertation, complete with footnotes and bibliographic support. In fact, it so well mimics that kind of academic writing that it is at times rather dry.

"When we think that in 1330 Friar Odorico of Pordenone, with truly angelic devotion, described a plant which gave birth to no less than a lamb, and that as late as the seventeenth century, on the threshold of the first real scientific experiments, Claude Duret also spoke of trees which produced animals, we cannot wonder if the discovery of a botany unconstrained by any known laws of nature has given rise to descriptions that do not always treat the real character of the new plants with objective accuracy."

And there's a rather lengthy footnote attached to that sentence too.

Lionni goes on to explain that there exists a whole world of intangible plants, which can be divided into plants that "are directly discernible by us and indirectly by instruments, while those of the second [group]...come into our knowledge only indirectly, through images, words, or other symbolic signs." The history of these plants is comprehensive dating back to prehistoric fossils, with supporting quotes from classical natural philosophers, amateur scientists, archeologists, and many academics. As the characters get more and more ludicrous--the most important prehistoric find, fossil tirils, was made by Jeanne Helene Bigny after consulting a medium at a seance--and the plants get more symbolic--"Uchigaki thinks that the distribution of the tweezers as we see it today is the final result of an intricate series of maneuvers aimed at the conquest of territory, and that these maneuvers bear the most extraordinary resemblance to the moves of the game of Go."--it becomes clear that the whole thing is a joke. A joke told with such a straight face that you might miss it if you aren't paying close attention. He makes it all sound so real.

But under the humor is a very serious philosophical discussion of the artistic process and a defense of its value. Many of the entries on parallel plants contain an in depth history of that plant's discovery--usually by an individual at a moment of inspiration--and the ensuing research--a further extrapolation based on the initial inspiration. This, of course, describes the trajectory that an artist follows in creating a work of art. But Lionni goes further than a simple metaphor. From the introduction in which the fictitious Bodenbach-Kordobsky triangle of name-thing-thing is challenged, "in certain parallel plants the name precedes the physical existence of the plant itself," to the fictional Oskar Halbstein's theory that "the interior of material objects is nothing but a mental image, an idea" and therefore the "interior of parallel plants...eludes even theoretical definition. As we are concerned with a substance that is totally 'other,' that cannot be found in nature, it is literally unthinkable," the question of whether or not thoughts, i.e. moments of inspiration, are real objects is sounded again and again. It is this question that led to the creation of Parallel Botany. From his autobiography:

"The discovery of sculpture...came about because of a total change of vision...The metaphor that had been the sustaining column of all my realities was suddenly unrecognizable: from standing for things, from representing things, the images had become things themselves. The shadows had solidified, the world was no longer about something--it was...Now another "possible" nature, une nature autre, was rising from the other side of the lake."

If art is thought and art is real, then thought is real. Enter a new vegetable kingdom.

But is there value in unreal reality? In the epilogue, Lionni gives a non-believer--a traditional botanist--a chance to weigh in. "These gentlemen [the media] have cynically sold us telepathy, alpha-rays, flying saucers, mental deconcentration, acupuncture, the Loch Ness monster, forks bent by willpower and the Black Box." Interestingly, rather than hold up true science as the answer, he goes on to say that fictional plants can't meet our artistic and emotional needs, say, inspire a poem or send a message of love to a beloved.

"But in the fury of his rancor the veteran botanist lumps together the absurd with the possible, madness with reason, good with ill...The sudden questioning of things that have always and in every way conditioned our sensory and mental behavior demands a spirit of invention, an originality of method, a freedom of interpretation normally suffocated by the enormous weight of accepted ideas inherited as a result of our traditional scientific education...It is reported of the Swedish philosopher Erud Kronengaard that he once said to a friend: 'There are two kinds of men, those who are capable of wonder and those who are not. I hope to God that it is the first who will forge our destiny.'"

Lionni brought the same message to his children's work in his 1989 book Tillie and the Wall, written just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In it, two tribes of mice separated by a wall are brought together due to the tenacity of Tillie, a dreamer who imagined "beyond the wall a beautiful, fantastic world inhabited by strange animals and plants."

THE PRIMARY SOURCE for background material for this post comes from Lionni's autobiography Between Worlds. I also drew heavily from the excellent "100 Years of Leo Lionni" maintained by Random House, which includes videos of Lionni on his work, and the linked-from-Wikipedia bios at AIGA and ArtDirectorsClub. TIME magazine's original review for Parallel Botany is available online.

I was very excited to post all of the art from Parallel Botany, and I have done so on my Flickr page here, but just before finishing this post I found that someone has posted the entire book, text and art, if you want to go further than the art without tracking down a physical copy.

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.

ANDY WARHOL: CARD GAMES ARE FUN

I HAVE WRITTEN PREVIOUSLY about Doubleday's Best In Children's Books series, and so quote myself:

The phenomenal Best In Children's Books series published by Doubleday Book Clubs from 1957-1961 [was] something of a minor league for children's book illustrators with stories drawn by artists such as Maurice Sendak, Ezra Jack Keats, Peter Spier, and Barbara Cooney.

Another illustrious name that can be added to that list is Andy Warhol. In the late 1950s, before turning his back on "commercial" art out of fear that the gallery world would not take him seriously, Warhol illustrated six stories for the Best In Children's Books series. At the time, he was in Doubleday's stable of freelance artists, designing book jackets and illustrating adult trade books such as the etiquette books of Amy Vanderbilt. These were works done solely for money as Warhol still struggled to find his milieu, and the art is rather bland and impersonal.

Amazingly, these illustrations are almost never mentioned in Warhol biographies and there appears to be a dearth of criticism in the academic press. The only significant acknowledgment that these Warhol drawings even exist comes from the 2009 auction of the original art for "The Little Red Hen" from Best In Children's Books 15.

The illustrations throughout this post are from "Card Games Are Fun" by Alfred Sheinwold in Best In Children's Books 27 (1959), which is currently the only volume with Warhol art that I have gotten my hands on. As usual, you can see the entire set on my Flickr account here. The other titles sell for little more than $1 online if you're eager to see more, and a complete list with lots more information on the Best In Children's Books series can be found in the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection. I'll post other books as I stumble across them.

There are other books by Warhol that are sometimes considered children's books. As far as We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie is concerned, the Best In Children's Books illustrations are Warhol's only works for children. The understandably mistaken Andy Warhol's Children's Book, was an outgrowth of an 1984 exhibit ostensibly for children "Andy Warhol's Children's Show," but the book was made in the limited quantities expected of catalogs for art exhibitions with a price point that did not invite giving it to an actual child. Similarly, the Andy Warhol Series, a group of small gift books compiled around a theme and released posthumously (titles include Yum, Yum, Yum; Love, Love, Love; Cats, Cats, Cats) look like they might be children's books, but they were never marketed as such and the art included was certainly not made by Warhol with children in mind. To explore more of Warhol's work that could tangentially be related to children, but is correctly classed as not for children, search Andy Warhol at daddytypes.com, a site that has done an exhaustive exploration of Warhol's more juvenile turns.

The background information for this post came from several Warhol biographies, and Nicholas Paley's commentary "About Andy Warhol's Work For Children" in Journal of Aesthetic Education Vol. 21, No. 4, Winter, 1987.

I WANT TO TAKE A BRIEF MOMENT to apologize for how infrequently I now update We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie. For those of you who are or have been full-time caregivers, I think mentioning that my daughter is two-and-a-half is sufficient explanation. For everybody, I hope that when I do post, it's worth the wait and that you'll all bear with me.

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE. In honor of the holiday, I offer a preview of a series I had hoped to post this calendar year that will have to wait for next. All of the biographical material, context, and many more images will come in the new year. Here is the great Warren Chappell's rendition of the perennial holiday classic The Nutcracker.

For those of you who have never read the original E. T. A. Hoffmann story, may I recommend the legendary translator Ralph Manheim's translation illustrated by the legendary children's book luminary Maurice Sendak.

And as a holiday bonus, I refer you back to my Christmas in June post, Ilonka Karasz's The Twelve Days of Christmas and the Karasz illustrated Phyllis McGinley's Merry Christmas, Happy New Year.

Happy New Year. Enjoy it in good health.

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.