Wild Things Exhibition Guide

We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, 1st Edition
1993
Book
New York: Harper & Row, 1993. © 1993 by Maurice Sendak.

Jack and Guy

Maurice Sendak looked to Mother Goose and joined two obscure rhymes for his story about children living on the streets of a contemporary metropolis. A gang of giant rats kidnaps a child, and Jack and Guy set out to rescue him, ultimately saving him with the help of the motherly moon and a massive white cat.

Sendak created the book in 1993, amid a rise in homelessness and during the AIDS epidemic, which claimed the lives of many of his friends. Jack and Guy could be seen as a gay couple, and their rescue of the child resembles an adoption, two decades before same-sex marriage became legal. (However, in New York City, where Sendak grew up, same-sex adoption became possible as early as the late 1970s.)

Sendak brought back the characters Jack and Guy 20 years later in his final book, My Brother’s Book, a posthumously published homage to two important people in his life: his brother, Jack, and his partner of 50 years, Eugene Glynn.

Maurice Sendak on Charlie Rose, 1993
Interview excerpts
Duration: 3 min. 45 sec., with sound
Courtesy of Charlie Rose, Inc.

Watch Sendak discuss his 1993 book We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy.

Workshop of Andrea Mantegna
Italian, about 1431–1506
Descent into Limbo
About 1475
Engraving

This engraving is based on the Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna’s painting that directly inspired Sendak’s cover illustration We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993).

In the engraving, Christ strides over the shattered gates of hell. On the right, Adam and Eve stand, hunched, with their righteous son Abel. Winged demons with reptilian tails and elf-like ears announce Judgment Day. Sendak saw Mantegna’s painting as an allegory for the creative process itself in which the artist dares to “dive deep” into the wellsprings of his imagination and into the history of art itself to bring back inspiration.

Artists: Maurice Sendak and Art Spiegelman (born 1948)
In the Dumps
1993
Watercolor and ink on paper with reproduction
© 1993 Maurice Sendak. Published by The New Yorker, September 27, 1993, p. 80.

The New Yorker magazine asked Sendak and his friend author-illustrator Art Spiegelman to collaborate on this comic strip. It’s in the form of a conversation between the two artists talking about how too many adults think children need to be shielded from topics such as world hunger or genocide, when in fact the media inevitably exposes them to such horrors every day.

My Brother’s Book
2013
Book
New York: HarperCollins; First Edition, 2013. © 2013 Maurice Sendak

After his beloved brother, Jack, died in 1995, Maurice wanted to create a book to celebrate their relationship, and he reprised his characters Jack and Guy. When he finally finished My Brother’s Book, he said, “I’ve been struggling for over five years to write a memorial to my brother that would not all be revelatory or autobiographical but would convey what he meant to me. And I did it.”