This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 26, 2011 - Wild things, goblins and child-snatching -- not teddy bears, lambs and patty-cake -- dominate the illustrations of Maurice Sendak, whose exhibition "In a Nutshell: The Worlds of Maurice Sendak" opens at the St. Louis County Library headquarters on Lindbergh this Friday.
The lack of warmth and fuzziness in Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" and other stories is not surprising, when you consider some history -- not exactly the stuff of fairy tales. When the son of Polish Jewish immigrants was a 4-year-old growing up in Brooklyn, Charles Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped from his crib. Talk of the baby's disappearance and eventual death formed vivid, horrifying images in Sendak's developing brain.
At 13, his fear was compounded by news that hit not just the papers, but his own home, when the Sendak family's Polish village was destroyed by Nazis. Most of his relatives were killed or taken to concentration camps.
Young Sendak could not repair the horrors of his world, but as an adult, he could remedy the terror inside his children's stories. In "Where the Wild Things Are," a boy named Max tames the beasts by "staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once" and is soon riding on their backs as their king in a wild rumpus. In "Outside Over There," an infant stolen by goblins is rescued by her sister.
Images from these and other Sendak books loom larger than life in the traveling exhibit, which contains panels of illustrations blown up as large as six feet high and three feet wide.
The images were selected from among the more than 100 books Sendak, 83, has illustrated during his 60-year career; he also wrote 20 of them. No one is more familiar with Sendak's work than Patrick Rodgers of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia. For the past four years, Rodgers has curated several Sendak exhibitions and spent many hours talking with the illustrator and author.
In a phone interview, Rodgers told the Beacon that "In a Nutshell" displays artistic treasures for both the young and old.
