Wild Things Exhibition Guide

Final Art for “The Goblins” in The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm
1973
Ink on paper
© The Maurice Sendak Foundation

Sendak and The Brothers Grimm

In preparation to illustrate The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from the Grimm, Sendak journeyed through Europe in 1971. He visited the regions in Germany from which the Grimms gathered their tales and steeped himself in the language and landscapes of their stories.

The translators of the stories in The Juniper Tree refused to sanitize the Grimms’ often dark narratives. As Sendak wrote, “Clearly the brothers Grimm … never bothered their heads about providing so-called healthy or suitable literature for children. How fortunate for us they were only interested in telling a good story!”

Ludwig Emil Grimm
German, 1790-1863
Portrait of German Woman
1814
Etching

Ludwig Grimm, the younger brother of the folklorists Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, was an artist. His portrait of the German storyteller Katharina Dorothea Viehmann, who was an important source for the Grimm Brothers’ work, was used as the frontispiece for the second edition of the Grimm Fairy Tales. Sendak used this likeness in his picture “The Devil and the Three Golden Hairs,” on view nearby.

Grimm Reise (Grimm Journey)
1971
Sketchbook
© The Maurice Sendak Foundation

Throughout his European trip to research the Brothers Grimm, Sendak wrote daily in this notebook, which he called “Grimm Reise” (Grimm journey).

They stole my sister away! To be a nasty goblin’s bride!

Outside Over There
1981
Book
Boston: Lothrop, Lee, and Shepard Books. © 1981 Maurice Sendak

Outside Over There, 1981

Sendak spoke often about the difficulties of creating Outside Over There. It took more than 100 drafts to write about Ida’s dream-like adventure to save her baby sister, who goblins stole from a bedroom window (inspired by the Grimm story “The Goblins”).

The book became a vessel for Sendak’s own obsessions: the kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s toddler son in 1932 haunted Sendak since he was a young boy. The baby’s abduction and death came to signify to Sendak all the perils that could befall a child. And yet, in Outside Over There, Ida, like Max and Mickey before her, overcomes fear and anxiety in her quest to successfully save her sister.

Winslow Homer
American, 1836–1910
Dad’s Coming!
1873
Wood engraving

This print by Winslow Homer was a model for the opening scene of Outside Over There, evoking the family’s sense of longing for the father, who is at sea. Homer was one of Sendak’s favorite artists, and throughout his career, Sendak hung several of his prints in his studio.

Final Art for Outside Over There
1977
Watercolor, pencil, and ink on paper
© The Maurice Sendak Foundation

Maurice Sendak injected his pictures with images from his personal life and from the art that he most admired, no matter how unrelated they seem. For example, the goblins who steal Ida’s sister look like the Dionne quintuplets (born in 1934), the first quintuplets known to survive infancy and the subject of newspaper and magazine stories when Sendak was growing up. In a nearby image where Ida soars in the air with her yellow raincoat, Sendak included one of his heroes, the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, sleeping under a tree.

Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Elder
German, 1759–1835
Woman and Boy in an Arbor
1824
Etching

The German artist Carl Wilhelm Kolbe’s work, like this etching, inspired Sendak’s fantastic plant life in Dear Mili. Kolbe created a series of finely cross-hatched etchings of gigantic vegetation that dwarfed the animals and people, a common trope of Romanticism.

Final Art for Dear Mili
1985
Watercolor, pencil, and ink on paper
© The Maurice Sendak Foundation

Dear Mili is based on a fairy tale discovered in 1983 in a letter Wilhelm Grimm wrote at least a century earlier to a girl whose mother had died. Although the story is a Christian allegory about war and death, Sendak imbued the book with the experience of Jewish children during the Holocaust. In the background of this image, he imagined the children of Auschwitz singing, conducted by Mozart.

Final Art for Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 1 Cover
1996
Watercolor and pencil on paper
© The Maurice Sendak Foundation

Sendak said of Herman Melville, “He is the greatest and loneliest artist I know; he gives me courage very often just to go on … Reading Moby-Dick is like getting drunk.” He found a kindred spirit in the Melville biographer Hershel Parker, and it was almost fated that Sendak was the one who did the covers of Parker’s acclaimed two-volume biography.

John Dugdale
American, born 1960
Study for Pierre, or The Ambiguities
1992
Photograph
© John Dugdale

Photographer John Dugdale uses a large-format camera and printing techniques that hark back to the 1800s to create his work, which Sendak admired and collected. The two men collaborated on a series of photographs that served as figure studies for Sendak’s pictures for Herman Melville’s Pierre. The photographer compared the way Sendak posed the figures in the picture to an old-time film director: “He should have had a megaphone and a director’s chair and a crop, the way he was yelling.”