by Bruce Guthrie
Recently, I drove up to Hagerstown's Washington County Museum of Fine Arts museum to see the opening day of "Childhood Favorites: 100 Years of Children’s Book Illustration". The exhibit runs until March 17.
The
signage within the exhibit had some inconsistencies so I'm not entirely
sure how many original works are present (the website says 140) or how
many different artists are present (a sign in the exhibit says 62) but
it's a bunch! The printed signage is detailed and they made the effort
to show you which of the pieces involved Newbery and Caldecott winners.
There
is no catalog for sale and the exhibit brochure is mostly for kids
activities so it's not that informative. The exhibit is a traveling one
and it has been making the rounds -- Google "Art Kandy Collection".
(Yep, that's apparently a real name.)
At some point, I'll have
Google read the sign text for me and everything will be filled out
better but I haven't had time for that.
Who's in the exhibit?
Oooh, it's extensive! It does not have things like comic strips -- you
won't find Sparky Schulz or Winsor McKay or Rose O'Neill in here. These
are the artists you'll see original works from -- I'm ignoring
lithographs and copies of books. By my count, there are 55 but I might
have screwed up a couple:
* Sarah Noble Ives -- pieces from c 1910-15
* Peter Newell -- a drawing from c 1915
*
Anton Loeb -- the text describing his Wizard of Oz drawings mentions
that the book was banned in some jurisdictions because of (1)
anthropomorphized animals, (2) a strong female characters, and (3) no
witches can be good
* Campbell Grant
* Feodor Rajankovsky
* William Henry Bradley
* Gustaf Tenggren
* Tibor Gergely
* Wesley Dennis
* Theodor Seuss Geisel
* Marc Simont
*
Garth Williams -- LOTS of Garth Williams... Including a study sketch
from "The Rabbits' Wedding" (1958) which was banned in places because a
white rabbit was marrying a black rabbit
* Michael Hague
* Felicia Bond
* Floyd Cooper
* Tom Pohrt
*
David Wisniewski -- these were my FAVORITE pieces in the whole
exhibit. He did all of these with cut paper, mentioning he would go
through as many as a thousand X-Acto knives per book. These were
great! I've never heard of the books they were from ("Hand of the Fire
Demon" and "Fire that Burns Forever", both from 1988) but he won a
Caldecott Medal in 1997 for "Golem" -- if you view the book on Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/Golem-
* William Stout
* Richard Egielski
* S. Saelig Gallagher
* Deborah Nourse Lattimore
* Audrey Wood
* Dennis Nolan
* Don Wood
* Patricia Polacco
* Karen Barbour
* Mercer Mayer
* Rosemary Wells -- again, LOTS of Rosemary Wells
* James Marshall
* Gerald McDermott
* Maria Kalman
* William (Bill) J. Dugan
* Jerry Pinkney
* Barry Moser
* Tomie dePaola
* Arnold Lobel
* Anita Lobel
* Edward Frascino
* Jules Feiffer
* Joan Walsh Anglund
* Hillary Knight
* David Shannon
* Gary Baseman
* Chris Raschka
* Mark Teague
* Joe Cepeda
* John Bemelmans Marciano
* Maurice Sendak
* Mel Crawford
* Laurent de Brunhoff
* Richard Scarry
* Alice Provensen and Martin Provensen
* Ted Rand
* William Pene du Bois
* Leonard Weisgard
It's definitely worth a visit. There's also a new exhibit "Picasso on Paper" which runs until early March. The free gallery brochure describes in a fair amount of detail his relationships with the women in his life -- pretty much the artist version of Donald Trump minus the coup attempt.
I of course photographed the hell out of everything. The direct link to my exhibition pictures is:
But some of my favorites are below.
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