THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, June 1, 1996 TAG: 9605310071
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY Bill Ruehlmann, Special to The Daily Break
LENGTH: 177 lines
Back in the second grade at Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Trinkett Clark recalls being so captured by the fairy tale she was reading that she did not notice the great storm gathering beyond the schoolroom window.
Grimm and grimmer.
It was a tornado, and the rest of the class was on the floor.
``I didn't even know it was raining,'' said Clark.
``TRINKETT,'' roared the teacher through her reverie, ``YOU NEED TO BE UNDER YOUR DESK!''
Like Dorothy's cyclone in Kansas, the windstorm went away. But the book's magnetic attraction goes on and on.
Now Clark, 45, former Chrysler Museum curator of 20th-century art, shares a lifetime appreciation for the literature of childhood in a major exhibition, ``Myth, Magic and Mystery: 100 Years of American Children's Book Illustration,'' opening to the public Sunday and continuing through Sept. 8 at the art museum in Norfolk.
``There is something in it for everyone,'' Clark said.
Dorothy is there in the wry-dry imagery of W.W. Denslow, as are the fang-faced Wild Things of Maurice Sendak and the megalomaniac stack of Yertle's turtles from Dr. Seuss; Robin Hood, Raggedy Ann and Andy, Ferdinand the bemused bull; Curious George and scores more of wondrous old friends, fantastic and pristine in their original formats.
Clark dreamed up the exhibit in college decades ago and brought it to fruition over the past three years with the collaboration of her husband, Nick, 48, curator of American art at the Chrysler, and Michael Patrick Hearn, 46, a New York-based international expert on children's literature and its illustration.
The exhibit's signature piece is a sun-poked 1921 N.C. Wyeth portrait of wakened Rip Van Winkle, standing as if poleaxed at the entry to his home.
``He's opening a door,'' explained Clark. ``That's why I've always loved children's books - because of the doors they open.''
Sometimes those doors swing wide on strangeness. Even in Oz there is irony. So Clark finds it poignant that the Chrysler Museum fired her - after 6 1/2 years of full-time service, but three months before the ambitious new exhibit that is the flower of her work could be mounted.
Not Kansas anymore
That happened Feb. 16, ``to address issues involving the Museum's budget,'' interim director Catherine Jordan informed Clark in an official letter.
Wrote Roy B. Martin Jr., president of the Chrysler board of trustees: ``The conclusion of your employment with the Museum was strictly determined by its current financial status; it has nothing to do with your job performance.''
The effect was nonetheless devastating.
But Clark prefers to keep her eye upon the doughnut instead of the hole.
``If the exhibit works out,'' she said, ``it could do a lot of good for the museum in terms of bringing in money and people.''
Meanwhile Clark's 11-year-old daughter, Charlotte, has provided her with a T-shirt inscribed thus: ``MOMMIES CAN'T BE FIRED.''
Charlotte is a big reason for ``Myth, Magic and Mystery.'' Her parents still read to her nightly. Daddy Nick has been at it since his daughter was barely 18 months old.
The first book was Esphyr Slobodkina's ``Cats for Sale.''
``She wasn't supposed to have the attention span for it,'' Nick Clark said, ``but I did the monkeys in the trees with such great panache that it captivated her.''
Framed in his office at the Chrysler Museum is a photograph of Charlotte in costume at Halloween. The photo is surrounded by books.
``One of the pleasures of reading to children is the rediscovery of things that affected you in childhood,'' Nick Clark said. ``I managed to introduce an old favorite of mine, `My Father's Dragon' by Ruth Stiles Gannett, into Charlotte's lexicon. And a joyous element of this project has been telling other adults about it.
``Without exception, you see their eyes light up, and they invariably ask, `Is so-and-so in it?' ''
Very likely, so-and-so is.
Nick Clark earned a B.A. from Harvard in fine arts and a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in art history. He has written about American pre-Raphaelites and lectured on Gilded Age aestheticism. Why is this man co-curating an exhibition of children's book illustrations?
``Because these illustrators are artists,'' he said. ``They have been at the service of a commercial product that enormously complicates what they have been trying to achieve. They have had to be sensitive to matters of typography, shape and proportion on the page.
``Then their work has been disseminated as a reproductive message. Because their art has been a means to an end, it has wound up on an intellectual siding. But truly, these people are pied pipers for the printed word.''
L. Frank Baum's prose took us to the Emerald City, but W.W. Denslow's eye-popping pix made us want to stay there.
Ultimately, illustration is showmanship for literacy.
Wizards
As books and reading are at the center of the Clarks' lives, so they reside in the middle of ``Myth, Magic and Mystery.''
The extensive 250-piece exhibition of original drawings and paintings is divided into four major categories: ``Alphabets and Nursery Rhymes''; ``Stories for Young Readers''; ``Books for All Ages''; and ``Fairy Tales, Fables and Myths.''
Within the larger framework is a display entitled ``The Making of a Book,'' which shows the progress of Wendy Watson's ``The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night'' from initial idea to finished product.
At the heart of the show is a reading room rife with books for kids to read and adults to read to them.
``There's so much out there,'' Nick Clark said. ``The figures are now up to 5,000 children's books published in this country annually! This show is like catching rain in a Coke bottle.''
The enormity of the Clarks' curatorial task led them to enlist the aid of children's literature expert Michael Patrick Hearn, whom they encountered through a mutual acquaintance in the course of their wide-ranging research.
``Like Dorothy said,'' Trinkett Clark noted, ``it was an accident.''
``The Clarks,'' said Hearn in a telephone interview from his New York home, ``are superb curators with enormous sympathy for the material.''
He is author of ``The Annotated Wizard of Oz.'' Also ``The Annotated Christmas Carol'' and ``The Annotated Huckleberry Finn.'' Plus ``The Victorian Fairy Tale Book,'' ``The Andrew Lang Fairy Tale Book'' and many other scholarly and popular publications.
His biography of L. Frank Baum was the basis for an NBC Movie of the Week, ``The Dreamer of Oz.''
``I was a dreamer,'' admitted Hearn of his own childhood.
He grew up a Marine Corps sergeant's son on base at Camp Pendleton, Calif.
``A large part of Camp Pendleton is desert,'' Hearn said. ``I thought it very drab. It was my equivalent of Dorothy's Kansas.''
He read his way out.
Later Hearn would systematize his studies with a degree in comparative literature from Bard College.
And just as he rebelled at being treated in a ``second-class'' fashion as an enlisted man's offspring, Hearn bridles at conventional disrespect for children's literature, a subject he has taught on the graduate level at Columbia University in New York and Simmons College in Boston.
``My goal is to elevate it to the status of other literature,'' Hearn said. ``Children's literature is, in fact, the only common literature people have. `The Wizard of Oz,' `Alice in Wonderland' and `Treasure Island' stay with you all your life and prepare you for other reading.
``And if you don't read as a child, you probably will not read as an adult.''
``Myth, Magic and Mystery'' celebrates children's books and promotes all books.
So why read them?
Young Charlotte Clark had the definitive answer for that, and for going to see this show as well:
``Because,'' said the voice of experience, ``it's fun.'' MEMO: RELATED ACTIVITIES FOR CHILDREN AT THE CHRYSLER: page E3 ILLUSTRATION: Illustrations courtesy of The Chrysler Museum
An N.C. Wyeth Illustration - part of the Chrysler show - for the
1921 edition of "Rip Van Winkle": "It was with some difficulty that
he found his way to his own house."
MOTOYA NAKAMURA
The Virginian-Pilot
Nick and Trinkett Clark still read nightly to their 11-year-old
daughter, Charlotte.
A "CURIOUS GEORGE" color penci drawing by Hans Augusto Rey
A WILLIAM JOYCE oilpainting from "DINOSAUR BOB"
THE LETTER "Z" from "ED EMBERLEY'S ABC"
ABOUT THE SHOW
What: ``Myth, Magic and Mystery: 100 Years of American Children's
Book Illustration,'' a new exhibition of 250 original drawings and
paintings
Where: Chrysler Museum of Art, 245 W. Olney Road in Norfolk
When: Sunday through Sept. 8. Opens Sunday with a visit from Dr.
Seuss' Cat in the Hat at 1:30 p.m.
Hours: Sundays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.; Tuesdays through Saturdays,
10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Mondays, closed.
Admission: $4 for adults; $2 for children, senior citizens and
students; children 5 and under free. On Wednesdays, admission is
free for everyone.
Call: 664-6278.
THE CHRYSLER MUSEUM
Curator Michael Patrick Hearn is an international expert on
children's literature. by CNB