MOVING SENDAK’S WALL

Maurice Sendak painted this mural in the New York apartment of his friends the Chertoffs. The family donated the mural (and plaster) to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia; through April, the public can watch repairs in progress.

Maurice Sendak has almost never applied his signature toothy creatures to walls, but in 1961 he gave a mural to friends, Lionel and Roslyn Chertoff, on Central Park West in New York. In their apartment, he spent months filling a bedroom wall with costumed children leading birds and circus animals. He inscribed the names of the Chertoffs’ children, Larry and Nina, on a parasol wound around a lion’s tail.

Three years ago the family donated the mural to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, which owns about 10,000 of Mr. Sendak’s works. The Chertoff painting, still attached to 1,000 pounds of Manhattan plaster, has been mounted on an aluminum-reinforced wall at the museum’s Sendak gallery.

Through April, the public can watch repairs in progress for two hours on Wednesdays (about 1 to 2 p.m. and 6 to 7 p.m.). Milner & Carr Conservation will patch cracks, remove patches of whitewash and fill in lost details. Mr. Sendak is scheduled to complete the work.

“We’re hoping there’s some tiny little thing that he’ll add a flourish to, maybe one little blade of missing grass,” said Catherine L. Myers, a senior conservator at Milner & Carr.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 4, 2011, on page C29 of the New York edition.

http://www.rosenbach.org/learn/objects/chertoff-mural

Maurice Sendak’s Tribute to Beatrix Potter

Maurice Sendak has been called "the Picasso of children's books." But he is much more than that. There has not been another author/artist working during the past fifty years who comes close to his combined genius in both line and word. Only Beatrix Potter in this century might be thought of as comparable.
— Justin Schiller

The following is from the book Caldescott & Co.: Notes on Books and Pictures by Maurice Sendak

" I know that Peter Rabbit, for the audience, needs no boosting from me, but I would like to point to a few details that might help make my own feelings about it clear. I will refer, of course, to both words and pictures, for in this book there is no separating them."

"Above all, this tiny book vividly communicates a sense of life, and this, I believe, is achieved through an imaginative synthesis of factual and fantastical components."

"This book, so apparently simple, smooth, straight-forward, is to my eye textured and deepened by the intimate, humorous observations that Beatrix Potter makes in her pictures."

"I tremendously admire the poetry of Miss Potter's art as she develops the fantastic, realistic, truthful story."

"Peter Rabbit, for all its gentle tininess, loudly proclaims that no story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it is not a work of imagination."


The following narrative and the images used as examples are from the Victoria and Albert Museum Website data base.

Sendak’s illustrations to Robert Graves’s children’s story, The Big Green Book (1962), incorporate several images by Beatrix Potter, including sketches of the bedroom she slept in at Camfield Place, the gabled roof of Bush Hall and the potting shed at Bedwell Lodge, immortalised as Mr. McGregor’s potting shed in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. It has been said that ‘No other children’s book artist has had the nerve to borrow with the abandon and playfulness of Sendak. His use of borrowed imagery is vigorous, transforming, never slavish.’

Hello to a fellow Beatrix Potter fan - Hailey.

Both of these artists' works have been a part of my visual vocabulary my whole life and the more I look the more I love their art. So as I have been researching and revisiting their work I am so pleased to see that Sendak really enjoys and and is positively influenced by Potter's work.