The Montclair Art Museum is hosting this exhibition devoted to the art of children's writer Eric Carle
If you haven't read Eric Carle's "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," you haven't known a pre-schooler for nearly half a century. Through Jan. 3, the Montclair Art Museum is showing a selection of Eric Carle's children's illustrations, all of them done in his signature style: painting tissue paper with watercolor and then cutting it up to glue on archival paper, making collages in the shape of animals and children.
Carle -- he was born in 1929, in Syracuse -- grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, where his parents returned in 1936. His education during the war was stressed and sketchy, but he had an art teacher in high school who showed him Nazi-"forbidden" Modernists, like Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso. High school students can rarely resist the allure of the forbidden.
In 1952, Carle returned to the U.S. and went to work in advertising. Those were the years when the commercial media exploded into color, leaving the black-and-white pre-war world in the shade. Modernist optimism simplified forms and reduced emotions to their most direct expression, and animals made a good subject for that. (Klee and Picasso were fond of animals, too, precisely for their lack of self-consciousness). Carle's "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," first published in 1969, hit that moment dead-on.
Painting on fragile, nearly fugitive tracing paper and then gluing those hand-made scraps to archival paper to create an image may seem like a minor innovation. But it introduces a certain randomness, and a crafts-like homeliness, to the result.
In 1973, Carle married Barbara Morrison, who shared his interest in children's book illustration, and they moved to Northampton, Massachusetts. In 2002 they opened the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in nearby Amherst, from which this show is drawn.
The Carle Museum (which collects the work of other artists, too) never lets the illustrations for "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" travel because they are so fragile. The core of "Animals and Friends," then, is taken from two much more recent books, "Let's Be Friends" (2013) and "The Artist Who Saw a Blue Horse" (2011), both of them made up of tissue-paper collages, and from posters and other books.
Carle's phenomenal success has made him something of a celebrity -- there's a photo of the artist with naturalist Jane Goodall, and a video interview with Mister Rodgers, in the entrance to the exhibition. But the impetus of all his books is as deceptively simple as his style.
"The Artist Who Saw a Blue Horse," for instance, is about German Expressionist Franz Marc, who painted all kinds of inappropriately hued animals in his day, and therefore a kind of artistic homage for Carle. Earnestly friendly, and shyly aware of the animal risks that making friends entails -- that seems to be the essence of Carle's work.
"Eric Carle: Animals and Friends" shares the museum with a show drawn from the collection, "Work and Leisure in American Art," which among many other things features a recent museum purchase of Vik Muniz's recreation of Gustave Courbet's "The Stone Breakers,"
Artist Rachel Perry Welty photographs her "Lost in my Life" series by showing herself obliterated by consumer products she uses as a housewife--in this case, aluminum foil--in "Work and Leisure" at the Montclair Art Museum through January (photo lent by Pat Bell). which was destroyed in World War II. Muniz, who was born in Brazil but lives much of the year in Brooklyn, photographs collages made from torn scraps of magazines, auto parts, chocolate sauce -- really a wide range of things, often with labor or religious themes.
"Work and Leisure in American Art" is a survey of over 80 works of art in addition to Muniz's "The Stone Breakers, After Gustave Courbet (Pictures of Magazines 2)" (2013). Some are familiar, but many have been brought out of storage for the first time in years, even for the first time ever. It's a broad theme, and a popular one in American art, in part because it defines the essential dichotomy of American life. The dream is good as long as Americans have more "leisure" than folks in any other country. But the reality is Americans are often defined by working harder, and for longer hours, than citizens of any other Western culture.
"The Stone Breakers" was a controversial picture when it first appeared, as Courbet was himself a controversial (and socialist) artist for most of his career. The original's sympathy for hard work is clear, but Muniz's conceit, remaking the lost masterpiece with bits of commercial advertising, is rife with ironies.
So is the rest of "Work," at least as seen in art. If we define work not as back-breaking labor, as Courbet did, but as artist's "work," as in Nell Booker's "Jim Lechay Painting Moses Soyer" (1948) or in local-boy-makes-good "George Inness Sketching Outside his Montclair Studio" (1889) by his son, the two themes of the title seem almost to be one.
Leisure is a more natural subject in American art, especially before the Great Depression. But the examples here that jump are all, like "The Stone Breakers," near-contemporary, like Chicago-based Dawoud Bey's "Smokey" (2001), a C-print of a black man in a park holding a beer can, or Bronx-based sculptor John Ahearn's 1986 "Toby and Raymond," a life cast of a young man in a hoodie with his pit bull.
Rachel Perry Welty's self-portrait, "Lost in my Life (wrapped books)," is a large format photo of the artist on a stool in a room in which every object--mostly books--is wrapped in aluminum foil. Welty makes photos of herself swallowed up by Pop consumerist objects, and this one, with its Minimalist austerity, meets Carle on his own ground of shy innocence.
Dan Bischoff may be reached at danbischoff55@gmail.com. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
