Wild Things Exhibition Guide

Selected Objects from Maurice Sendak’s Collection of Mickey Mouse Memorabilia from the 1930s and early ’40s
Various materials and dates

While working on In the Night Kitchen, Sendak started collecting vintage Mickey Mouse merchandise that was created when he was a child. Quickly, Sendak became one of America’s most eminent collectors of Mickey Mouse memorabilia. For him, these objects brought fond memories and inspired his work. The ones on view here are drawn from a shelf of figures that was in his studio.

Winsor McCay
American, 1869–1934
Study for Little Nemo in Slumberland
1906
Ink on paper

In the Night Kitchen is, in part, an homage to cartoonist Winsor McCay. Sendak wrote, “He and I serve the same master, our child selves. We both draw not on the literal memory of childhood but on the emotional memory of its stress and urgency. And neither of us forgot our childhood dreams.”

When Sendak bought McCay’s drawing for Little Nemo, he had no idea that beneath one of the panels, McCay had originally shown a lion eating Nemo, a coincidental precursor for a lion who swallows Sendak’s famous character Pierre in Nutshell Library.

American, 1869–1934
Little Nemo in Slumberland
January 28, 1906
Newspaper

Winsor McCay’s full-page comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland debuted in the New York Herald in 1905 and ran in different outlets until 1927. In every episode, Nemo has a fabulous dream that takes him on exciting adventures in fantastic worlds, but he always ends up in—or fallen out of—his bed. McCay pushed the boundaries of the comics grid, making inventive use of pacing and varying the size and shape of panels. He also played with perspective and imagined fairy-tale architecture.

I’m not the milk and the milk’s not me! I’m Mickey!

In the Night Kitchen 1^st edition
1970
Book
New York: Harper & Row, 1970. © 1970 by Maurice Sendak.

In the Night Kitchen, 1970

While the main character of In the Night Kitchen paid homage to Sendak’s beloved Mickey Mouse, the title and story were inspired by baking company advertisements from years earlier. One of these read “We Bake While You Sleep!” Sendak later remembered, “It seemed to me the most sadistic thing in the world because all I wanted to do was stay up and watch.”

Mickey tumbles out of bed and into the Night Kitchen. Three bakers nearly cook the boy into the cake, but he becomes a hero when he gets the milk for the batter by flying up into the Milky Way in a doughy airplane.

Final Art for In the Night Kitchen
1970
Watercolor on paper with ink on Mylar overlay
© The Maurice Sendak Foundation

In the Night Kitchen celebrates Sendak’s love of pre–World War II American culture, including the bakers’ resemblance to Oliver Hardy of the famous comic duo Laurel and Hardy.

Of the book, Sendak said, “It was an homage to everything I loved: New York, immigrants, Jews, Laurel and Hardy, Mickey Mouse, King Kong, movies. I just jammed them into one cuckoo book.”

Study for Mommy?
August 1, 2004
Pencil on tracing paper
© The Maurice Sendak Foundation

In 2006, Sendak revisited the monsters of his childhood: Hollywood’s grizzly creations of the 1930s, such as Frankenstein’s Monster, Werewolf of London, and The Mummy, get cast in Mommy?, Sendak’s only pop-up book. A little boy wanders through a haunted house, defeating everybody’s favorite monsters on his quest to find his mommy, who turns out to be Frankenstein’s bride.

Author: Randall Jarrell (1914–1965)
Illustrator: Maurice Sendak
Fly by Night
1986
Book
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986. © 1986 by Maurice Sendak

Nightmares

Although he claimed that his actual dreams were never the inspiration for his stories, the possibility that his characters might be dreaming often provides the narrative framework for Sendak’s stories. In dream-like spaces, gravity is defied, and the rules of reality are suspended. The night, in particular, becomes a place where Kenny, Jennie, Max, and Mickey encounter monsters and all things wild and desirable. Wishes and fears develop into beings, and memories spread out into vast landscapes. In such depictions, Sendak looked to the works of some of the greatest graphic artists of the past. In the examples in Sendak’s private collection, we can study some of the demons that inspired him.

Final Art for Fly by Night
1976
Ink on paper
© The Maurice Sendak Foundation

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes
Spanish, 1746–1828
Los Caprichos: ¿No hay quien nos desate? (The Caprices: Can’t Anyone Untie Us?)
1797–98
Etching

Goya’s nightmarish images often percolated into Sendak’s work, as in the monstrous owls in his designs for Fly by Night, Sleep Demons, and Hansel and Gretel, all on view nearby. Sendak also incorporated a ddrawing of his own mother holding him as a baby into the Fly by Night panorama. It was a nod to his interpretation of the book as author Randall Jarrell’s “open declaration of his need for a mother.”

Henry Fuseli
Swiss, 1741–1825
The Nightmare
1783
Stipple engraving

Final Art for Sleep Demons by Bill Hayes Dust Jacket
2002
Watercolor, pencil, and ink on paper
© The Maurice Sendak Foundation

The artist Henry Fuseli is well known for his paintings with supernatural themes, such as The Nightmare. This print of was in Sendak’s personal collection. Sendak’s design for the Sleep Demons echoes Fuseli’s nude figure, draped in bedsheets and visited by menacing figures. The Swiss-born artist’s grimacing stallion also appears in one of the key show curtains Sendak designed for the opera Hansel and Gretel.

Beatrix Potter
American, 1866–1943
Bats
Date not known
Watercolor and pencil on paper

The English writer and artist Beatrix Potter is known for her animal illustrations and stories, most notably The Tales of Peter Rabbit. Maurice Sendak admired her and turned to her watercolor renderings of bats for inspiration when creating his illustrations for Randall Jarrell’s The Bat-Poet.

Sendak wrote of Potter: “Her ability to hear ‘the whistling that some people cannot hear’ and to know something about the stray mice and bats prefigures the microcosm Beatrix Potter so painstakingly, so brilliantly, brought to life in her books.”