Children's Culture and the Avant-Garde: Painting in Paris, 1890-1915 9780415872683, 9780203109366

Table of contents :
Cover
CHILDREN’S CULTURE AND THE AVANT-GARDE: Painting in Paris, 1890–1915
Copyright
CONTENTS
FIGURES
Series Editor’s Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Higglety-Pigglety Modernism
Chapter One Turn-of-the-Century Grotesque: The Uptons’ Golliwogg in Context
Chapter Two Henri Rousseau: Jungles Transformed
Chapter Three William Nicholson: A Swashbuckling Time
Chapter Four Paula Modersohn-Becker: Someone Who Has a Long Road in Front of Her Doesn’t Run
Chapter Five Marc Chagall: I Was Not Born Simply to Seek Pleasure
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

CHILDREN’S CULTURE AND THE AVANT-GARDE

Children’s Literature and Culture Jack Zipes, Series Editor For a complete series list, please visit routledge.com Ursula K. Leguin Beyond Genre Literature for Children and Adults Mike Cadden Twice-Told Children’s Tales Edited by Betty Greenway Diana Wynne Jones The Fantastic Tradition and Children’s Literature Farah Mendlesohn Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800 Edited by Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore Voracious Children Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature Carolyn Daniel

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National Character in South African Children’s Literature Elwyn Jenkins

From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood Children’s Literature and the Construction of Canadian Identity Elizabeth A. Galway

Myth, Symbol, and Meaning in Mary Poppins The Governess as Provocateur Georgia Grilli

The Family in English Children’s Literature Ann Alston

A Critical History of French Children’s Literature, Vol. 1 & 2 Penny Brown Once Upon a Time in a Different World Issues and Ideas in African American Children’s Literature Neal A. Lester

Enterprising Youth Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature Monika Elbert Constructing Adolescence in Fantastic Realism Alison Waller

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Crossover Fiction Global and Historical Perspectives Sandra L. Beckett

Reading Victorian Schoolrooms Childhood and Education in Nineteenth-Century Fiction Elizabeth Gargano

The Crossover Novel Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership Rachel Falconer

Soon Come Home to This Island West Indians in British Children’s Literature Karen Sands-O’Connor

Shakespeare in Children’s Literature Gender and Cultural Capital Erica Hateley

Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature Edited by Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard Neo-Imperialism in Children’s Literature About Africa A Study of Contemporary Fiction Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature Kathryn James Fundamental Concepts of Children’s Literature Research Literary and Sociological Approaches Hans-Heino Ewers Children’s Fiction about 9/11 Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities Jo Lampert The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature Jan Susina Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers Maria Nikolajeva “Juvenile” Literature and British Society, 1850–1950 The Age of Adolescence Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson Picturing the Wolf in Children’s Literature Debra Mitts-Smith New Directions in Picturebook Research Edited by Teresa Colomer, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Cecilia Silva-Díaz The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature Invisible Storytellers Gillian Lathey The Children’s Book Business Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century Lissa Paul Humor in Contemporary Junior Literature Julie Cross

Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature Tison Pugh Reading the Adolescent Romance Sweet Valley and the Popular Young Adult Romance Novel Amy S. Pattee Irish Children’s Literature and Culture New Perspectives on Contemporary Writing Edited by Valerie Coghlan and Keith O’Sullivan Beyond Pippi Longstocking Intermedial and International Perspectives on Astrid Lindgren’s Work s Edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Astrid Surmatz Contemporary English-Language Indian Children’s Literature: Representations of Nation, Culture, and the New Indian Girl Michelle Superle Re-visioning Historical Fiction The Past through Modern Eyes Kim Wilson The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature Holly Virginia Blackford Pinocchio, Puppets and Modernity The Mechanical Body Edited by Katia Pizzi Crossover Picturebooks A Genre for All Ages Sandra L. Beckett Peter Pan’s Shadows in the Literary Imagination Kirsten Stirling Landscape in Children’s Literature Jane Suzanne Carroll Colonial India in Children’s Literature Supriya Goswami Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Painting in Paris, 1890–1915 Marilynn Olson

CHILDREN’S CULTURE AND THE AVANT-GARDE Painting in Paris, 1890–1915

M A R I LY N N ST R A S SE R OL SON

NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of Marilynn Strasser Olson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Olson, Marilynn Strasser. Children’s culture and the avant-garde : painting in Paris, 1890–1915 / by Marilynn Strasser Olson. p. cm. — (Children’s literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Children’s literature—History and criticism. 2. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)— France—Paris. 3. Art and literature—France—History—19th century. 4. Art and literature—France—History—20th century. 5. Children in art. 6. Children in literature. I. Title. PN1009.5.S63O47 2012 809'.89282—dc23 2012008696 ISBN13: 978-0-415-87268-3 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-10936-6 (ebk) Typeset in Minion by IBT Global.

To Don and Christopher

CONTENTS

List of Figures

xi

Series Editor’s Foreword

xiii

Acknowledgments

xv

Introduction

Higglety-Pigglety Modernism

Chapter 1

Turn-of-the-Century Grotesque: The Uptons’ Golliwogg in Context

19

Chapter 2

Henri Rousseau: Jungles Transformed

35

Chapter 3

William Nicholson: A Swashbuckling Time

57

Chapter 4

Paula Modersohn-Becker: Someone Who Has a Long Road in Front of Her Doesn’t Run

89

Chapter 5

Marc Chagall: I Was Not Born Simply to Seek Pleasure

1

127

Conclusion

155

Notes

161

Bibliography

203

Index

219

ix

FIGURES Cover:

Senecio (1922), Paul Klee, and Peggy’s Head, Florence Upton from Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwogg”.

1.1

Florence Upton. Advertising flyer for The Golliwogg’s Bicycle Club (1986).

21

Detail of Number 226, Die Freunde aus der Kinderzeit, broadside by Eduard Ille, München, Braun & Schneider, 1858.

22

1.3

Florence Upton. The Golliwogg in War!

23

1.4

Florence Upton. Golliwogg at the Seaside (1898).

27

1.5

Pablo Picasso. Nu sur fond rouge (1906).

29

2.1

Drame sanglant dans une ménagerie. Detail of a recurring cover motif. Le Petit Journal (Janvier 24, 1904).

42

2.2

Henri Rousseau. Horse Attacked by a Jaguar (1910).

46

2.3

Henri Rousseau (dit le Douanier Rousseau). La Charmeuse de Serpents (1907).

49

William Nicholson. Self-portrait as pavement artist from An Alphabet.

62

3.2

William Nicholson. A Young Nobleman Surveys the City.

79

3.3

William Nicholson. Heinemann poster for Clever Bill.

82

3.4

William Nicholson. [She Taught Them]—How to Dance.

85

1.2

3.1

xi

xii • Figures 4.1

Paula Modersohn-Becker. Reclining Mother and Child II (summer 1906).

103

4.2

Rue de la Grande Chaumière (ca. 1905).

114

4.3

Paula Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung. Sitting Girl (ca. 1899).

121

4.4

Paula Modersohn-Becker. Sitting Nude Girl with Vase (1906/1907).

124

5.1

Marc Chagall. The Cowshed (1917).

132

5.2

Marc Chagall. View from a Window, Vitebsk (1914/1915).

140

5.3

Marc Chagall. Over Vitebsk (1914).

145

5.4

Marc Chagall. I and the Village (1911).

152

Series Editor’s Foreword

Dedicated to furthering original research in children’s literature and culture, the Children’s Literature and Culture series includes monographs on individual authors and illustrators, historical examinations of different periods, literary analyses of genres, and comparative studies on literature and the mass media. The series is international in scope and is intended to encourage innovative research in children’s literature with a focus on interdisciplinary methodology. Children’s literature and culture are understood in the broadest sense of the term children to encompass the period of childhood up through adolescence. Owing to the fact that the notion of childhood has changed so much since the origination of children’s literature, this Routledge series is particularly concerned with transformations in children’s culture and how they have affected the representation and socialization of children. While the emphasis of the series is on children’s literature, all types of studies that deal with children’s radio, fi lm, television, and art are included in an endeavor to grasp the aesthetics and values of children’s culture. Not only have there been momentous changes in children’s culture in the last 50 years, but there have also been radical shifts in the scholarship that deals with these changes. In this regard, the goal of the Children’s Literature and Culture series is to enhance research in this field and, at the same time, point to new directions that bring together the best scholarly work throughout the world. Jack Zipes

xiii

Acknowledgments

With grateful thanks: Gillian Adams, Angela Ingram, Caroline Jones, Michael Joseph, Katherine Ledbetter, Chris Martin, Anne Morey, Susan Morrison, Claudia Nelson, Suzanne Rahn, Teya Rosenberg, Victoria Smith, Elizabeth Stark, Graeme Wend-Walker, and Miriam Williams For help in obtaining and viewing materials: Margaret Vaverek of the Alkek Library, Texas State University; Rebecca Duckwitz of the Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung; and the Hill-Stead Museum For permission to reprint the Golliwogg article, which appeared originally, in a slightly different form, in Children’s Literature 28 (Yale University Press, 2000) For support: Children’s Literature Association Grant Committee for support of Chapter 4 Texas State University for granting Developmental Leave in the fall of 2010 Don and Christopher Olson For permission to reprint works of art: Desmond Banks Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung Museum d’Orsay The Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

xv

Introduction Higglety-Pigglety Modernism I can see Paris as plain as day by just shutting my eyes. The beautiful ladies are always gayly dancing around with pink sunshades and bead purses, and the grand gentlemen are politely dancing and drinking ginger pop.1 Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

Paris, as the “cultural capital” of Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was a Mecca for young people who streamed there in the thousands to take life-drawing classes and become artists and liberated people. When forces of social convention close in around a turn-of-the-century fictional child hero, it is not always apparent that Art and some degree of Bohemianism was an option of the time for a substantial number of young people, still less that it was, in some ways, actually encouraged. We see some glimpses: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm’s pink sunshade, for example, was the gift of Miss Ross, a painter, who had brought it from Paris. The sunshade ends its life as a sacrificial victim in the family well in Riverboro, Maine, but not without having given Rebecca a wider perspective that her rural neighbors lacked. The bestselling Trilby (1894), by Punch illustrator and painter George du Maurier, evokes a kind of “college scrape” version of 1850s bohemianism: “Oh, happy days and happy nights, sacred to art and friendship! Oh, happy times of careless impecuniosity, and youth and hope and health and strength and freedom—with all Paris for a playground, and its dear old unregenerate Latin quarter for a workshop and a home!”2 It also points out another feature of the time that impinges on children’s culture, namely, that many children, like Trilby herself, were artist’s models from the time they were born. In addition to being a long-running youth event, however, the Parisian fin-de-siècle moment also drew on childhood as an inspiration. Painters who hoped to change the way the Academy defined art sometimes turned to the 1

2 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde idea of the primitive to re-define what a Modern art should be doing. Sometimes childhood itself was a site that seemed worthy of investigation. For children’s literature specialists, this calls for the question of how “childlike” is defined, in much the same way that while discussing the innovative aspect of “primitive” can be useful, the term itself must be carefully scrutinized. The avant-garde movement in art, often identified with the kinds of early Modernism around 1900, contains many strands. One might get a consensus that the late nineteenth-century painters—and practitioners in many fields— are simply reacting against something: particularly an established set of social or religious or artistic beliefs that no longer appeared viable in a changing world. Because in some ways Modernism appears to be a kind of second round of Romanticism, and we are used to associating childhood with Romanticism, the association of children’s culture with the avant-garde seems commonsensical. The painters I will examine, however, demonstrate by their practice and their places of origin that although the connections are many, they are highly varied. And that the definitions used for the early avant-garde are, themselves, slippery. It seems to make a difference, for example, what particular aspect of life is the target of rebellion. And, because earnest Victorians (who had incorporated aspects of Romanticism) had been decrying social and religious hypocrisy for years in both the plastic and literary arts, the form in which the reaction is couched can be definitive. Henrik Ibsen’s plays, which herald many of the Modernist changes in Anglophone literature and the arts, are about hypocrisy and injustice in established social, religious, and gender relations. But the subject of his controversial Ghosts (1881) is simply restated in the sentimental and melodramatic Trilby: a childlike, though sexually experienced, bohemian model is purer and more righteous in every way than a conventionally religious upperclass family. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children’s literature abounds in examples of rebellious material, in terms of undermining the established order, gender relations, conventional ways of thinking, adult standards, and so on, but the books’ status as belonging in the Ibsen rather than the du Maurier camp depends upon individual critical importance attributed to particular topics (Can nihilism be implicit? Must preferring a particular subjective view coincide with the denial of objective reality? Is it acceptable to take up Eastern mysticism while rejecting Western religions?), in addition to the style of the work that through innovation expresses the artist’s attempt to embody a new sense of being. In the case of avant-garde art, the style test is generally made in terms of rebellion against the perceived standards of the “Academy.” The “Academy” refers in this discussion primarily to the (French) Salon in Paris and, to a lesser extent, the (English) Royal Academy in London. From the 1760s onward, both the French and the English had art establishments, with the French being the preeminent in international circles. These institutions had grown out of governmentally sponsored schools for art—École des Beaux-Arts, Royal Academy—which were meant to foster artistic excellence and national cultural ideals. Their importance depended upon the selective juried shows

Introduction • 3 that were held annually (or biennially), at which the painters fortunate enough to please the judges were given a chance to display the accepted works before a large public audience, to be reviewed in the newspapers and other journals, to win prizes and status, and very likely to sell paintings. Academic portrait painting, sometimes by women, is mentioned in such works as those of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Rosa Nouchette Carey, and Mrs. Henry de la Pasture because the exhibitions could be an elite social event: often a point is made about a society beauty’s portrait attracting much attention from her friends, or a portrait, already sold, being left in the painter’s possession for the Academy or Salon.3 An artist’s yearly production was aimed at having an appropriate entry (size and so on could determine appropriateness) for the showing, which could uniquely establish an artistic career. Throughout the nineteenth century, various political and social agendas re-defined who could enter paintings for the Salon (what nationalities, what gender) and gradually offered some other opportunities to show work—for example, the Salon des Refusés (1863) for painters who had been denied a place in the Salon—but the Salon was the international arbiter of painting excellence until late in the century. When Esther’s ne’er-do-well older brother, Fred, in Rosa Nouchette Carey’s Esther (1884), leaves home for St. John’s Woods (a fi n-de-siècle artistic locale) in London to collect “broken china” and wear velvet jackets, he is hoping to paint a picture that will be “accepted by the hanging committee.”4 He is a “Bohemian” artist, but while this life style involves a relaxation of formal requirements for social interaction (as well as both young men and women overcoming various taboos about painting from the nude), the aim of the artists is to be great and famous along accepted lines or (as noted here in Chapter 4) to hone skills that could be made commercially successful in some other way. The avant-garde, although it co-existed with this milieu, is instead an effort to re-think what Modern art should be, specifically by rejecting what “the hanging committee” had to say. The Academy (discussed further in Chapter 2) was primarily associated with illusionism in art. This can be roughly defined as painting that attempted through technical skill (perspective, complementary arrangement of colors in the composition, accuracy of proportion, and so on) to create the illusion of three dimensions on the canvas, as well as to convey outward reality in what appeared to be an accurate way, while suffusing it with the artist’s own formal and thematic concerns. The belief that there was an overarching reality to convey, and a right way to convey it, underlies the standard. As Robert Herbert notes when describing an example of John Ruskin’s art criticism, the greatest art “rises above naturalism to a superior level and exposes the supreme order of the universe in the grandness of the artist’s imagination.”5 The painter’s imagination may be said to be a kind of mediator between universal truth and the material world. A hierarchy of excellence in types of paintings was also part of the academic standard, with history paintings praised for their ability to convey the

4 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde most noble (or national) ideas. A review from the 1844 Royal Academy reveals this agenda: A picture by G. Patten representing the Madness of Hercules. The hero occupies the centre of the picture, wielding aloft in his left hand his struggling child, while his right grasps a bloody club. His wife is kneeling in the foreground with uplifted arms, and the corpse of one of his victims lies at his feet. In this picture there is much that is good, but upon the whole it is unsatisfactory. The countenance of Hercules is coarse and ferocious, conveying no notion of the dignity of the fallen hero; and there is a want of sublimity throughout the group.6 Besides the required sublimity, it can be noted that historical and mythological paintings are paintings with something going on: the people in them are part of a story. Such backstories would have to be known by the (educated) viewer of many academy paintings in order to appreciate how well the painter had succeeded in conveying the noble idea in question. (Who are those people? What are they doing with all those horses? Was this a good thing?) When Esther’s little brother in the eponymous Carey novel determines that his first painting, when he is grown, will consist of “the Retreat of the Ten Thousand under Xenophon,” he is ambitiously embarking on future greatness, prepared by his juvenile efforts to illustrate scenes out of biblical stories as his Sabbath activity.7 An artist’s choice of a subject not connected with sublimity or not connected with a story, then, might indicate a rejection of the traditional hierarchy. The issues that arose—or should have been discussed—at the James Whistler v. John Ruskin 1878 libel trial over Ruskin’s criticism of Whistler’s Nocturne paintings concern this definition by Academic standards of what a painting is, as opposed to a potentially “pleasing decoration.”8 Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold, a picture of fireworks over the Cremorne Gardens near his home in London, particularly excited attention at the trial, where its lack of perspective, lack of truth to Nature, lack of finish, lack of meaning, obscurity of form, and so on were approached from many angles, including Ruskin’s original contention that he shouldn’t be charging so much for inferior workmanship. The jury found for Whistler but awarded him only a farthing damages. Linda Merrill, in her monograph on the trial, states Ruskin’s position (originally in Modern Painters I) that the “preciousness” of paintings depends “ultimately on the clearness and justice of the ideas they contained and conveyed,” which can be restated as the idea that pictures should be visual treatises, or figures of speech.9,10 Opposed to this, as Merrill notes, is the non-literary and non-naturalistic way of defining “idea”: “the idea of a work by Whistler was contained in and conveyed by its compositional constituents, rather than the objects those elements might incidentally depict. Unlike a picture, which indicated the external world, a nocturne was essentially self-referential.”11

Introduction • 5 That a painting can be defined as an arrangement of the “compositional constituents” suggests the abstract art that was still in the future. But it also gives more legitimacy to any viewer’s opinion, even those that were contrary to Whistler’s stated intentions. In practice, a painting containing objects or people from the external world as incidentals, with pictorial harmony and color considered as the desired end, is likely to appear ambiguous. The viewer is free, under these circumstances, to take from the painting whatever seems to him or her to be there; it eliminates the superiority of an art critic of the kind noted above in connection with Madness of Hercules. In the case of Whistler paintings (or those of painters such as Sir William Nicholson, who argued his tenets), however, it is also quite hard to keep narrative meaning out of “arrangements”; it does not take a particularly literal-minded viewer to put some in. The Whistler trial demonstrates a changing standard and the beginning of public confusion about what a painting is supposed to be. The Salon des Refusés of 1863 (at which Édouard Manet and Whistler both exhibited) had been such a turning point in France. As Charles Harrison notes, “it was becoming clear that taste in art was no longer something that one dominant section of society could define and control.”12 Both occasions also demonstrate that there were a variety of ways to oppose the Academy: Painters such as Whistler, or Nicholson, or Manet, who belonged to Whistler’s generation and whose technique and subject matter was open to similar discussion, were not abstract artists, and they painted aspects of the world around them, but they were not “establishment” artists. Nicholson’s visual joking and experiments in illusion are, for example, cheerfully defiant. In his study, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–1916, Christopher Butler notes that the drift away from illusionism is toward subjectivism, which involves exploring a new mode of vision, a new way of seeing.13 (This is sometimes allied to the idea that without a great universal truth, like God, there is no one true way to capture reality, only various subjective viewpoints. This is frequently not the explicit reason, however, and may be opposed to the stated intentions of the artist.) In the process of determining the best way to find a new form of expression, sometimes an artist felt that inspiration could be found in a culture or in a national artistic style that bore little resemblance to the Academic tradition in which she or he had been raised; this approach to a new way of seeing is often called primitivism. As Gillian Perry points out, many of the artists now considered “Modern,” were, in their time, actually opposed to the Modern aspects of their era, in particular urbanization.14 Some of these persons associated themselves with “primitive” forms as a rejection of the accepted way of painting in the Western society from which they increasingly felt distanced. In the history of children’s literature the anti-urban idea is familiar because it is related to the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Émile, 1762), which had and continue to have strong influence within our field. The idea that the child falls into error when socialized by church, state, and fashion and that people

6 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde living in circumstances that prevent this from happening live more authentic lives encourages the idea of uninstructed childhood or uneducated people as inspirational and true. The child-rearing method advocated by Rousseau in Émile inspired vast educational reforms in Europe and North America with far-reaching effects. For example, Juliet Dusinberre and Norman Brosterman have both discussed varying influences that Friedrich Froebel, a radical German educator in the Romantic tradition of Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, had upon English literary Modernism and abstract art, respectively.15 Froebel, the inventor of the kindergarten, in his theories of development and his classroom methods constitutes so broad a range of influence, however, that much remains to be said. Chapter 4 in this volume discusses a further connection of educational theory to the German avant-garde painter Paula Modersohn-Becker’s work. John Ruskin, like Rousseau, was a major influence on the determination that childhood was a site for artistic innovation. As Robert L. Herbert notes, “Ruskin was so far taken by the abstract elements of the arts that he preferred the early and less polished work of each period he loved.” The “abstract and vital” period belonged to its “childhood,” while the work that most nearly reached “perfection,” was its decadent and least valuable period.16 Moreover, his championship of the Pre-Raphaelite painters included his repeated statements that coloring in painting had been corrupted by art instruction from the Renaissance on. His art instruction manual (The Elements of Drawing, 1857) stressed the importance of seeing with the untutored eye of childhood, when color could be freshly observed from its physical location in Nature, rather than being conventionally used because the painter knew already that grass, for example, was green: The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify . . . when grass is lighted strongly by the sun in certain directions, it is turned from green into a peculiar and somewhat dusty-looking yellow. It we had been born blind, and were suddenly endowed with sight on a piece of grass thus lighted in some parts by the sun, it would appear to us that part of the grass was green, and part a dusty yellow (very nearly of the colour of primroses); and, if there were primroses near, we should think that the sunlighted grass was another mass of plants of the same sulphur-yellow colour. We should try to gather some of them, and then find that the colour went away from the grass when we stood between it and the sun, but not from the primroses; and by a series of experiments we should find out that the sun was really the cause of the colour in the one—not in the other. We go through such processes of experiment unconsciously in childhood; and having once come to conclusions touching the signification of certain colours, we always suppose

Introduction • 7 that we see what we only know, and have hardly any consciousness of the real aspect of the signs we have learned to interpret. Very few people have any idea that sunlighted grass is yellow.17 Thus, the decision that art would benefit from a separation from fashion, from bad instruction, and from places where these practices held sway emerged in part from a critic who inspired the avant-garde on the one hand, and was simultaneously reviled by experimental painters for tying art to morality on the other.18 A “primitive” location, however, did not produce avant-garde work in most cases. Some painters who sought out remote locales painted very traditional or even sentimental pictures of peasant life. Some took up folkloric crafts. But some, such as Paula Modersohn-Becker at Worpswede or Paul Gauguin in Brittany or Tahiti, were attempting to change the way they painted to better reflect their ideas of Modernity. Modersohn-Becker and Gauguin differed widely in the extent to which they idealized the people with whom they interacted in their retreats. But because both worked to understand and illustrate concepts of motherhood and childhood in communities cut off from the capitals of Europe, where authenticity might be found in human and spiritual relationships, and because both significantly altered their styles in non-naturalistic ways in order to capture this insight, they can be called Modernists in that sense. 19 In the post-Darwinian world, the child and the remote setting was likely to exhibit an uninhibited approach to human sexuality, as well as to the botanical aspects of Nature, in the hands of avant-garde painters. Although neither Tahitians nor residents of the poorhouse at Worpswede were accustomed to nudity in the era in which the painters encountered them, the painters’ conception that people living in remote places were more in tune with life forces is reflected in the sort of pictures each painter produced. The idea that children are, instead of separated from sexual matters, awakening to and reflecting biological forces is part of this conception. Some of the paintings of mothers and children produced by Modernists avoid the eroticism that had encumbered many Academy paintings, while illustrating the sitters’ apparently comfortable acceptance of the natural body. The connection of the “primitive” with the female gender is, naturally, a problem in Modernist, as well as in Academic, work, but the emphasis on motherhood resonates with many of the best-known pieces of children’s literature in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Paris, in this period, was a place where the flora, fauna, and people of the world could be observed, in some sense, without actually leaving for Tahiti, a solution Henri Rousseau embraced. The discussion of differences between “primitive” outsiders—villagers from foreign lands who exhibited their way of life in Parisian parks—and native Parisians is bound to be troubled, but to the painters the “outsiders” were often the same source of inspiration and perspective one might get by going far away. Odilon Redon (1840–1916), a

8 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde French symbolist painter, for example, found the villagers who inhabited the exhibitions at the Jardin d’Acclimatation (1881) a source of positive contrast to Parisian (and adult) life: The way they look at us expresses as much superiority as wildness. . . . One stretched out on the ground . . . follows with his eye, a civilized man who passes by. . . . A rich financier enters . . . while I compare them. How ugly he is, this old bourgeois; and they beautiful, these sublime children of polar life! Their nudity emerges from the earth like a flower of India, in full bloom.20 According to Barbara Larson, Redon’s exposure to the Tierra del Fuegans, in addition to contemporaneously collected anthropological busts and artifacts, inspired such charcoal images as Cactus Man, which suggests the tragedy inherent in the doomed, outworn old Parisian, as well as the beauty of the young, nonEuropean people.21 The use of non-European figures in the paintings and books considered in this volume in Chapters 1, 2, and 3, undoubtedly owes some of its inception to the Paris that celebrated multiculturalism, colonialism, and anthropological study at a moment when its painters were looking for something new. In a more famous manifestation of what is called primitivism, avant-garde painters looked for inspiration to another artistic tradition rather than to the remote location or peoples themselves. In this case, the new way of seeing was specifically linked to the style of the artifacts of another place or time. The “primitive” styles that were of interest in this era were more abstract or simplified or monumental than the naturalism of the European tradition. As Perry notes, the relation between the European artists and the artifacts of (often colonized) peoples is complex and not, probably, a matter of “discovering” something from outside the European culture.22 Again, this is an area where the Modernist painter is often implicated in the colonial fervor of the time, although it is at least conceivable that some painters’ allusions to, say, African, motifs might be progressive political statements. The legitimacy of “refreshing” or “rejuvenating” the old world through exposure to a “young” culture depends a great deal on how exposure to the young culture was acquired, as well as to the always present ambivalence of the term “primitive.” The conflation of “childhood” with “primitive” meant that exposure to non-European artifacts also affects children’s culture. Although, as Butler notes, “Freud sees childhood as recapitulating the archaic; the childhood of the individual and the primitive beginnings interact,” the belief in the particular appropriateness of international folklore and myth for children obviously predates Freud’s influence at the turn of the century by decades, just as a Romantic era attempt to refresh English poetry by an infusion from Arabic, Persian, and Indian poems can be seen in the work of Sir William Jones in 1772.23,24 What the effect of seeing nature and human relations from the perspective of many different cultures has on children is unclear, partly because children’s exposure to folktales is mediated by especially prepared versions,

Introduction • 9 but it is likely to have been similar to some of the effects notable in creative adults. For the European painters trying to find a new form of expression, traditional or ancient artifacts that were newly introduced to European culture (such as those of Egypt, Africa, or Oceania) did demonstrate the idea that the experiences of truth and seeing were manifold, not universal and unified. Japanese prints were included by many people in the list of the remotely primitive artifacts that were newly discovered by Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century (further discussed in Chapter 2). Japan, in the kind of print that excited European painters, had entered a Romantic period, itself, and the idea that some of the prints most admired were actually influenced by European painting was not well understood. But, for example, Europeans noted that Japanese prints did not attempt to create the illusion that the piece of paper on which they were printed was literally a window into natural reality in the way European illusionism sought to do. The Japanese masters’ approach to conveying the natural world, although initially criticized by Academic standards, seemed inspirational and beautiful both to the artists who loved Nature, like van Gogh, and to those who wanted to borrow arrangements and spaces for other purposes. Emphasizing the material nature of the canvas in a composition, eliminating shadows, using flat spaces of color, altering the viewer’s point of view of the subject in ways that had not been used in European painting, also became a way of breaking with the Academy. Commodore Perry’s “opening of Japan” brought Japonisme to the West. Children’s literature, in keeping with adult-stream culture and the arts, embraced Japanese tales and interpretations of Japanese culture in the fin-de-siècle period.25 Further, the non-European artifacts that offered a new way of seeing also sometimes suggested a new way of viewing spirituality. If, as in the case with many Modernists, Western Christian dogma was viewed as hypocritical, narrow minded, or (because creation, fall, and redemption were central to the religion) in too direct a conflict with evolution, ancient secrets of another sort might be tried. Preferring the master narratives of another tradition, as was the case in adopting the techniques of the Japanese print, is a kind of spiritual halfway point for many people in this era. Larson’s study of Odilon Redon includes a summary from Samuel Bethoud’s Féeries de la science (1866), which contains a narrative motif found in popular science of the decade: A Japanese prince leaves his splendid palace to look at the scientific wonders one could find in Paris. He discovers Pasteur’s early work and looks through a telescope. . . . The prince is also interested in primitive objects and the spiritual powers that seem to reside therein. 26 She concludes, “this idea of an exotic wanderer at large in Paris who, like a child, is spellbound by what he finds in the capital was a favorite teaching tool in the sixties.”27 The eagerness to adopt or learn about spiritual artifacts of ancient societies was reflected in such influential works as E. Nesbit’s The Story

10 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde of the Amulet (1906), which references theosophy and other tales drawing on a connection between children and the people of an earlier time. The work of L. Frank Baum also reflects the belief that spirituality could be strengthened by a combination of science and non-European religious beliefs. The artifacts of ancient Egypt and translations of the Arabian Nights (which included bottles with djinns in them and so on) had been available to Europeans throughout the nineteenth century, although more attention was centered upon them in the last two decades. The Rosetta Stone was in contention between France and England in the Napoleonic Wars and translated by the 1820s; artifacts from Egypt were brought to Europe by unscientific scavengers in the first half of the century and studied and excavated more carefully in the second half. That ancient “secrets” were becoming available to Western culture at the same time that science also was offering new insights is an important dual reality; the idea that cultures were coming together was, as well. The effect of a retreat to places outside urban centers, in fact, ultimately corresponds to the cosmopolitan effect of the Parisian urban area, itself. Both sites enlarge the number of sources of inspiration and influence from which art is drawn, and simultaneously deny that one tradition, alone, has all the answers. As in the case of Mary’s (from India) or the Sowerbys’ (Yorkshire peasants) influence in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden, generative life is the result of looking outside the established ruling class for guidance, an idea widely disseminated at the time. Paris, during the years following its military defeat by Prussia in 1871, repeatedly gathered the whole world to international expositions. Its zoological garden was both a tribute to the power of the people’s political insurrection and a display of faraway international images. The contemporary balloon craze was popularly adapted as a “voyage autour du monde” thrill ride at the 1878 Universal Exposition. As Larson notes, it featured a tethered balloon soaring over “exotic constructions” such as a Chinese pagoda, and doubtless reminded the public of the international adventures in the very popular works of Jules Verne, which began in the 1860s.28 Paris’s journals and museums displayed ancient artifacts and paintings and new science and art for a world of viewers. It also hosted an international group of student artists. All of the “primitivisms” noted heretofore have been labeled from what one might call the point of view of painters and critics who were excited about or sympathetic to Modernist artistic production. To be more complete, one should note that the critics, painters, and general public who were not sympathetic to Modernist innovation also used the word in a pejorative way, and in this “primitive” childhood also had a role. This rather loosely used “primitive” refers to “childishness” (rather than “childlikeness”) on the part of the artist. In Butler’s phrase, “incompetent rather than Modern.” 29 This “primitive” responds to an artist’s breaking of Academic rules by rebuking her or his lack of training: “child” as untutored and in need of instruction. References to the use of bright, unmodulated colors, for example, might elicit the response that the painting looks as if a child painted it, a remark that became a cliché (but

Introduction • 11 also a compliment) by the era of abstract art. When the technique in question is intentional and the painter is an avant-garde painter (not Grandma Moses), this kind of loosely used “primitivism” is often reassessed at a later date. However, on the other side of cubism, it can also be used pejoratively to indicate a strand of mysticism or other archaic remnant in a work that might otherwise be seen as a Modernist artistic production, an occasional criticism, for example, of Marc Chagall’s work. Not only did childhood converge with primitivism, but with the contemporary cultural phenomenon of decadence, as well (an issue discussed in Chapter 1). Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory and other cultural interests in biology and heredity, in some hands, became a reason for a darkened view of Nature: a “new way of seeing” that reinterpreted the world as in thrall to competitive biological drives, micro-organisms, and deterministic doom. Barbara Larson notes, for example, the great societal attention to microbes, epidemic disease, and public hygiene in fin-de-siècle France, which inevitably rose in an era in which biology was somewhat better understood, but in which medical science was still unable to eliminate or cure common fatal illnesses.30 In fact, the interest in heredity and germs outran the ability to make an accurate medical diagnosis. In children’s books such as Six to Sixteen and Secret Garden, for example, cholera, which is due to contaminated water, is discussed as a contagious disease; in many venues, syphilis is wrongly supposed to be hereditary. The discussions in Dear Enemy (1914) about the heredity of various orphans at the John Grier Home and the hovering specter of Margaret, Mother of Criminals reflects this public concern about genetic determinism.31 Moreover, the natural birth-to-death cycle experienced by living creatures was also perceived as a metaphor for civilizations, in the same way Ruskin had used it for artistic development. Larson notes that France, following its defeat by Prussia, was particularly prone to the melancholy fear that its greatness was all in the past, although such fears were an international rather than national phobia. Contemporary attention being paid to high infant mortality, declining birthrate, and hereditary diseases also involved children in this national discussion. Pictures of diseased children, for example, in the Academic tradition (as well as in the work of Avant-garde artists) were represented at the Exposition Universelle of 1900.32 Pictures by Edvard Munch of his dying little sister (as well as syphilitic infants) can be associated with the general sense that society and its children is in thrall to biological forces and, consequently, doomed. This kind of acceptance of popular versions of evolutionary theory gave rise to multiple responses, some of which are also represented in children’s literature. The question of what to do about a belief in the force, but not the benevolence or rationality, of Nature is endless and must be partial. It is reasonable to say that many people’s religious beliefs simply incorporated or rejected evolution, thus keeping the master narrative. As Robert Rosenblum notes, “In the welling search for ways to depict an invisible world of both supernatural mystery and elemental emotions, the late nineteenth century witnessed

12 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde a virtual revival of religious painting, as if Nietzsche’s famous proclamation in 1882 that ‘God is Dead’ demanded fresh responses.33 Ann Dumas’s essay on religious paintings in 1900 notes that “Although in general the nineteenth century was an age of diminishing religious faith, the end of the century saw a religious revival symptomatic of a more general spiritual yearning as a reaction against the steady rise of material culture,” noting the many crucifi xions, annunciations, scenes of contemporary and humble worship, and, of course, the mother and child pictures that coincide with a strong motherhood motif in children’s literature.34 Marc Chagall’s frequent use of religious symbolism in highly idiosyncratic ways can be seen as part of this era of painters who sought to “depict an invisible world of both supernatural mystery and elemental emotions.” Another positive response to the power of Darwinian nature was to believe in the individual’s power to harness the bullying life forces and, with Nietzsche’s guidance, will a better future for humankind, or to perceive evolution as working naturally for a higher state, a belief associated with positivism or theosophy. Children’s literature and avant-garde painting also incorporated this response. Paula Modersohn-Becker’s Modernist paintings reflect these beliefs. Secret Garden, both in its rich vegetation and in its characters’ ability to win the forces of Nature for their own use, is philosophically similar to her work. One also could emphasize the rich fecundity of Nature’s forms but give them an unpleasant and horrific twist: a little shop of horrors. In children’s literature, it is possible to do both. The Uptons’ Vege-Men’s Revenge combines malevolent vegetation, of the kind also imagined by L. Frank Baum, with faith in the ultimate safety of little girls. Vege-Men’s Revenge is influenced by Art Nouveau, a style with intertwining snares of vegetation. Another option in children’s literature is the solution of many decadent artists: replacing life with art, or, specifically, creating worlds in which death or change is written out. Peter Pan, of course, specifically has this power. The powers of Nature are great, but in children’s literature the powers can be resisted or rejected. Childhood provides characters that are, like Keats’ nightingale or Grecian Urn, outside the natural fate of ordinary humanity. In children’s literature these are often toys—dolls, rocking horses, teddy bears, toy soldiers, rabbits—and they often stand apart from the life cycle. Burnett’s RackettyPacketty dolls (1906) and Johnny Gruelle’s Raggedy Ann (1918) belonged to the child-owners’ grandmothers, and they have never been livelier. None of their accidents harm the Uptons’ Dutch Dolls (1895–1909). Winnie the Pooh, unlike Christopher Robin, never grows old. As childhood objects, they retain the positive associations of a primitive source, combined, in fact, with stylized features. Their animation—though not explained in their stories—mimics the animation ordinarily due to childhood imagination and affection. These games, books, and toys of children’s culture can also contribute to the grotesque “way of seeing” that is an important facet of Modernism. In Grotesque Figures: Baudelaire, Rousseau, and the Aesthetics of Modernity, Virginia

Introduction • 13 E. Swain argues that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an important grotesque figure for Charles Baudelaire, a student of the phenomenon and early example of Modernist expression.35 This view is founded upon the doubleness of the grotesque, discussed further in Chapter 1, which applied to Rousseau’s stature in Baudelaire’s France as both a radical inspiration for the French Revolution and conversely a cause of the post-Revolutionary trauma. Post-Revolutionary grotesque, in both Baudelaire’s and the author’s view is not the light-hearted carnivalesque, a “festive perception of the world,” which could exist before the Revolution, but an interest in and way of seeing that arises out of “the estranged world.”36,37 Swain notes that from Rousseau’s point of view the grotesque should be eliminated and with it the absolute monarchy that sponsored it. Baudelaire, however, saw it as “a subversive force in oppressive times.”38 Of the innumerable writers upon and interpreters of the grotesque, Ruskin is, again, one of the most important English critics for this period, and G.K. Chesterton is another. It was Chesterton, in his essay on Robert Browning, who called the grotesque “a new way of seeing,” parallel, then, to the other new ways of seeing that the avant-garde employed in their search for alternatives to the old way. As Philip Thomson notes, Chesterton thought that it might be “a function of the grotesque to make us see the (real) world anew, from a fresh perspective which, though it be a strange and disturbing one, is nevertheless valid and realistic.”39 Ruskin’s view is disapproving as well as admiring. As part of early Venetian gothic, the grotesque can be seen as playful, in allegories, noble.40 “Modern Grotesque,” particularly examples in the popular press that involve searching for exaggerated points of character, may limit the great artist, but Ruskin gives the caricaturist the unique quality of having this talent without ever being taught: “no teaching, no hard study, will ever enable other people to equal, in their several ways, the works of Leech or Cruikshank. . . . the power is, in the masters of the school, innate from their childhood.”41 Moreover, he concedes, when the powers of quaint fancy are associated (as is frequently the case) with stern understanding of the nature of evil, and tender human sympathy, there results a bitter, or pathetic spirit of grotesque, to which mankind at the present day owe more thorough moral teaching than to any branch of art whatsoever. 42 The grotesque in Modernist art is not invariably allied to moral suasion, although it frequently may be. Nor is this necessarily the case with the grotesque in children’s culture. In the first place, real childhood dolls (not literary ones), in particular, are, by their nature, often what we mean by grotesque in appearance. Many people are frightened by them; many horror movies use the contrast between their apparently dulcet expressions and secret ghoulish motivations to disturb audiences. There are probably no humanoid toy images that would not seem

14 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde horrible if they were known to be possessed of intelligence, a point exploited in E. Nesbit’s Enchanted Castle (1907). You think, perhaps, that Ugly-Wuglies are nothing to be frightened of. That’s only because you have never seen one come alive. You just make one—any old suit of your father’s, and a hat that he isn’t wearing, a bolster or two, a painted paper face, a few sticks and a pair of boots will do the trick; get your father to lend you a wishing ring, give it back to him when it has done its work, and see how you feel then. 43 The reversal of this situation—imagining people turned into doll-like forms—carries some of the same quality. Paul Klee’s Senecio, which is juxtaposed with the Upton Dutch doll, Peg, on the cover of this volume, demonstrates some of the grotesque ambiguity that can be achieved by painting people as dolls, but part of the effect is inherent in the dolls, themselves. Second, childhood was frequently associated with popular entertainment forms in the nineteenth century, and the forms, such as Punch and Judy, harlequins, and clowns are also, in themselves, what most people would call grotesque: energetic and playful, but simultaneously, murderous, nihilistic, and tragic. Dieter Petzold notes in his article on the grotesque for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature that the extent to which children’s laughter at Punch is a defense against fear of the Punch’s misshapen deformity, rather than the ambiguity that an adult brings, cannot be known, but that adults have regularly assumed that children enjoy such images.44 The doubleness of the situation is the more pronounced because in this era commedia dell’arte figures, when real human beings (not puppets), are frequently just poor people hardly getting by, street people of the era in ironically festive costume, a societal problem explored by both children’s literature and avant-garde paintings. Third, the illustration of nineteenth-century children’s literature was often grotesque, even when the stories illustrated might have been pictured in some other way. Such illustrators as Gustave Doré and Arthur Rackham heightened the grotesque aspect of stories that were widely available to children. Although this list includes the morally intended illustrations of, say, Caldecott in his Aesop collection, it also includes the obvious contributions of Struwwelpeter and Max and Moritz, which in storyline and illustration depended upon the balance of the horrific with the humorous, as do the limericks of Edward Lear.45 This survey also should extend, however, to the kind of morally intended but unconsciously humorous story that engendered Struwwelpeter—the awful warning school of nursery literature in which the woodcut illustrations and/or exaggerated punishments for careless behavior (falling into wells, getting caught on meat hooks) readily produce hysterical laughter rather than the solemn lessons that were intended, a humorous point made by Lewis Carroll. The great contribution of the early nineteenth-century

Introduction • 15 woodcut nursery book to the generation producing work in the fin de siècle includes this instruction in the humorous and violent. Finally, many of the excellent illustrators of nineteenth-century volumes intended for or available to children were also political satirists or caricaturists: professional purveyors of the grotesque. Any line portrait is, to some extent, a caricature, but Grandville, Cruikshank, Caldecott, Doyle, Tenniel, and Ille, for example, were intentionally lampooning social mores and famous people—a tradition that Max Beerbohm carried on in the later era. Stephen Prickett in Victorian Fantasy says that Cruikshank had given shape to the fantasy of his age by his brilliant illustrations to Grimms’ fairy tales in 1823. He had been brought up in the tradition of the eighteenth-century caricaturists Hogarth and Gillray, and had begun his career as a cartoonist during the Napoleonic wars. . . . The ravings of Buonaparte became the model for the raging Rumpelstilkin.46 Margaret Higonnet in her study of Modernist picture books notes that “Dynamism and instability” are the contributions of the child in inspiring the Modernist avant-gardes, particularly those arising from World War I and the Russian Revolution. She notes that the dynamism is achieved through the “ambiguous juxtaposition of violence with innocence or naiveté.” 47 The discovery of a connection between the grotesque, which frequently involves this juxtaposition, and childhood did not wait for Walter Benjamin, who discussed it, as Higonnet notes, in his 1928 essay “Old Toys: The Toy Exhibition at the Märkisches Museum.”48 His critique of the conception of childhood in his own time, moreover, does not extend to that juxtaposition in a nineteenth century, which he characterizes as believing in childhood innocence. In fact, in much the same way that Puritan works for children appear to have taught them the use of metaphor as well as religious beliefs, many works of the nineteenth century illustrator appear to have taught an ironic or grotesque view of life, strongly aware of the inadequacies of human or cosmic order. The selection of painters in this brief study is an attempt to represent some of the diversity in class, gender, and nationality resident in the city during its fin-de-siècle years of preeminence, as well as their varying intersections with children’s culture in their own production. Mingling in the Parisian crucible during their developmental years, they represent some of the most obvious examples of artists for such a study, while simultaneously suggesting that the avant-garde had a richness of invention and idiosyncrasy at the turn of the century that, in itself, is worthy of celebration. Chapter 1 discusses the Golliwogg books by Florence and Bertha Upton (1895–1915) in terms of the significance of the toy images in the books to the avant-garde. Florence Upton, the creator and illustrator, was born in New York State (1873), a few years after her English parents’ emigration. Like most other painters in this volume, Upton lived in the Montparnasse neighborhood

16 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde during her period of study in Paris, and, like Paula Modersohn-Becker, her choice of an art school was Colarossi’s private art academy on Rue de la Grande Chaumière. Florence Upton’s tuition at Colarossi’s art school in 1901 fell between the years that Paula Modersohn-Becker attended, but they very likely crossed paths in their housing and interests in the next few years; the Paris of the young aspiring painters was not very large—much like the tourists’ Paris of today. Florence Upton was not an avant-garde painter, and her paintings were shown both in the New Salon associated with the Sociétè des Beaux-Arts and at the Royal Academy in England. Instead, it is her earlier illustrations for her series of children’s books, initiated in 1895 before she went to Paris and continuing until 1909, that seem to embody a spirit of artistic innovation at the turn of the century. Chapter 2 discusses Henri Rousseau’s jungle paintings, works mostly created between 1904 and the painter’s death in 1910, and evoked as a children’s playscape today. Rousseau, a Frenchman born in 1844, retired from his tollcollecting job in 1893 to be a full-time painter, something he had waited for all his life. His first exhibition (1884) was with the Salon des Indépendants, a venue formed by innovative painters, at which anyone with an entrance fee could exhibit. Because the official Salon failed to appreciate the importance of the avant-garde, Rousseau’s paintings (he later also exhibited at the Salon d’Autumne) were, from an art historical standpoint, at the right place at the right time, amidst the best painters of his era, although he yearned for the glory and economic rewards of Academic recognition. Rousseau’s desire to reach the people with his art, his utilization of popular and children’s culture (and sense of humor), and his firmness in both evoking Nature and putting Nature in its place explain a great deal about his appeal to a broad general audience. As a selftaught, very poor, but courageous, old man amidst the young artists flocking to his city, the irony of his reputation as “childlike” is worthy of investigation. Chapter 3 discusses Sir William Nicholson, an English painter (born 1872) whose innovative picture books in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had far-reaching influence. A Francophile all his life, Nicholson’s period of study in Paris (Julian’s art academy, fall 1891) was the briefest of any of the painters represented here, yet it was important. Nicholson’s avant-garde style of wood-engraving, however, also was based upon some of the methods and assumptions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century children’s books, which enjoyed critical approbation in his era. Nicholson’s use of shadows offers an opportunity to discuss the attention paid to the narrative effects of lighting in picture, literature, and theater as electricity became part of the culture. Because he was a painter influenced by Manet during this period, this chapter discusses the influence of Manet on children’s culture. Although Nicholson’s picture books were produced in the 1920s, stretching the period covered here farther than is done in the other chapters, his practice in the picture books seems to complete or reflect the paintings, which earlier had made his artistic reputation.

Introduction • 17 Chapter 4 discusses the work of German avant-garde painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) came to Paris for the first time in 1900 and continued her student life at the art academies in Montparnasse as often as she could until her death in 1907. As a dedicated Modernist painter, she was atypical of the youth movement as a whole. Since she was a dedicated student, however, her story helps scholars of children’s culture to examine the student life of Paris and to try to assess some of the reasons for her generation’s desire for the artistic life, reasons that included the influence of nineteenthcentury educational methods. Because the New England transcendentalists shared the German interest in radical European pedagogy, some of the themes apparent in Modersohn-Becker’s art can also be seen in the works of Louisa May Alcott and Kate Douglas Wiggin. Modersohn-Becker’s painterly influences included Rousseau, whom she visited, and Gauguin, with whom she shared an interest in painting mothers and children at a time when this relationship was notable in children’s literature, as well as in works such as those by Émile Zola and her good friend Rainer Maria Rilke. A diarist and letter writer (though not so frequent as van Gogh), her first person account of her struggle to find artistic expression helps define the idealism of the period. The last chapter concerns the early work of Marc Chagall (1887–1985), from his arrival in Paris from Russia in 1910 to about 1917. Chagall is famous for his ecstatic reaction to Paris, an ecstasy that transformed his palette and changed his fortunes: In Paris I visited neither academies nor professors. I found my lessons in the city itself at each step, in everything. I found them among the small traders in the Weekly open-air markets, among the waiters in cafes, the concierges, peasants, and workers. Around them hovered that astonishing light of freedom (lumière-liberté) which I had seen nowhere else. And this light, reborn in art, passed easily onto the canvasses of the great French masters.49 Paris became his home, but his old home, Vitebsk, remained a motif in his paintings for decades. Of the painters in this volume, only Chagall actually takes his childhood for his subject matter. Because the life of Vitebsk was a memory and because he wrote memoirs of his childhood early in his life, the paintings seem to be rendered through his childhood eye, a kind of shortcut into “the sacred world of childhood,” in Mircea Eliade’s view.50 In the early paintings, however, those closest to his childhood, the vision is turbulent and the questions existential. The problem of oppression, appropriate to someone born into poverty in pre-Revolutionary Russia, is translated by Chagall into an investigation of how sacrifice can be permitted in a holy world, a question that nineteenth-century children’s literature had sought to answer in its long discourse on the treatment of animals, which occurred as biology erased the differences between human and other animal species. As a painter

18 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde whose practice included debts to cubism and vorticism, but whose paintings frequently appear to be metaphors (although untranslatable metaphors) perhaps even in Ruskin’s terms, Chagall demonstrates that Modernist painting, defined as “against” many kinds of academic practices, must also be measured as part of a tradition that has always sought to carry out sacred functions of expression and insight in the world. The art of the turn of the century was somewhat parallel to the position of “Golden Age” children’s literature as a crossover moment in the canon, a time when adults and children were reading the same books. If the higher echelons of the earlier Academy painting—historical subjects, say—required a specialized education to decipher, so, too, does the cubist or later innovations of the twentieth century, one reason for their lack of popularity with the general public. In the middle, one might posit, lies an area in which the adult and child approach cultural production as something like equals. Moreover, as Colin Rhodes notes in Primitivism and Modern Art, the extreme position that children and adults were equal in their artistic productions had its contemporaneous moment in the sun: The Blue Rider almanac (1912) edited by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, intentionally mixed avant-garde art with children’s art, to note it as a source of inspiration: By presenting the visual material on equal terms, Kandinsky and Marc achieved a leveling of the relative values of these objects, which in turn allowed audacious comparisons to be made—for instance, that the child’s drawing is equal to a Picasso and that the naïve artist Henri Rousseau and the Baroque master El Greco (1541–1614) are companions on the same spiritual journey.51 And might they not be? Children’s culture and Modernism, often at odds in the later century, intertwined in what is here identified as the Parisian moment. The following chapters attempt to provide some context—in experience, complicity, and thinking—for the roots that children’s culture shares with the early avant-garde.

Chapter One Turn-of-the-Century Grotesque The Uptons’ Golliwogg in Context

The Golliwogg books, beginning with The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwogg” (1895), were extremely popular annual Christmas offerings from Longmans, Green until 1909. Aware of the annual anticipation, reviewers sometimes expressed a “Here’s another Golliwogg book, it must be Christmas” resignation about them, occasionally shaking their heads over why the Golliwogg had taken over nursery life in the way that it had. But in spite of this prominent position in turn-of-the-century English children’s literature, present-day histories of children’s literature pay surprisingly little heed to the Golliwogg books.1 Given that the books had remarkable illustrations and influenced other works both technically and thematically, they were the first English picture books with a black protagonist, they had ubiquitous spin-off toys, greeting cards, games, dolls, and household items (“fortunes were made from the Golliwogg”), and the series inspired Claude Debussy’s popular Golliwogg’s Cakewalk and considerable affection from those who were raised in its era, this lack of critical attention is unfortunate.2 That the Golliwogg books are perceived as icons of racism as well helps to explain critical reticence but failure to study the Golliwogg seriously distorts its era in children’s literature, an era in which interchange between children’s culture and the adult avant-garde was particularly marked. The notable popularity of the Golliwogg motif when seen in its context suggests that this particular series said something significant to thinking adults as well as to children, that in its day it embodied the “spirit of the age.” The series was originated by Florence K. Upton, then 21 years old, the talented daughter of a talented family of British emigres to New York state. Like a number of young women of her era, she was motivated by the desire to support her family, since her father had died in 1889, leaving her mother to raise four children by giving voice lessons. Upton had already been illustrating for 19

20 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde four years when she turned to the idea of picture books while on a family visit to her relatives in London. She and her mother used the comfortable royalties that resulted from the Golliwogg series to take her siblings to Paris so that they could all receive art training, an enterprise that eventually resulted in her painting career. After her training, Upton continued to live and work in England, while the rest of the family returned to the United States.3 Upton painted from models, and before painting, she wired the figures (the wooden dolls are jointed and look much like artist’s mannequins) into the ludicrous positions they assume in the stories.4 Her mother, Bertha, then wrote the galloping verses that describe the illustrations. That the books were produced in this fashion, with verses following pre-existing illustrations, points to an extremely close collaboration between the mother and daughter, although they sometimes were not in the same country. Presumably plot notes by Florence must sometimes have accompanied the pictures, but the details of the working relation have not been documented.5 The characters in the Upton series are the Golliwogg character (a term Upton invented), the model for which was a black ragdoll from her childhood unearthed by a London aunt, and five Dutch (deutsch) wooden dolls of varying sizes. The original ragdoll, an American toy purchased at a fair with a leather face and rather stiff-looking body, had been mistreated (used as a throwing target) by the Upton children in Florence’s youth.6 He most closely resembles the Golliwogg of the first books—that is, he has thin lips and a triangular nose that bring a later doll hero, Raggedy Ann, to mind.7 The face of the Golliwogg evolved, eventually settling into gentler, more flexible features, but from the first he had a more attractive body and proportion than the original toy. Although Upton and others discussed his grotesque appearance, the pictured figure has pleasing compactness, flexibility, and decorative clothes. I think it is worth noting that though the original ragdoll’s clothing may have been those of a minstrel, the dress of Upton’s Golliwogg just as readily suggests the dress of the Bohemian artist, an allusion close to Upton’s life. The reference to the “artist head of Golliwogg” in the first book supports this suggestion.8 The stories themselves, picaresque adventures, are contained in oblong books of about 60 pages, which subsequently made them difficult to anthologize and thus more easily forgotten by children’s literature historians, even though the Golliwogg books comically interpreted for the nursery market many of the groundbreaking events of their time. After the first book, in which the characters meet in a toy shop on Christmas Eve, each begins with Golliwogg enthusiastically instigating a new, usually topical, adventure that the dolls must help him with: You look astonished, Peg, my girl, To note our summer goal, But just as sure as you stand there, We’ll find the great North Pole!

Turn-of-the-Century Grotesque • 21 To reach it, you will have to climb O’er fields of ice and snow Where monstrous polar bears prowl round, And lonely rivers flow. Sarah and I have made our plans To build a lovely boat, She knows how strong it ought to be On Arctic seas to float. (The Golliwogg’s Polar Adventure)9 They travel by bicycle, electric auto, and balloon, discover the North Pole in 1900 (ahead of the explorers—and also Winnie the Pooh), have a “kodak” tour of Africa (ahead of Teddy Roosevelt’s safari), and fight a war (unlike the

Figure 1.1 Florence Upton. Advertising flyer for The Golliwogg’s Bicycle Club (1896).

22 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde

Nro. 226.

Figure 1.2 Detail of Number 226, Die Freunde aus der Kinderzeit, broadside by Eduard Ille, München, Braun & Schneider, 1858. Ille (like a number of English illustrators, including Upton) illustrated for a humor publication. In Ille’s case Fliegende Blätter (Flying Leaves).

Boer War, bloodless).10 The series also includes a visit to Holland (a popular site of children’s literature since Hans Brinker and a joke on “Dutch” dolls), a fox-hunt, the Golliwogg’s impersonation of Santa in a flying swan sleigh, a circus, a seaside resort (rather satirically treated), and a robinsonade. All of the books involve whole-hearted exhilarating participation, a variety of elaborate costumes, catastrophes in which everyone crashes in spectacular ways, and suspenseful rescues of whatever member of the loyal band has come to grief. The Golliwogg, a big thinker and go-getter, is also a thoughtful and considerate friend.11 He is the accepted suitor of Sarah Jane, the second largest doll, who is a model of loyalty and competence. The other notable characters are the largest doll, Peg, who is sometimes malicious and always strong minded, and dauntless Midget, who is so tiny that her inclusion in the group automatically makes it look out of proportion and odd. Meg and Weg are medium-sized dolls with less individual character. Although the books are not difficult to understand, they are unusual. In our urge to puzzle over or censure the series, it is easy to forget that they were always very odd. Lively, sweet, and funny, they are a contribution to the grotesque in children’s literature, a particularly strong nineteenth-century strain that includes elements of the Alice books as well as many other English and German classics.12

Turn-of-the-Century Grotesque • 23 And in embodying attributes generally associated with the grotesque, the books also combine fi n de siècle ideas associated with two important artistic movements of the period. Jean Pierrot’s The Decadent Imagination 1880–1900, for example, identifies some of these qualities that tie the Golliwogg books more closely to this adult context.13 Pierrot associates the decadents with “allegiance to the most spectacular aspects of modernity,” such as Golliwogg’s auto-go-carts, airships, bicycles, and other topical inventions and pursuits. Pierrot also describes the decadents as “avid for acquaintance with foreign customs”—clearly also true of the Golliwogg as it is of characters in the nearly contemporary Oz books. And, of course, the decadents preferred the fantastic in art to Naturalism.14 In this series, however, it is not easy to distinguish between the forces of decadence and the forces that diametrically opposed it. For example, the Golliwogg and the Dutch dolls, in their exotic qualities and their extremely animated manner are also allied with artists who rejected the decadent label. Indeed, the most obvious quality of the series is its exaggerated energy. The Golliwogg’s most characteristic mood is exuberant, and he is usually portrayed as working away at some task to accomplish his great aims.

Figure 1.3

Florence Upton. The Golliwogg in War! Page 18.

24 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Wilhelm Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature mentions the relation of the commedia dell’arte to grotesque, in that its nature cannot be assessed from its language “but only from the way in which it is acted or, better still, from the movements performed by the actors.”15 But it should be noted that Golliwogg’s enthusiastic movements, unlike those of E.W. Kemble’s turn-ofthe-century stereotypes of black children, are more purposeful than amusing, and the slapstick elements are not limited to Golliwogg, but are also characteristic of the (white) dolls. Because of their jointed structures and their impetuousness, the Dutch dolls are even more humorous than Golliwogg, because his upholstered and fully clothed body looks more normally human, while many of their activities draw attention to their segmentation and literal woodenness. It should also be noted that the Golliwogg and the dolls always overcome the difficulties of their situation. The universe is not nihilistic as it would be, for example, in a real clown routine. The friends race through adventures in which carnivores, mechanical devices, physical laws, social conventions, and their own sketchy plans threaten to defeat the company—but their spirit always triumphs. For example, when Golliwogg falls down the chimney on Christmas Eve and remembers, belatedly, that he could have just used the door: But here a smile uplights his eyes And dries his falling tears: “This still shall be the happiest day We’ve had for many years– Come! leave this mess upon the floor, Dear girls, we’ll have our ride: I quite forgot the magic sleigh Awaiting us outside!” (The Golliwogg’s Christmas)16 In other words, in their slapstick fashion their adventures are silly and bizarre but not seriously alienating. Golliwogg is considerably more capable than, say, Tristram Shandy, of controlling the malevolence of physical objects and restoring harmony. His energy is both amusing and positive, and both energy and childlikeness were qualities that interested the avant-garde artists of the period. In connection with the end of the nineteenth century, many scholars have commented upon the widely held belief that European civilization was doomed and the European races degenerate.17 In response to the belief that mainstream European art was decadent and failing and that vital energy must be found elsewhere, many changes in literature, music, and art were attempted, especially those that sought to go outside what artists perceived to be established European modes. We are all familiar with the introduction of African sculptural forms in early twentieth-century art, for example, although this phenomenon was not the fi rst indicator of the movement.

Turn-of-the-Century Grotesque • 25 In view of the insistence of the avant-garde that authentic and vital forces were associated with African, Polynesian, and various peasant cultures, with children’s drawings, and with other “primitive” sites, it is tempting to wonder whether Golliwogg’s extremely energetic style, inventiveness, and capacity for hard work reflect this sense that the future was coming from outside European culture, as many artists with a similar interest in throwing off conventionality believed.18 If Golliwogg is partially an early creation of what Lemuel Johnson calls the “negrophilism” of the fi rst two decades of the twentieth century, a time when “iconoclastic brilliance ‘chose savage artists as its mentors,’” then Golliwogg’s racial identity, such as it is, would have been seen positively by these artists.19 Turn-of-the-century children’s literature is not ordinarily a place for finding enlightened racial attitudes. But when Greta Little calls Golliwogg a hero, she is stating the truth as it is found in the text of the Upton stories, where the Golliwogg is always seen as an admirable and serious character.20 The stories never belittle the character—indeed, they promote him as a role model. But we cannot help observing today, as the adults of that day would probably have observed without sharing our disapproval, that the doll possesses a minstrel show version of African features.21 What the character’s appearance actually conveyed to its child audience is a mystery. We do know that Florence Upton, herself, perceived a contrast between the illustration and text, citing children’s enthusiasm for the character as proof of their superior ability to perceive truth beyond appearances. Edith Lyttelton’s Florence Upton, Painter (1926) notes that Upton wrote to some American friends in 1902, another [reviewer] says that I know my public, but for the life of him he cannot understand why it is that “anything so hideous should please and even fascinate children.” Ah, Gay, the Golliwogg is ugly, but he has a good heart, and he is a dear fellow, and are not children way ahead of adults in reading character? They see his beautiful personality. What are looks to them? 22 Under these circumstances, it appears that Upton was intentionally taking a toy that might not be viewed with admiration—for racial as well as other reasons—and mischievously or edifyingly proving the opposite in the admirable character, high respectability, and dependable intelligence of her hero.23 In truth, however, the Golliwogg is appealing in appearance to many people (the grumpy critic apart), and, in fact, children’s picture books do not succeed when the protagonist does not appeal visually to children. Moreover, the toy versions of the golliwogg (with which the Uptons had no connection) immediately became extremely popular and, like the slightly later teddy bear, a doll that was given to boys as well as girls. Indeed, there is some reason to believe that Upton was simply wrong about children’s need to read character in order to see the doll positively. For example, Lyttelton also records Upton’s 1917 comments on a portrait sitting in which she

26 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde attempted to occupy the child sitter by bringing the girl a (requested) Golliwogg doll. Upton’s journal notes I have never seen a child in such a passion of love as she was for the time being with that Golliwogg—it was extraordinary. She had to keep on biting her lips to keep from smiling. Sometimes she pressed him to her with almost quivering passion saying under her breath “Oh, you darling.” It was a revelation to me. (my emphasis)24 Surely there was a great deal of variation in reception of and perceptions about this doll, and Upton’s (or any Anglo-American adult’s) initial impression of the Golliwogg’s ugliness may have been based upon the image’s degrading past or reflect a preference for associating childhood with pastoral or sentimental surroundings. But Upton apparently failed to see that the Golliwogg might be associated with black people, which makes her commentary hard to interpret in a time when such lack of awareness is not possible. In view of the interest of the avant-garde in non-European sources of inspiration, however, the Golliwogg’s ubiquity, popularity, energy, and blackness seem to constitute a childhood site encouraging an idea–negrophilism—that had not yet surfaced in adult cultural productions. Although the qualities of simplified and ideal form that the Fauves (1906) and various other turn-of-the-century painters took from so-called primitive art were congruent with some of the ideas that they had already developed internally, the notion of non-European art as iconoclastic was undoubtedly an important idea that achieved expression in the years just after the inauguration of the Uptons’ series. When Debussy created his Golliwogg’s Cakewalk (1908), for example, he was not only referring to a popular contemporary children’s book and using some pre-jazz rhythms, but he was also using the cakewalk as a send-up of Wagner’s Tristan.25 His groundbreaking dissonances and parody of a much-admired composer—while using non-European and non-adult sources—makes the piece a nosegay of modern trends also present in the series from which he took his title. The iconoclastic aspects of the Golliwogg books were present in the very first volume. When Peggy and Sarah Jane awaken in a toy store, they resolve to use the midnight hours to advantage. Seeing a dressed doll, they are suddenly aware of their sartorial deficiency, and Peggy sends Sarah up a nearby flagpole to fetch a flag: Then up the pole with trembling limbs, Poor Sarah Jane did mount; She dared not lag, But seized the flag, Ere you could twenty count.

Turn-of-the-Century Grotesque • 27 Big Peggy gazed with deep concern, And mouth wide open too; Her only care That she might wear A gown of brilliant hue.26 The flag in question is an American flag, and they make from it a red-andwhite striped dress for Peggy and a starry blue dress for Sarah: both flimsy and revealing. The remaining three Dutch dolls—Meg, Weg, and Midget—often do not wear dresses at all. There are at least two iconoclastic, carnivalesque details here. First, the dolls are defacing a national symbol in an era that could not have been more aware of flag etiquette than America was at the time.27 The flag dresses continue through the series, although making and wearing costumes for expeditions is a regular feature of the outings. Moreover, it is unusual to be using naked female characters. The overthrow of social decorum in each case is never mentioned in the series. The dolls are oblivious to these conventions. Indeed, although the dolls and the Golliwogg sometimes aspire to fashion success, they always judge by whether their costumes are stylish or not, overlooking the fact that their personal appearance never conforms to any available norm. Mary Poppins, who looks “rather like a wooden Dutch doll,” shares their interest in new clothes and their quality of always being pleased with themselves. 28

Figure 1.4

Florence Upton. Golliwogg at the Seaside (1898), page 7.

28 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Because the dolls are free from any kind of worry about propriety or comeliness, there are fantastic jokes attached to clothing that has no function but decoration. Why, for example, do some dolls prepare furry polar expedition outfits to go to the pole, while others are apparently completely comfortable while wearing only hats? Then, too, the startling nakedness of the dolls is exacerbated by the fact that the Dutch dolls are obviously intended to be dressed when played with. They have paint and a more finished look, for example, halfway down their arms and legs, showing where the limbs would project from sleeves and under skirts and how the joints and bare segments would ordinarily be concealed. We bring to the dolls’ strangely inhuman bodies something like the wonder with which we confront the Tin Woodman of Oz: a kind of uneasiness at their mechanical, but living, natures. A third area of iconoclastic innovation is that the Golliwogg and Sarah Jane are sweethearts, a point that has to be considered in connection with assessments of racism (and the great popularity of the series in places where racial tolerance was not pronounced). Indeed, the relationship between the Golliwogg and all the girls is gallant. Their mutual affection can be seen in the verses that end the Christmas book, for example, in which the Golliwogg has tried to substitute for the Santa he didn’t believe in “for little Sarah’s sake.” Discovering that there really is a Santa, after he had tried to arrange Christmas all himself, he needs encouragement: ”Now for a kiss! cries Sarah Jane, A kiss apiece, you know; For who deserves it more than you, Under the mistletoe! There never was, nor e’er will be Another day like this! So, let’s record it with a vow, And seal it with a kiss!” They clasp him fondly in their arms, This modest, gentle knight– ******* –And so we’ll let the curtain fall Wishing them sweet “Good Night.”29 The rather grown-up relation between Golliwogg and Sarah Jane is one of the reasons that little children could model themselves upon the series, however, not one of the kinds of transgression that they would be likely to recognize— which is also the case with jokes about President Roosevelt and militarism.

Turn-of-the-Century Grotesque • 29 This dual audience transgressive appeal is also applicable to an additional aspect of the series tied to the artistic context. One of the ways in which the grotesque can be expressed in literature or art is in the reduction of human beings to the doll-like: Lucy Lane Clifford’s “Wooden Tony” or Hoffmann’s Nutcracker are examples. Puppets and commedia dell’arte masks are related to this effect, as they are to other aspects of the grotesque. The simplified made-up faces of participants in minstrel shows also fit this profi le, as well as giving it a different slant. Doll-like humans, harlequins, and masks represented an extremely important aspect of turn-ofthe-century art, literature, and music, an era that produced a large number of works around these motifs.30

Figure 1.5 Pablo Picasso. Nu sur fond rouge (1906). © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

30 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Examples abound. For example, Klee’s Senecio (1922) is presumably an ideal—that is, non-naturalistic—way of looking at a human face rather than a realistic portrait of Peggy. But it looks like Peggy. (see Front Cover; Paul Klee © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York) Joseph-Émile Muller in his Klee: Figures and Masks says of the piece that “at first sight Senecio is scarcely more than an impassive, harmless doll’s head. But soon one feels the fire in those eyes which seem to roll in their sockets. The tenderness of the yellow and pink seems to possess an ambiguous meaning”—an ambiguity significant to grotesque work and an ambiguity that the Upton series suggests.31 Klee himself said, “The legend which describes my drawing as infantile . . . must stem from those linear combinations in which I attempted to show a man [as] an object, while preserving the total purity of line.”32 Here the human being as doll and the iconoclastic artist as childlike combine. Modigliani, also an admirer of African masks who made a number of masks himself in 1911 and 1912, paints people so that they appear doll-like or masked, as noted by his critics and interpreters.33 Human beings are treated in a similar way in the work of Erich Heckel or Paula Modersohn-Becker in Germany.34 And one of Picasso’s pre-Cubist works, Nude on Red Background, 1906, also demonstrates this idea. In this painting, executed in the same period in which he was drawing harlequins and in which the Upton books were still being written, one can see that the girl is apparently in the process of being turned into a segmented doll35 (see Figure 1.5). Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein uses a similar technique; he simplifies her face into a rigid mask, an approach which removes her from ordinary fluid humanity.36 In short, the resemblance of dolls and doll-like masks to artists’ mannequins had special significance in this era; it is reasonable to suppose that artists must have seen the Golliwogg books as signifying clusters of ideas that we no longer bring to them. It is interesting, however, that there is probably a break here between adult and child ideas of the “doll-like.” The adult views the doll as less than human in potential, an object, and the doll-like as someone possibly petrified by the condition of society. The iconoclasm inherent in drawing people as dolls comes from making evident this sad truth and from the new techniques used to convey the idea: thus, while this approach can be playful, it is not really happy. Children, however, are more apt to perceive doll play as providing freedom from the constraints of their lives. In other words, doll lives, because they are controlled by a child’s imagination, have the potential to be better (and more grown up) than child lives. For children then, the dolls within the Upton series enjoy liberation from convention and social constraints, as well as from fear of injury because of their wood and rag construction, and they have the imaginative freedom associated with doll play. They have a better time than the rest of us.37 It is a specific freedom from propriety, however— not being clothed—that further allies the Dutch dolls with the avant-garde of the early twentieth century.

Turn-of-the-Century Grotesque • 31 The iconoclasm involved in using naked female dolls in the series must also be placed in this wider context. The naked woman, often associated with the exotic primitive or with prostitution or harem backgrounds, was a staple of nineteenth-century high and popular art.38 Many of the Modern pieces associated with the Fauves or Picasso were iconoclastic reworkings of this kind of female nude, an attempt to look at the form—as well, sometimes, as the ideology that made the odalisque a popular subject—in a new way. Typically, the nakedness of the female body is an obvious focus of such pictures, but the qualities that make the body sensuous or erotic are eliminated. For example, speaking of Picasso’s universally cited Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Francis Frascina says that in contrast to the rich conventional language of the nineteenth-century works of Ingres and Bouguereau, “the signifiers in Les Demoiselles appear ‘crude,’ ‘dissonant,’ ‘ugly,’ ‘ambivalent.’” He speaks of their “mask-like faces” and “angular bodily forms.”39 In much the same way, I would argue, the Upton dolls are feminine and found in romantic situations but are devoid of sexual parts and sensual qualities. One of the ideological motives for this iconoclasm on the part of avantgarde painters, as we can imagine, was a desire to unsettle the form and to unmask the social forces that made naked women, often “primitive” naked women, conventional artistic and popular cultural icons. Like Les Demoiselles, who are still striking the poses of the conventionally lovely, we see the Dutch dolls primp and adorn themselves, basking in the Golliwogg’s respectful admiration. Independent of conventional ideals of appearance, the dolls manage their “angular bodily forms” with panache, a perky contrast, presumably, to what the Fauves later had in mind. But the child reader of the Golliwogg books is regularly exposed, as was the viewer of Fauve paintings, to those parts of the female body that in daily life would be kept hidden. In neither case did these parts have any sexual interest. Following Leslie Fiedler’s discussion in Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self, a discussion in which he called freak shows an opportunity for children, in particular, to be reassured about their own identities (I’m not a freak, they are), we might wonder whether children felt themselves allied to the dolls because of this aspect of their appearance.40 Children, too, are sexual beings, beings who experience, perhaps, the same level of romantic attachment as the dolls within the stories, but whose attachments are officially denied as such. New and old artistic approaches to the female form are still with us, but our era is more likely than the Uptons’ to note the gender inequality suggested by the fact that some of the Dutch dolls are naked, while the Golliwogg is clothed. The dolls constitute a kind of harem, perhaps reminding us of Edward VII’s social excesses. He, too, was fond of fancy uniforms. And much of the time the Golliwogg has the important idea that sets the narrative off and the others fall in behind. In the first book, however, the Golliwogg defined one aspect of their relationship less conventionally. While being pelted in the face with

32 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde snowballs by the “steady aim of Sarah Jane,” a maneuver that Bertha Upton calls “very serious fun,” Golliwogg retaliates (but in a more sporting way): ”Vengeance!” he cries, “I’ll pay them out! If girls will play with boys, There’s got to be Equality, So here’s for equipoise!” And then some monster balls he makes, He does not spare the snow And as each back Receives a whack, Like ninepins down they go.41 Gentle knight or no, points for “steady aim,” managerial skills, know-how, and dauntless courage are distributed among the main figures in the group, with Midget constantly receiving commendation for her ardent spirit. We can examine nowadays both the Golliwogg’s blackness and the dolls’ gender position just as we might examine the iconography of the painters who sought to bring a new vision to the odalisque tradition. Although overthrowing older conventions, although often carrying idealistic political meanings, the now grotesque naked females in the pictures (forms that are identified with the supposed sexual innocence of childhood as well) continue to imply that women and children are still being understood in conventional ways.42 Jill Lloyd discusses the German painter Max Pechstein’s murals (and by extension the work of other members of the Brücke) in terms useful for the discussion of such nudes: The association of women and children with their [the Brücke] concept of the primitive, which we shall find constantly recurring in the studio, bather and street scenes, relates to the sexual and racial politics of social Darwinism, which regarded both women and native communities as “children” occupying a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder. For die Brücke these associations had positive rather than negative connotations, suggesting a life force and an intuitive, “natural” alternative to the rationalizing and calculating “masculine” temper of their times. But this touches the ambivalent and problematic heart of their primitivism: for the “attack” on bourgeois codes and practices inverted rather than truly subverted existing evolutionary criteria, and thus reproduced many of the ruling prejudices of their times in a new and “positive” guise.43 There is reason, in other words, for our contemporary anxiety when faced with this interesting series.

Turn-of-the-Century Grotesque • 33 We are also aware, as the musicians and artists of that day were not, that turn-of-the-century admiration of the primitive was based on a substantial ignorance of the cultures out of which the “primitive” artifacts came. “[T]he absence of an accessible iconography or history to these objects allowed them to be easily absorbed into modern artistic culture,” as Gill Perry explains in “Primitivism and the Modern.”44 Artists identified the primitive with the more “authentic” view that they sought to achieve by throwing off European decadence, but, of course, this “primitivism” was a Euro-centric myth. They simply did not know much about the cultures that had produced the art they admired, and they were defining them in a way that we have doubts about, even if, in these terms, Golliwogg is really an incongruous Übermensch. The avant-garde artists were of their time, as were the Uptons. In a humble way, the Uptons did “dethrone . . . life and put art in its place,” and the iconoclasm and wit of the Dutch dolls and the Golliwogg, their ability to be read as indicative of contemporary feelings about the human condition, contributed to their broad audience appeal. If we are now unable to read the Uptons without anxiety, the attempt to read them as the iconoclasts of their generation may have seen them may help us to identify our own shibboleths. More than 100 years after the Golliwogg and Sarah Jane were invented, if they cannot help us “subdue the demonic aspects of the world” as Wolfgang Kayser thought that the grotesque should do, they may at least remind us to be conscious of the power of our own demons, as well as the cleansing power of human energy.45

Chapter Two Henri Rousseau Jungles Transformed

This is the alpha and omega of painting, so bewildering that deeply rooted convictions falter and waver before so much self-satisfaction and such great childlikeness.1 Félix Vallotton, 1891

In some ways, the perpetual label of “childlike” that was applied to Henri Rousseau in his lifetime has been reinforced in the number of distinguished children’s books in our own that allude to his paintings. But “the Douanier” can also justifiably be called one of the most popular painters of all time; The Sleeping Gypsy, for example, a desert landscape with a curious lion and sleeping musician, has iconic status in Western culture and beyond. Rousseau’s convictions, not the critics’, shaped the world he created, and it is not an accident that it is a world that people think of as a place appropriate for their children to live. Looking at Golden Age children’s literature—the literature of Rousseau’s time—and Rousseau’s work together helps to identify their shared concerns at a moment when Modernism and children’s culture intersected.

Childlike as Defi ned by Fresh Perception The expression “childlike” bears investigation because it had specific qualities at the end of the nineteenth century that we may not be so aware of today, as well as implying assumptions about childhood that we might query. For example, the power of “childlike” Japanese prints to start a revolution in French art in the nineteenth century is famous. Arthur C. Danto sums up the reasons for the difference that Japanese prints made, in this way: “I think modernity 35

36 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde begins with the loss of belief in the defining narrative of one’s own culture.”2 “The deep change, and indeed the beginning of Modernism, begins in the West when Japanese prints become objects, not of curiosity, but of influence. . . . Van Gogh and Gauguin decided to constitute the masters of the ukiyuo-e print as their predecessors. These prints showed the right way to represent in art: and if these prints were right, an entire artistic tradition was wrong.”3 The Japanese prints and the pictures of Rousseau stood in a similar position toward both the Academy that was superseded in that era and the Avant-Garde that was established. As Elisa Evett notes in “The Late Nineteenth-Century European Critical Response to Japanese Art: Primitivist Leanings,” Japanese prints appeared “childlike” to the Academicians because of a number of specific qualities: the use of animals and plants in a non-hierarchical relationship to people, for example, as well as the lack of illusory qualities typified by omission of or unusual use of perspective and non-naturalistic use of color. Nonhistorical subject matter (Japanese nature prints were assumed to be essentially Japanese rather than the nineteenth-century fashion that they were), simplified rather than realistic forms, and serenity were cited as additional reasons why the Japanese, appealing as the work of the nineteenth-century printmakers was to the European audience, were seen—often with some nostalgia—as “childlike” rather than “adult.” These qualities are the same as those that the Academy used to criticize Rousseau’s work and that were frequently cited as reasons for calling his productions “childlike” or, in fact, “childish.” As Evett notes, “Japanese art seemed to embody a state of mind, a condition of being, and a quality of perception that was forever lost to the Western World.”4 That the “quality of perception” was frequently deemed to be a result of a different way of seeing—a physical difference—could be explained in the case of the Japanese by their different race and remote physical setting. Because Rousseau was French rather than a representative of another racial or national group, his subjective vision and practice was less easily explained by other Parisians and more roundly criticized.5 William Uhde’s comment that “Rousseau “sees men and things differently from us,” however, points to a similar explanation.6 The Avant-Garde admired Rousseau’s paintings much more than the Academy did, but also considered him “childlike” and not really a member of their company.7 They appreciated his lack of the “adult” qualities that made the Academicians the Academicians—mastery of the rules of perspective, the desire to create mimetic illusion, the adherence to historical subject matter as the highest echelon of achievement—but while Rousseau’s practice was, therefore, celebrated as forward-looking and revolutionary, he lacked manifestos. His practice led the way in the overthrow of the Academy, but his intentionality was not clear. If one does not state what one is doing, one is neither adult nor truly revolutionary. And Rousseau’s paintings of “historic” subjects, for example, although they are truly unexpected and extraordinary, were an ambitious attempt to comply with the Academic taste for allegory and history (rather than overthrow it), even while his remarkable approach

Henri Rousseau • 37 showed the inadequacies of the Academy’s increasingly banal standard. As Carolyn Lanchner and William Rubin note in “Henri Rousseau and Modernism,” Rousseau’s era, which coincided with the Post-Impressionist and Fauvist periods, became “increasingly concerned with two principles that would be the hallmarks of Modernism: conceptual or invented form as opposed to perceived form, and style as opposed to subject matter as the bearer of content.”8 Rousseau’s art is representative of the second of these principles, and also possibly the first, but the implications of his style are not the same as those posited by the Modernists.

Nature and the Proletariat To some extent, Rousseau’s “childlikeness” in comparison to the Modernists appears to be the result of a very basic attribute that is not really “childlike” at all: he loved nature and, like van Gogh, wanted to paint pictures that would cheer people up.9 Rousseau’s perception of Nature as consolatory and beautiful separates him from the decadents, who because they were depressed by Nature’s forces often denied the aesthetic experience Rousseau was enjoying, and avant-garde painters whose desire to use conceptual forms might be seen as an anti-nature statement in some sense. Rousseau’s intentions in the jungle paintings that are the focus in this paper, extended to his other work as well; he wanted to provide a fine experience:

Damn it, yes! I can say that I had my successes. Look. The year I painted my allegory of the Centennial of Independence, I depicted our ancestors in short pants, dancing to celebrate the arrival of liberty, and in a corner of my composition, I wrote out the opening lines of an old French song: “Auprès de ma blonde, qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon. . . .” Well, my dear friend, when I arrived at the opening, everybody was dancing in front of my painting and singing “Auprès de ma blonde.” Everybody was happy.10 Although critics (especially in the early days) laughed at his work, visitors always clustered around his art show entries. One might say that both van Gogh’s and Rousseau’s posthumous reputations have depended partly upon their benevolent realization that nature has the ability to be consolatory and that art can and should make very hard lives easier. Neither one of these basic attitudes is “childlike,” however. Both are more likely to be found in adults attempting to cater for the young or oppressed than in children, themselves. Rousseau was a very poor man who lived in an increasingly urbanized Paris, as his remarkable suburban paintings, which demonstrate the way technology and industry impinged upon natural settings, show. His love of Nature was pursued, not by going to Tahiti or Provence, but by going to the zoo. The

38 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Jardin des Plantes, the great zoological garden of Paris, contained greenhouses that, as many commentators have noted, were the source of Rousseau’s foliage and overwhelmingly dense jungles.11 The rise of biological and botanical interest that we associate with the Victorians and the post-Darwinian world was partly responsible for the founding of the pioneer zoos, and for the sense that far away plants and animals bore investigation. This “Nature” interest coincided with the technological: the rise of improved printing techniques, which made books with plates of botanical or bird or animal pictures very popular in Rousseau’s day. He was not, in other words, the only painter attempting to connect with the natural world while still in Paris—nor the only person interested in portraying nature while in an urban setting. As Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier note in Zoo: The Story of Zoological Gardens in the West, one of the reasons that the public supported such zoological gardens was the perception that they were thereby supplying animals for painters (Edward Lear, for example, painted his parrots and owls at zoos in London), a function defined as important whether for artistic, educational, or scientific reasons.12 Rousseau’s attempt to bring the jungle to others was also one that the zoos, themselves, sought to promote. The idea that in post-Revolution France the workingman rather than the aristocrats could promenade in landscaped gardens and visit menageries was a political triumph.13 But the idea that this would be a beneficial way for workingmen to spend a Sunday holiday—that reconnection with Nature had this inherent effect—is also part of his time.14 Kenneth Kidd notes a similar function ascribed to American zoos in that era—that they were a wholesome, nondrink-oriented, working-class family outing that would ameliorate social ills.15 As Leslie Paris notes in Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp, the artificial Nature experience known as “summer camp” emerged as an answer to public anxieties in this era.16 John Ruskin’s country outings for the workmen creating the gothic library at Oxford falls under a related heading: activism based upon an anxiety that separation from the natural landscape was pronounced for the working-class child and that adult creativity would be impaired thereby. The consolatory or inspirational view of Nature is quite easy to understand in terms of a real country outing. The consolatory or inspirational aspect of Nature that does not involve communing with a portion of real natural habitat and does not involve being raised to observe and delight in unimproved natural habitat, is more difficult to describe or articulate. For Rousseau’s generation, “wonder,” or the opportunity to imagine wonders, seems to have been the kind of special quality that planners felt an urban dweller might find at a zoological park. For this reason, the buildings made to house, or to provide a backdrop for, animals at zoos were fanciful structures meant to suggest places such as ancient Egypt or China.17 They were very possibly not appropriate geographically for whatever species was being quartered there—not educational or scientific, in other words—but they suggested that a trip to the zoo was an

Henri Rousseau • 39 opportunity for the proletariat to go around the world. That it would be an opportunity to see things that otherwise they would never see and presumably be the better for this chance to imagine. Moreover, although the animals, themselves, may have been cruelly treated in such settings, the orderly gardens, fancy glass houses, and inviting tree-lined walks were undoubtedly much grander and cleaner than the dwellings and neighborhoods of virtually all of the patrons. “To travel by means of thought alone”—or, possibly, to relish the dignity and well-groomed floral beauty that was the gift of a democratic civic structure—are the kinds of consolation or inspiration that appear to have been intended.18 They are probably the appeals of Disney World, as well. In any case, Rousseau’s admission that whenever he entered the glass houses of the Jardin des Plantes, he was “in a dream” suggests that he was having the experience of Nature that the planners intended that he should have.19 His own response was related to the experience that his jungle paintings would evoke in other people. There are connections between Rousseau’s zoological jungles and other cultural productions of his time that have to do with imagination and accessibility. James Barrie’s story Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, for example, as Lynn Byrd points out in “Somewhere Outside the Forest: Ecological Ambivalence in the Neverland” is a way of making another great public garden more interesting; or, to put it another way, the orderly and civil urban Nature space is the inspiration for imaginative ideas on the part of both narrator/storyteller and the child and adult audience.20 As Donna White and Anita Tarr have noted, Peter Pan, the play, is best understood as a pantomime, a proletarian entertainment, in the same way that the zoos, themselves, were wonders of an inexpensive and accessible kind.21 The work depended upon the ability to amaze the audience with spectacles made possible by newly invented technological innovations, but it was meant to encourage rather than substitute for the imagination of the audience. The classic example is the moment in Peter Pan when the clapping of the audience members who “believe in fairies” brings Tinkerbelle back to life. Hokusai, whose “childlike” paintings were discussed earlier, shares this desire to be accessible to humble, as well as elite, citizens. The most famous Japanese print-maker in nineteenth-century Europe, and creator of the iconic The Great Wave, Hokusai was, from the beginning, an illustrator looking for a broad audience appeal. As Matthi Forrer explains, the Edenic scenes that created European nostalgia and pleasure (which in spite of Academy remonstrance actually showed Western influence) were available in widely distributed picture books (manga) and explained in how-to-draw volumes. His pictures of courtesans and actors adorned theater and musical performance programs, as well as poetry collections.22 Forrer notes that even today, “no other Japanese artist’s works are so well-known around the world by such a large non-specialist public.”23 Similarly, Hiroshige, whose nature landscapes gave the Japanese, themselves, a “glimmer of revival” amidst their own decadence, made prints

40 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde of aesthetically improved views from roads and places already famous for historic or scenic interest. 24 They were sold in souvenir booklets for travelers who had been there or non-travelers who hadn’t. They were intended to do what they always have done: allow the widest popular audience of viewers to rejoice in a Nature that can only be seen with the mind’s eye. Bringing an imaginative experience of Nature to the people depends, of course, upon the absence of Nature that did not require so much dreaming— and not only because of the urbanization of formerly pastoral areas or the economics that made travel quite impossible. This also was an age when, in Europe, the only large African or Asian wild animals that even middle-class or upper-class painters were likely to see were taxidermy models and an age when the camera had not yet made the “jungles” visually attainable to the average citizen. Painters needed to dream a great deal to turn stuffed taxidermy models of lions into living images. Similarly, Bêtes Sauvages, the children’s animal photograph book from which Rousseau (secretly) took many of his animal subjects and poses, also required a great deal on the part of its readership.25 The bêtes (in black and white, of course) are shown in cages or in poses on their keepers’ shoulders. The process that a child would have to go through to imagine them back into wherever they came from is, in fact, the same process required by visiting the zoo, itself, with less architectural or floral help.

Imagination and Subjectivity Gillian Avery tells us in her article “The Cult of Peter Pan” that the Edwardian child had a duty to believe that there were fairies at the bottom of the garden; she notes that the child who was “unable to imagine with the requisite intensity” was a “hopeless muff” in the innovative, yet era-specific, novels of E. Nesbit.26 Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay “Child’s Play,” attempted to discriminate the differences between adult’s and children’s pleasures in a definition that seems to have resonated with many contemporaries. He notes that We need pickles nowadays to make Wednesday’s cold mutton please our Friday’s appetite; and I can remember the time when to call it red venison, and tell myself a hunter’s story, would have made it more palatable than the best of sauces.27 Tom Sawyer (1876) and Peter Pan (1902–1911) notably demonstrate this faculty: when playing, neither of them can tell real life from their imaginary world. A similar definition exists in A Little Princess (1904), the novelette, serialized story, and extremely popular play by Frances Hodgson Burnett. In the story, one of the major tests of character between Sara Crewe and her humble friends (as opposed to the wicked headmistress and student enemies) is that

Henri Rousseau • 41 Sara and her friends are able to imagine that the cold dirty attic is a romantically realized Bastille or a castle on a festal night, while the others see “rubbish.” Anne of Green Gables suffers greatly (to her author’s delight) because when she imagines specters into the Prince Edward Island foliage, they stay there to haunt her. Jules Verne’s novels (starting in 1863, and produced at the rate of one or two a year into the first decade of the twentieth century) were stories that became quality children’s literature, literature that engendered, as Marion Durand and Diana Wormuth note, illustrations “on the frontier of the fantastic.”28 The tales of imaginative voyages, space travel, and sometimes prophetic scientific invention assume a definition of childhood interest and capacity in keeping with the Anglophone stories, while their engraved illustrations were also inspirational to the artistic community.29 They were, according to Durand and Wormuth, “pictures that dreams are made on.”30 Thus, while the sympathetic art critics who saw the Japanese as “childlike” were often focused upon childhood vision as being particularly acute and fresh, a different definition of “childlike” emphasized its visionary nature. The insistence upon fanciful imagination as the most important quality in childhood coincides with movements in the adult art world that similarly privilege the imagination and subjective vision. As Lancher and Rubin noted, Modernism rests on the “conceptual form” rather than the “perceived form.” The desire to break with nature’s “perceived” forms on the part of decadent (not necessarily Modernist) artists is summed up in the opening letter in Charles Bernheimer’s book, Decadent Subjects: The certainty of my death, rather than defi ning the meaning of my life as a conscious creation, shows rather that my life has no meaning apart from its biological function. My self has no distinctive identity: I am merely an instrument of nature’s luxuriant productivity and impersonal violence.31 As Barbara Larson notes in her work on Odilon Redon, the younger Symbolists in the mid-1880s consciously turned from the gloom induced by this awareness of being in thrall to natural forces (Darwinism as conceived by the decadents) and gloom over France’s political state, to highlight subjectivism and the dream state. “The shift away from morbid determinism to individual and imaginative response was part of what Léon Daudet would refer to as ‘the delivery after the pain’ [devant la douleur].”32 Subjective vision, when applied to children’s literature, resulted in works emphasizing the difference between children and adults, in a kind of specialized Wordsworthian vein, with greater emphasis on the child advantage than Stevenson suggested. Kenneth Grahame’s Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898) are classic examples, because they specifically outline the difference between child and adult views, making it clear that the child’s vision is priceless; the child, who has its author’s favor, is openly contemptuous of the

42 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde

Figure 2.1 Drame sanglant dans une ménagerie. Detail of a recurring cover motif. Le Petit Journal (Janvier 24, 1904).

perception of its elders. The later introduction to Le Petit Prince articulates the same position: “Mon dessin ne représentait pas un chapeau. Il représentait un serpent boa qui digérait un elephant.”33 The unconscious Fauntleroy also emphasizes this advantage in Burnett’s classic Little Lord Fauntleroy (1890), another originally serialized novel that became a widely popular turn-of-thecentury play and cultural phenomenon. The story concerns an egalitarian raised-in-America child who reforms his grandfather, a selfish and classbound aristocrat, by his complete faith in his grandfather’s altruistic and noble intentions. Although one might assume that Fauntleroy is simply too inexperienced to know what his evil grandfather, the Earl, is like, Fauntleroy’s subjective vision is the best one, and the one that proves true in the end. The childlike view is, of course, an inherent quality of exemplary children. This kind of “childlike” definition, when applied to Rousseau’s imaginative painting, therefore necessarily praises the intensity or anachronistic “vision splendid” of Rousseau’s subjective view more than it does his ability to create or control the artwork.

Henri Rousseau • 43 The children’s classics of the era also included imaginative dreams experienced by child characters within the novels. Sigmund Freud’s milestone work on dreams was published in 1900, but it was preceded by decades of discussion about the sources of dream imagery, as well as by artistic expressions of dreams in art, music, and literature. The dream-visions in children’s works such as those by Lewis Carroll, Mrs. Molesworth, Jules Verne, Juliana Ewing, or George MacDonald (and their myriad imitators), or the less famous but interesting Vege-Men’s Revenge by Florence and Bertha Upton, belong to a time when dreams were a matter of intense interest in the same way that daytime imagination was and where literary children might be supposed to be more capable of vivid dreaming than adults.34 In any case, the fictional children are not taking opiates or drinking absinthe or intentionally seeking to induce dreams, they simply fall asleep. While Alice’s dream vision of Wonderland arguably articulates the perplexities of child life, many of the children’s literature dream visions are in roughly the same category as Rousseau’s famous jungle painting The Dream (1910) in content. The Dream is a picture of a woman reclining on a sofa in the middle of a dense and beautiful jungle, surrounded by two lions, an elephant, birds, monkeys, and snakes, all enchanted and wondering in the vegetation around her because they are listening to “merry tunes.” That is, although the content of the dreams varied and were not entirely concerned with jungle scenery, they defused fearfulness about the Natural state: about living and dying in this world. As in the case of the dream vision of the Vege-Men’s Revenge, as in the L. Frank Baum Oz story that borrowed from it, The Dream shows that what people feared about undirected and bullying Nature might, through better vision, be seen as a partial or altogether mistaken notion. “Devant le doulour” applies to trust in the instinctive belief in a more harmonious whole and a future that can be faced without misgiving, as well as to the idea that the subjective or dreamlike state is necessary in order to live in an imperfect world. The issue of whether the Uptons, Baum, or Verne—or any other children’s literature author—was intentionally creating or conveying such a vision, however, is not a question that we are faced with: of course, they were. And Rousseau?

Taming Nature: “style as opposed to subject matter as the bearer of content” In 1908 Pablo Picasso, who had come to Paris as a young man in 1901, gave a party in honor of Rousseau in his studio in Montmarte that became a legendary birth moment of twentieth-century art. It celebrated Picasso’s first acquisition of a Rousseau painting, Portrait of a Woman, which he had discovered in a shop and purchased for five francs. The party included critics and painters and literary figures among the many guests. The accounts of the party, called the Banquet Rousseau, can be interpreted in more than one way, but they

44 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde return to the question of whether Rousseau was most accurately perceived as the possessor of a uniquely subjective, childlike, or naïve vision that made him different from all the grown-ups at the party, or whether he was intentionally aiming at a different goal than the others in a particularly interesting, experimental way. The extent to which Picasso was sincere or joking when he planned this tribute remains in the realm of debate, and exemplifies the odd reputation and sense that Rousseau was not really a grown up or an equal that appears so strongly in the memoirs.35 The extent to which the participants knew at the time how appropriate the tribute was depends upon the person discussing the party. There is one memoir that appears to go to the heart of my current discussion, however. André Salmon recounts that the exuberant artists, well into the night, sang a song with this chorus to Rousseau: C’est la peinture de ce Rousseau Qui dompte la nature Avec son magique pinceau!36 This tribute is important in that it appears to be giving Rousseau the same creative power and intentionality that we would accede to Grahame, for example. He tamed nature. Rousseau painted a great deal of vegetation, although he also painted a wide range of pictures that are not covered with leaves. His more than 20 jungle pictures apparently were painted, with one exception, after 1904 during the last years of his life (he died in 1910). They are mostly very large canvasses, featuring enormous flowers, plants, colors, and patterns that create a landscape in which there is beauty, even when the subject matter involves a carnivore devouring its prey. van Gogh’s reapers, the death figures cutting the grain in a number of his pictures, illustrate a similar juxtaposition. True, they represent the death of the wheat and, by analogy, human life, as well. But they are part of a landscape of delight; the yellows of autumn, the presence of natural scenery in a triumphant time of the year, must necessarily alter the perception of death. The beauty (subjectively treated) exemplifies a philosophy about death. For van Gogh, Nature was, in this way, a consolatory religion. There! The “Reaper” is finished, I think it will be one of those you keep at home—it is the image of death as the great book of nature speaks of it—but what I have sought is the “almost smiling.” It is all yellow, except a line of violet hills, a pale fair yellow. I find it queer that I saw it like this from between the iron bars of a cell.37 His frequent returns to wheat pictures not only indicates his need to revisit this important topic and to reflect his natural environment while in Provence but also his admiration for Leo Tolstoy and Jean-François Millet, who had associated wheat with the national life of peasants, and Walt Whitman who

Henri Rousseau • 45 had associated eternity with leaves of grass. Sympathy with the common man, the desire to cheer, and the recognition that death is a topic that must be dealt with while experiencing mortal life, make van Gogh a very reasonable lens through which to view what Rousseau might have been doing. Rousseau was known to even his critics as a wonderful colorist, although his non-naturalistic use of color was a focus of early criticism. The variety of the colors of red on the dancers in his salute to the centennial of independence and the variations of green in his first jungle picture, Surprised, are frequently noted. The colors that might make the strongest case for “cheerful,” however, are the frequent pastels in the jungle pictures. Against the greens and oranges (on flowers, on fruit) that we might reasonably expect, there are, for example, also light blue and pink over-sized lotus flowers and pink flamingos, as well as pink clouds and evening skies. Rousseau’s landscapes are so obviously prettier than those one might encounter in European life. They are the work of someone making over, as well as conveying—“inventing” as well as “conceiving”—a reformed Nature. In addition to being colorful and full of fundamentally attractive foliage, the canvases of Rousseau’s jungle pictures are balanced in a way that conveys the message of the works. His painting process followed, apparently, something like a paint-by-number approach. He applied all the places where one color was to be used at one time. We are used to the idea of paintings being identified as “arrangements of color” in the way that Whistler conceived of this idea—“arrangement in grey and black” being his label for the picture that the rest of us know as Whistler’s Mother, for example. Rousseau’s paintings take such an idea to the extreme. As Nancy Ireson notes, “whether his riverside scene is true to life becomes, in a quest for a harmonious picture plane, of secondary importance. What matters instead is that a series of strong vertical lines punctuate the canvas. . . .”38 She adds, “it was Rousseau’s ability to prioritise painterly concerns above all else—to express his personal vision—that endeared him to fellow artists.”39 In fact, when the “arrangement” is deliberately balanced, when each color is part of a pattern of repetition and designed to bring symmetry to a scene, then “arrangement” is evidence that “style rather than subject matter . . . [is] the bearer of content.” In this case, a deliberately patterned and balanced canvas is a philosophical declaration about the nature of life. Rousseau’s paintings, like many children’s books, attempt to incite cosmological assumptions of a consolatory nature. A look at the relatively small canvas Horse Attacked by a Jaguar (1910), now housed in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, provides a concrete example. This picture contains a wide variety of plant species of many shades of green. The leaves on the plants are painted in such a way that they have individual texture and depth—they have a solid, sculptural appearance, and have shading that suggests a light source, even though they are more perfect and flawless than such foliage would be in an ordinary setting. The leaves are, moreover, whether because they are in the foreground of the painting or simply of

46 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde

Figure 2.2 Henri Rousseau. Horse Attacked by a Jaguar (1910). The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

gigantic size, much larger than the juxtaposition of jaguar and horse in the center and middle of the picture. The effect is of a huge tropical landscape of great orderliness and varied beauty, oddly intersected by a tiny death in its midst. To the educated eye, the presence of a horse in a jungle is also an unexplained mystery. The picture is balanced by use of color and use of similar shapes. Upright vertical stems march across the canvas from left to right: the biggest tree stem, all the upraised stems of grasses, an especially prominent plant at the bottom with leaves like those on a daffodil or clivia, and three tree-like stems with three different kinds of leaves on the right side of the picture. Color creates two different triangle patterns in the middle of the picture: one pattern is comprised of repetitions of pink. These are flower heads of two kinds near the left side, flower heads of a similar shape near the right side, and flowers with similar foliage shown way up in the air at the top of the picture just left of the middle. The animals roughly intersect the bottom of the triangle and are enclosed by it. The triangle shape is, moreover, echoed by the foliage directly behind the animals. Here we see plants of a darker green looking much like the poles on which one grows beans in a garden. The triangles of green carry out the shape made by the pink flowers. Still in the center, the white horse’s head is the bottom point of an inverted triangle made with the other prominent white

Henri Rousseau • 47 features of the canvas: the heads of two tidy cruciform flowers, which also are part of the upright, vertical pattern. The apparent weightiness given to the projecting spear-like larger leaves in the bottom left of the picture is brought into balance by the smaller, but noticeably dense and bushy moplike tree at the upper right, which has darker green leaves to make up for its smaller size. The animals are in the exact middle of the composition from left to right, and just slightly below the middle top to bottom. The sky is a clear, unclouded light blue. The patterned symmetry of the picture contributes to a sense of stasis, or motionlessness, in the picture, as Lanchner and Rubin note.40 If we contrast the image of the horse and jaguar to the treatment that Delacroix would have given to it, or the melodramatic popular images offered by newspapers of the day (See Figure 2.1), we can see that emotion has been eliminated from the simplified and expressionless forms. The jaguar’s face and/or devouring jaws are hidden. The horse’s mane has been scattered at picturesque angles by the apparently sudden encounter, indicated by its forelegs being lifted gracefully off the ground and the jaguar’s capable-looking right foreleg firmly grasping the horse in a kind of embrace. The horse looks out of the picture without frenzy or movement, caught in a stop-action moment. The prettiness of the white horse and the foliage and the disproportion between the size of the animals and the size of the foliage, combined with the stillness, give the picture the odd dreamlike quality that predates Surrealism. The way that the shadowing on the foliage is not quite consistent or does not apparently come from quite the same hidden light source probably also contributes to this effect. When Adrian Searle noted in his review of the Jungles in Paris show that Rousseau’s pictures reminded him of the best children’s books, “full of darkness, violence, and mystery,”41 he was, I believe, noting an important but incomplete point. Although readings of the emotional tone of pictures are bound to encounter special and subjective views, Rousseau’s treatment of this Nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw situation specifically defuses its gory potential and, instead, presents us with a concept to consider rather than a bloody accident to expend emotion upon. And when examining the concept—that animals die that other animals may live—the animals in question are being presented, insistently, as part of a much bigger picture in the way that children’s books persistently do. Children’s books are about death because many cultures use them to initiate children into the concept of mortality. But children’s books also undertake the responsibility to give the novice a way to integrate death into a coherent world view; they don’t leave a child with bad news and no remedy. In the case of Rousseau’s picture, the assault is dwarfed by the picturesque canvas, which might be a kind of perspective on how we are to view the encounter. True, death happens, but it is part of an organized whole. True, life ends unexpectedly sometimes, but Beauty is much more common. We cannot help but recognize that mortal things die, in this life, but we do well to have

48 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde faith that this pattern is part of a larger pattern that may yet negate its sadness and loss. Serenity, balance, and pattern are attainable and apply to our own lives, as well as those of our fellow creatures. Stasis may indicate other emotions, but it gives a canvas a portentous feel. In Rousseau the message can seem to be as consolatory as a folktale or homily. The two techniques discussed here, pattern formed by repetition and cosmological themes about death, are familiar in children’s books. Beyond the symmetrical and satisfying patterns of folk tales, which are the building blocks of the positive messages they bring, we fi nd the modern examples of children’s literature that have inherited this approach. While death can be used for a variety of effects in other kinds of fiction, in “the best” children’s books it is carefully prepared for. Surprise is reduced by foreshadowing, to cause the death to seem inevitable; death can be accompanied by religious consolation (the traditional approach) or by fitting it into the vegetative pattern of the seasons. The beauty of language in which the passage is invested may make the death memorable and picturesque, rather than simply violent or pointless. The death of unattractive characters may appear to be karma. The death of attractive characters may be honored and respected. The safety of the child reader is not meant to be torn apart, even though the book is affirming or introducing the reader’s own mortal state. Such approaches occur both in reassuring predictable and didactic works for early childhood, and in more sophisticated apparently less folkloric genres. Repetition, as Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer tell us in The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, is one of the basic qualities of children’s literature, giving readers on the most basic level the chance to “develop schemata for making sense of the stories they hear.”42,43 In addition, repetition of incidents can compartmentalize and separate the tension of a story, making it into segments that can be taken in smaller, less traumatic, pieces. It can hem in the matter of a story, allowing us to see difference and change or, when used as pervasively as Rousseau uses it, a stasis is formed within a novel in much the same way that it is formed upon the canvas.44 Although repetition is useful in children’s literature for many reasons, one of those uses has to do with forming patterns of a predictable and reassuring nature. And in each case, the writers in question have carefully prepared this pattern for a purpose; they have, in varying ways, tamed Nature.

Pipers The power of Art to tame Nature is explicit as a visual image in two of Rousseau’s jungle pictures that contain a piper—a mysterious black figure in both The Snake Charmer and The Dream—whose music soothes and tames the animals, snakes in particular, with “happy tunes.” The poem Rousseau appended to The Dream for example, says

Henri Rousseau • 49 Yadwigha dans un beau rêve Entendait les sons d’une musette Don’t jouait un charmeur bien pensant. Pendante que la lune reflête Sur les fleurs, les arbres verdayants Les fauves serpents prêtent l’oreille Aux airs gayes de l’instrument.45 As André Salmon noted, “Voyez Rousseau, qui n’a rien appris, créant tout seul le mythe d’Orphée charmant les animaux!”46 A similar idea is suggested by the The Sleeping Gypsy, in which the figure examined by the handsome lion is a musician, whose instrument rests in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture. Rousseau was himself a musician and music-teacher, playing the violin and the flute, a point always noted in discussing his “salons” to which he invited both the artistic elite and the neighbors. Rousseau’s pipers are agents for the taming of dangerous or brutal natural impulse.

Figure 2.3 Henri Rousseau (dit le Douanier Rousseau). La Charmeuse de Serpents (1907) (RF 1937–7) Paris, musée d’Orsay. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

50 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde By the end of the nineteenth century, as Seth Lerer has noted, Pans were ubiquitous in artistic production.47 Robert Louis Stevenson, in Pan’s Pipes of 1878, explained them as a metaphor: There are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied with evolution . . . there will always be hours when we refuse to be put off by the feint of explanation, nicknamed science; and demand instead some palpitating image of our estate, that shall represent the troubled and uncertain element in which we dwell, and satisfy reason by the means of art.48 In keeping with the “troubled and uncertain” aspect, often the Pans in works intended for adults performed less than light-hearted roles. They did not tame nature. They subjugated humanity to Nature’s desires, even while they remained associated with untouched and pre-industrial scenery. The French Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé wrote the best-known exposition of this kind of piper in “L’Aprés-midi d’un faune” of 1865–1876. The 1876 version of the poem was illustrated by Édouard Manet in a “book of dialogue,” the most famous of its kind. It inspired the still more famous Modernist musical work by Debussy (1894), a work in which the flute is featured in the opening bars. Nijinsky notably danced the ballet of the same name (1912). The works evoke a combination of lust, consciousness of the individual being enveloped in powerful natural forces, and the arcadian dreaminess that Robert Rosenblum, Maryanne Stevens, and Ann Dumas identify in some of the era’s paintings.49 The passionate faun in Mallarmé’s poem, interrupted in the midst of ravishing two nymphs, drowses off to seek them in his dreams. In a related, but somewhat darker tack, works of fiction, such as Arthur Machen’s influential The Great God Pan (1916, written in 1890/1891), combine horror founded upon suggestion of depraved sexual acts, atmospheric connection of nature god with natural landscape, and the fear of the devouring feminine also seen in the works of Edvard Munch, Gustave Klimt, and in a variety of fin-de-siècle Salomes.50 Saki’s stylish satyrs and woodland gods are similarly erotically conceived and natural forces to be reckoned with. Lord Dunsany’s The Blessings of Pan (1927) uses the seduction of a formerly Anglican village by pagan piping as an indication that the “illusions” (that is, religious beliefs) of his day were represented not by a faded and absurd Christianity but by an awestruck subjection to the power of Nature. Jean Pierrot notes that the aspect of the Orpheus myth (noted above by Salmon) that most inspired the French decadents was not the Orpheus who attempted to retrieve Eurydice from the Underworld, but the Orpheus who tamed the animals by his music but met a violent death at the hands of the Thracian women.51 Thus, the nature gods, the Pans, of children’s literature share the predilections of their time, but also offer a startlingly different take on Nature and the natural. The difference is not so much in the less explicit sexual material, as in the degree to which they reject the “douleur” of the decadents in regard to

Henri Rousseau • 51 the helplessness of humankind (and men, in particular) in thrall to Nature, women, and Darwinism. Two of the most famous of the Pans of Golden Age children’s literature, Peter Pan and Dickon in The Secret Garden, are on significantly different sides of the Nature question: one embodies harmony with Nature and the other a rejection of Nature. Both are implicitly sexual in their representation. But these pipers, in both cases, are perfectly able to manage Nature; they can “tame” Nature in ways that others cannot. And, thus, Nature becomes the great healer or the perpetual dreamland, a much less worrisome state of affairs. Evett’s article on the reception of Japanese art notes, in similar terms, that John la Farge said of Japan “The Great Pan might still be living here,” meaning, apparently, only the good—richer human connection with nature, inspiring landscapes—not helplessness and victimization.52 The “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” in Wind in the Willows (and later Pans in The Little Grey Men and Linnets and Valerians) actually represents order, rather than inexorable biological forces, within the natural realm. The Pans are there to take care of the innocent and to set things right. The Piper in Grahame’s work brings back the lost otter child to his grieving father; the later Pans similarly protect the innocent from cruelty and criminal intent. The Pied Piper, who steals a town’s children when they will not pay him for enchanting their rats, is—at the least—enforcing rules about commercial transactions. The pipers are awe inspiring, they are dreamlike and mysterious in conception, and they are irresistible, but they are benevolent forces that define the Natural realm as ultimately (though not presently) benevolent, too. The twenty-first-century Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan similarly tie Pan to ecological themes. The satyr character in the series seeks Pan to reorder and repair the wild. When Rousseau introduces the snake charmer and the piper with “merry tunes” into some of his mysterious jungle landscapes—even, perhaps, the piper in his strange arcadian picture, the Happy Quartet—then, he is evoking the dreaminess, the overwhelmingly fecund natural landscape, and the question of dangerous forces, in keeping with the interests of his generation. But he is also taming nature with his magical brush in the way that children’s literature of the period (and beyond) perceived it. He is evoking the artist’s power to create or to reveal a world order that lies beyond experience.

Ambivalence Most of Rousseau’s jungle pictures, of course, do not contain a piper figure, and many of them contain an attacking carnivore. The two-sided nature of his vision—the rapacious animals and the disciplined and patterned foliage—is the key to another aspect of his relation to the most interesting children’s stories of his age. This involves the extent to which a kind of “taming” can be

52 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde accomplished even when the artistic form cannot be successful on so weighty a matter as biological death. Rousseau produced some masterpieces, and masterpieces are built on tension. The tension in the jungle pictures (the ones that do not contain a piper) is, most fundamentally, within the “taming” itself. As Theodor Adorno notes in Aesthetic Theory, “[Art’s] most exemplary works have something violent about them in that they seek to arrange and “compose” every detail. By imposing its harmony from outside, classical art flouts the truth of that harmony.”53 Like the concept of pastoral, with which it is allied, the art of Rousseau also has “the potential to harbour its opposite within itself.”54 Although Adorno was not talking about art works that so directly discuss “survival of the fittest,” his commentary on the relation of art to life can be readily applied to the jungle paintings. “Initially hostile to expression, the formal nature of beauty half triumphantly transforms itself into a kind of expression wherein the menace of domination of nature is wedded to a sense of yearning for the defeated victims of that domination . . . thus this expression is one of grief about subjugation and its vanishing point, i.e. death.”55 The pretty horse in Horse Attacked by a Jaguar, discussed above, stares, like one of Munch’s expressionist figures, out of the painting into the viewer’s eyes. In part, this reminds us that many of Rousseau’s animal models—the images in Bêtes Sauvages—were being posed for the camera. The book is a series of composed pictures of animals interacting with their keepers while in captivity, frozen in this objective state on fi lm. They, too, face the viewer. As in a comparable Munch, the expression is hard to read. The horse has no expression and thus gives the painting the ability to be interpreted subjectively by viewers who associate themselves, perhaps, with the situation. We die alone, and the orderliness and beauty of the natural world cannot entirely disguise this fact. As an interpreter of the natural cycle, Rousseau had not exactly “taken on the role of moral educator that Michelet advocated for all who might speak to ‘the people,’” as Christopher Green notes about his political paintings, although he was going a ways along that road.56 The religious faith that doubtless helped sustain his appreciation of nature is not explicitly present in this work, as it might be in some children’s books of the period. Nonetheless, while ambiguity is not the same as the reassuring folk pattern described earlier in children’s literature examples, the “hard to read” aspect of Rousseau’s work, which makes him look unique or enigmatic within the framework of the artists who admired him, does have a close parallel with the grotesque children’s literature of the nineteenth century. The balancing act between terror and reassurance that makes Rousseau’s work interesting is much like the effect generated by such works as Struwwelpeter, the death jokes in the Alice books, L. Frank Baum’s Tin Woodman, and such oddities as the very popular Golliwogg and the Vege-men in his own time. Much of the appeal of the Golden Age to critics and readers arises from the conscious assurance, I suppose, of authors who could, because of their vision of the world, present what appears to be shocking or dissonant material without blinking—or with

Henri Rousseau • 53 a smile. Author/illustrator Maurice Sendak says, for example, of Randolph Caldecott’s Mother Goose illustrations: For me his [Caldecott’s] greatness lies in the truthfulness of his vision of life. There is no emasculation of truth in his world. It is a green, vigorous world rendered faithfully and honestly in shades of dark and light, a world where the tragic and the joyful coexist, the one coloring the other. It encompasses three slaphappy huntsmen, as well as the ironic death of a mad, misunderstood dog; it allows for country lads and lasses flirting and dancing round the Maypole, as well as Baby Bunting’s startled realization that her rabbit skin came from a creature that was once alive.57 The qualities that the Caldecott, Hoffman, Carroll, Baum, and Upton works share, aside from their grotesquerie and fertility of invention, are their extreme popularity with a broad audience and their immoderate sense of humor. All of these works produce widely differing interpretations because, for example, whether Struwwelpeter is sadistic, didactic, or hilarious depends a great deal upon the reader, and a great deal of the humor lies within the pictures, themselves. But Struwwelpeter, like Rousseau’s work, continues to have popular appeal—as a musical, in various satiric versions—in our own time (and, like Hokusai’s manga, is a precursor of the modern comic book). Viewed as a group, Rousseau’s collection of jungles with fierce animals is likely to raise the smile that Rousseau noted as his own response, and it is not a smile based upon his imagined shortcomings or failure to meet Academy standards: not the laughter of the nineteenth-century critics. It is the smile that he intended should be on our faces. He often was painting funny pictures, or wonders of a kind that were both accessible and human. He was the artist who was not only glad to explain puzzling aspects of his works to others but who actually appended what Walter Benjamin would call “captions” to his works to render a bit of interpretive help.58 If anything, the mature defenses against despair and death exemplified in his work—the laughter, the appreciation, the perspective—position him as considerably more “adult” than those who failed to keep their wits or manage the exigencies of the post-Darwinian, technologically rampant world. Rudyard Kipling, like Rousseau, is an artist whose work irresistibly encourages others to examine his life when trying to determine what he was doing and why, although in Kipling’s case, as a children’s writer, there are fewer questions about whether or not he was conscious of his own vision. Yet both men—husbands, fathers—were exceedingly unfortunate in the battles that they fought with Nature—both lost children, Rousseau lost two wives—and “yearning for the defeated victims” is a strongly felt personal emotion in both cases. Salmon speaks in commendation of “sa bravoure devant la vie cruelle,” when discussing the old man that he knew; Kipling’s works about lost children are infinitely moving.59

54 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Kipling’s Jungle Books, which pre-date all of Rousseau’s jungle paintings except “Surprise” by about a decade, share some of their qualities, as well as differences. While both Kipling and Rousseau were playing up the exotic qualities of their forests, Kipling is much more compellingly linked to Empire and colonization. There seems little point in discussing this matter in the case of Rousseau, and Kipling’s art, too, is more subtle than his politics.60 “The law of the jungle” when used in a popular way is a simple kind of reference to Darwinism: “eat or be eaten,” possibly, or “only the fit survive.” Kipling’s “law,” however is really something like the opposite. The orderly and ironclad “laws” guarantee that the jungle, though dangerous, is much safer for the informed and diligent than is the world of men. 61 The images of the Jungle Book are nocturnal landscapes of exceptional beauty, with moons that bring Rousseau’s work to mind. No one should ever forget Mowgli before the Council Rock playing with pebbles in the moonlight, the Cold Lairs on the night of Kaa’s hunting, or the phosphorescence on the White Seal’s beach. Like “Mysterious Kôr,” whose beautiful images inform a reverie upon bomb-cratered London in Elizabeth Bowen’s work, the danger remains but the beauty predominates. Kipling’s “laws” are the tidying and structured harmony from the outside that Adorno addresses when he speaks of classics. But both artists, Kipling and Rousseau, are people to whom the beautiful image was consolation in itself.

Late Twentieth-Century Picture Book Jungles Sendak’s comment upon the “truth” of Caldecott’s lively and disturbing vision is a place to end when thinking about connections between Rousseau’s vision and children’s classics. From the perspective of children’s literature, Rousseau’s paintings are not childlike, though they have the ability to reach an audience that includes children. They are a gift from an experienced, not an innocent, mind which, while reverencing Nature, asserts the utility of art in life. Distinguished twentieth-century children’s books borrowed Henri Rousseau’s paintings for children’s viewing. The first of the cat-and-fine-art books, Margaret Wise Brown’s The House of One Hundred Windows (1945) uses Rousseau’s European landscapes among the imaginative “windows” of an observant cat, ending with the unanswered question of whether the cat will decide to stay in the “house” or leave through the suddenly opened backdoor. “The door was open. It was up to the cat.”62 As Sandra Beckett notes in “Parodic Play with Paintings in Picture Books,” in 1992, the Norwegian illustrator Fam Ekman borrowed The Sleeping Gypsy, Portrait of a Woman, and Old Junier’s Cart, for Kattens Shrekk, a book about a cat that takes its fear of dogs to an art museum full of feline fine art.63 Among other influences, Anthony Browne’s mutable landscape in Voices in the Park (1998) also seems to owe a great deal to Rousseau’s scenes of tree-lined urban promenades.64

Henri Rousseau • 55 Rousseau’s jungle paintings, the subject of this chapter, are yet more common in imaginative children’s productions.65 In Dav Pilkey’s poignant tribute to cats and art, When Cats Dream, he uses Rousseau’s jungles as the ultimate cat escape.66 Browne’s Willy the Dreamer(1997) puts a television-absorbed family on the mysterious sofa in the jungle of Rousseau’s The Dream.67 Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, Bumble-Ardy, and The Magic Flute also borrow his dream-landscape and exotic foliage.68 The distinctive stasis of the pictures in Wild Things and the benign all-seeing moons of many of Sendak’s books also appear to bear some cousinly relationship to Rousseau’s work. The contrast of Tomi Ungerer’s eponymous Moon Man to corrupt human society reminds us of both Rousseaus—Jean Jacques, as well as Henri—while the twilight and foliage once again identify the Douanier’s jungle as one of the familiar environments of our children’s worlds.69 When aspects of Rousseau’s works appear in contemporary children’s books, they are not at all the same thing as his paintings. The incorporation of the jungles into children’s books apparently reduces the tension by reducing the extent to which Nature and mortality are intertwined, although the theme is not abandoned. Margaret Wise Brown’s cat, for example, may be a kind of latter-day Lady of Shallot. The cat’s choice of Art or Life seems to be balancing a rich imaginative life against sunlight, but it also juxtaposes eternity and mutability. As Suzanne Rahn notes, the choice that the cat should or will make is not obvious.70 Dav Pilkey’s cats find excitement in Rousseau’s jungles, much like those zoo patrons who were awaiting “wonders.” They are safe because they are dreaming, like Yaghwida, and because they are carnivores, themselves. It is the jungle’s charm—and the power of art and the imagination— that are recommended; but while the problem of boredom may happen to the young and feline, we do not tremble before it. The cats’ fears and Rousseau’s jungles do not exist on the same page. And yet, like Sendak’s Higglety-Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life, which immortalizes a beloved Sealyham, the book is a memorial tribute to the dead cat, Tomato—art as a means of preserving and consoling.71 Maurice Sendak has not discussed Rousseau among his sources for Wild Things, although William Moebius has suggested a likeness and Tony Kushner notes it in reference to similar foliage and nocturnal scenes in Sendak’s Magic Flute.72 There are many Romantic painters who feature nocturnal forest scenes with moonlight (for example, Samuel Palmer). But I think that many people would agree that there is a similarity between these two, and not the least because the psychological/dream aspect of Sendak’s work has so often been discussed and the “wild rumpus” picture, as Kushner notes, “captures life in motion and renders it motionless,” achieving a stasis that might be reminiscent of Rousseau’s, though managed through different techniques.73 Max’s forest, for that matter, is one of Rousseau’s “portrait-landscapes” with a vengeance, because most people understand it as a place that is an imaginative representation of Max’s own anger and frustration.74 Sendak’s picture book, like Rousseau’s ini-

56 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde tial canvasses, evoked a remarkable critical outcry, though of something like an opposite nature. If Rousseau’s critics thought his work childish, Sendak’s thought that Wild Things was too dark for children. His cosmology, though, is sadder and less assured than Rousseau’s, and more of the pain of Sendak’s world comes from identifiably human sources. We live in a world where Nature is perceived as vulnerable rather than powerful, and the decadents, with their fear of bullying Nature, have not prevailed. Greenness and trees, rather than death, are more clearly evoked and imagined as its “force.” If we give tastes of Rousseau’s paintings to children in picture books, we can do it with the assurance that Rousseau wanted to be exhibited to a wide audience and interpreted his adult audience as a group that, like children, needed teaching, consolation, and interpretive help. We believe (sometimes) that children should have humorous books and are more apt than his generation to find Rousseau’s work, though “high” art, sometimes cheerfully funny. We think in less hierarchical ways about animal and human lives and less binary ways about adult and child lives and imaginations—enough, certainly, not to confuse Rousseau’s talent with some generic or instinctual category. Indeed, though transcendent, he is today probably more apt to evoke his own time period rather than our children’s perception. In his generation, the especially knowledgeable were his champions; in ours, he may appeal most as a vision of what it is to be successfully grown-up.

Chapter Three William Nicholson A Swashbuckling Time

Sir William Nicholson, an artist whose work enriched children’s literature and culture from the beginning of his career, was an Englishman who studied at Julian’s Academy in Paris in 1891. As a member of the brilliant crowd of artistic, literary, and theatrical talents centered in London in the fi n-de-siècle and as a countryman who loved the English landscape, many of the influences passed on in his works for children can be seen as native to his time and place. But children’s culture and Nicholson’s contributions to it also owe a great deal to influences from the Parisian avant-garde that discussing Nicholson’s formative sojourn in Paris helps to articulate. Although his important picture books came after World War I had changed his world, Nicholson’s gaiety, coupled with seriousness about artistic production, brings to mind the visual images of bohemian Paris. The entertainments that the young people sought and recorded as urban pastimes in Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s new city, such as circuses and acrobats, puppet shows at cafés, harlequins both related and unrelated to English pantomime, dress-up clothes and costume balls, as well as enthusiasm for poems such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” are understandable historically and intellectually as special treats but not usually on our own list of adult tastes. William Nicholson, by some accounts, was never as young as this crowd, but he never relinquished the pastimes he enjoyed—artistic illusion, carrying boomerangs and a three-pound cup-and-ball game in his luggage, and delighting in costumes and a splendid dress-up trunk. From some points of view, he was the “Golden Age” child who actually remembered as an adult what real enjoyment was; from another, he was—like Louisa May Alcott or Edith Nesbit—a talented artist working as hard as he could at whatever was going to keep the wolf from his own nursery door. His immersion in literary 57

58 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde and theatrical as well as fi ne arts circles brought him into contact with what his biographer Sanford Schwartz calls pre-modern or just modern points of view, but no one group could really claim him as a member.1 As Marah Gubar has shown, there was authorial resistance to a belief in vulnerable childhood innocence in this period.2 A number of Nicholson’s acquaintances had strong opinions about the nature of childhood and childhood entertainment, particularly theatrical entertainment. These are opinions that are relevant when looking at the kind of early work that Nicholson produced. The source of this group’s information about childhood appears mostly to have been recollections of their own. But, notably, they seem to have assumed that the tastes of all children are alike. The child Max Beerbohm and G.K. Chesterton describe sometimes sounds like the “bad boy” of American tradition—a kind of milder version of Richmal Compton’s William.3 Compton’s decades-long series began in 1919 and in it William continues the dialogue between “child worshipers” and “real children” that the critics had begun earlier.4 But “mischief ” is not really an important component in their essentialized child. In some ways, Beerbohm and Chesterton are simply anti-Barrie (a point that Marguerite Steen felt compelled to make about Nicholson, as well): they assume that children are not sentimental about themselves and that they have a strong preference for the grotesque, violent, and funny.5 For example, Chesterton thought that the Punch and Judy-style mayhem of pantomime was uniquely suited for childish taste and health, in spite of what one might consider objectionable subject matter: A child knows that a doll is not a baby; just as clearly as a real believer knows that a statue of an angel is not an angel. But both know that in both cases the image has the power of both opening and concentrating the imagination. In imagination there is no illusion; no, not even an instant of illusion. For no split second even then did I believe that people had cut in two a live man—even if he was only a policeman. If I had believed it, I should have felt very different. What I felt was that it was right; that it was a good and enlarging and inspiriting thing to see; that it was an excellent thing to look down on the strange street where such things could be seen; in short, I could say then, with a quite undivided mind, that it was a very good Christmas present to go to the Pantomime.6 Beerbohm saw the Alice books as the antithesis of Peter Pan (“children find in them the lively embodiments of their own grotesque fancies”) and thought that Struwwelpeter was a perfect mixture of morality and delight.7 In the same era, Saki’s eponymous “Storyteller” lampoons didactic tales by telling a story about a little girl whose jangling good conduct medals get her eaten by a wolf, while the Golliwogg books (by women!) traded sentiment and pastoral for

William Nicholson • 59 slapstick and current events, though they were not as dependent upon what Hilary McKay’s Saffy calls “the omnipresence of murderous strangers” as Beatrix Potter’s funny little animal stories.8,9 Although there were children’s literature contributions of many different kinds available in the late Victorian/Edwardian moment, it was this “robust” thread to which Nicholson’s contribution most nearly belongs. Of the crowd of Englishmen that loosely or frequently interacted with Nicholson, James Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Hillaire Belloc, Walter de la Mare, and Oscar Wilde actually wrote for children. But Beerbohm and Aubrey Beardsley can also be found represented in a children’s gift annual, The Parade (1897). In spite of the overwhelming masculine presence, those who could draw—and many of them could (see chapter 4)—had been influenced by their childhood books, notably Kate Greenaway illustrations, although Beerbohm later excoriated her for turning children into decorations.10 When John Ruskin lectured on Greenaway illustrations rather than Modern French painting in his fi nal Oxford series, he might have been near the end of his usefulness as an art critic, but he should be given credit for realizing the enormous difference that inexpensive art reproductions would make to childhood and culture. It is only in recent times that pictures have become familiar means of household pleasure and education: only in our own days—nay, even within the last ten years of those,—that the means of illustration by color-printing have been brought to perfection, and art as exquisite as we need desire to see it, placed, if our school-boards choose to have it so, within the command of every nursery governess. Having then the color-print, the magic-lantern, the electric-light, and the—to any row of ciphers—magnifying, lens, it becomes surely very interesting to consider what we may most wisely represent to children by means so potent, so dazzling, and, if we will, so faithful.11 Ruskin probably did not envision exposure to Under the Window producing a Beardsley. But this generation (Beardsley, Beerbohm, and Nicholson were born in 1872) had grown up with mass-produced, distinctive Victorian picture books available to them, and it had made a difference.12 Michael Joseph has noted that Nicholson liked Randolph Caldecott’s lively work enough to put his drawings in two of the literary magazines that he and Robert Graves collaborated on in the early 1920s.13 Nicholson’s own early work for children, then, makes him part of the English literary crowd that was interested in the views of children and in creating work for them. His Modernism, more nearly associated with his studies in Paris, however, also encouraged this endeavor. For example, he is generally supposed to have viewed some paintings by Édouard Manet (1832–1883) in 1891.14 And Manet’s work is influential on Nicholson’s sub-

60 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde sequent production in broad general terms, as well as in matters of brush stroke and technique. Manet’s paintings in the 1860s greatly influenced the direction of art in Paris in subsequent decades. His paintings involve a broad spectrum of subjects and influences, but his position as a Modernist landmark has to do, in part, with the way he positioned himself in respect to his subjects. As Anne Coffin Hanson notes in Manet and the Modern Tradition (1977), in reference to a frontispiece to a collection of etchings by the painter, “it [the image] represents a new self-consciousness of the artist living in the world of his motifs and his personal life, rather than fi lling the more traditional role as educator of the public, supporter of moral values, and creator of the eternal truths.”15 Taken as a preference for portraiture over historical spectacle, and a portraiture, moreover, that could be described as “intimate” rather than sociological or allegorical, this is a stance that opens the door to legitimizing ambiguity and uncertainty about the content of a picture, as well as a statement about the legitimacy of the painter, himself, making the decision about what subject matter to take seriously and what his role as an artist should be. It is a stance that was important to Nicholson and his relation to children’s culture. Manet is often described as a painter of suburban backyards and café life, as well as bouquets and still lifes that reflect upper-middle-class domestic interiors. The overthrow of Academy traditions, in this respect, opens the door to the rooms and places where child life may be found, while simultaneously refusing the official parenting/teaching role. The emphasis on the visual and physical rather than the historical or overtly ideological simultaneously makes a work accessible to a broader audience (including the uneducated or young), while also making any one reading of the work less authoritative. The difference between high and low art and adult and child judgment, is diminished. Second, and almost in contradiction, the didactic impulse is still a factor in some of the work of the avant-garde of Nicholson’s period, including Manet’s. Although it is done without allegory and indirectly, with ambiguity, the plight of the outcast and the social results of human failings can be seen in the work of these painters. In Manet’s work one might look at La Rue Mosnier aux Drapeaux (1878), for example, in which, as Henri Lallemand notes, “The street is festively decorated with flags, but the joyful display is contrasted with the presence of a man on crutches seen from behind,” the man apparently a war veteran wounded in service.16 Nicholson’s “Armistice Night” picture, though very different, uses a similar contrast. Manet’s barmaid at the Folies Bergère, though her gaze is elusive, seems to question the social scene that she inhabits. In English children’s culture, Beerbohm’s ironic caricatures of well-known figures (the first non-realistic art that Kenneth Clark enjoyed as a child), the humorous horrifying rhymes of Belloc, the fairy tales of Wilde, the Fabian impulses of Nesbit (for example, in The Wouldbegoods) are sometimes based upon a frankness about social realities. In Nicholson’s work, we can see the

William Nicholson • 61 combination of several of these elements in his wood engravings involving what an early volume called London Types.

Posters and Advertisements When Nicholson studied at Julian’s in Paris in 1891, he was 19. As his biographers have noted, Nicholson’s brief experience of Julian’s art school was not really to his taste, though it had lasting consequences.17 Initially, the exposure to Paris seems to have filled Nicholson with enthusiasm and the confidence that art could be made to pay and that he could earn enough money to be able to also pursue his own projects, an important issue because he was about to become a young husband. For example, Marguerite Steen mentions his experiments with new forms of mass reproduction that he thought might work.18 After his return to England, the first fruits of his experience was his collaboration with James Pryde, a former art school friend and soon his brother-in-law. Under the name “J & W Beggarstaff,” they produced posters on the cutting edge of avant-garde art in England.19 The posters, influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and contemporary with Aubrey Beardsley’s pictorial posters, were a contribution to the French craze taken up by the British, which—because they were produced for theater productions, as well as to sell various goods and services—combined the newest kinds of art with both popular entertainment and commercial advertising.20 The Beggarstaff posters also had a continental following during the few years that the collaboration continued, while the two young men served their art apprenticeship together, but did not make a commercial success. The posters were followed, in Nicholson’s case, by mastery of wood engraving, using a technique associated with illustration in English children’s books. The wood engravings were touched up with color and reproduced by lithograph in the less expensive editions; the expensive copies for collectors were colored by hand. Nicholson created a distinguished series of publications using this technique, which retained elements of the Beggarstaff poster style. The “modern” aspect of the collage posters and the wood engravings are similar. Both use greatly simplified forms and are large bold portraits of people (or animals) made of contrasting black and neutral ground: sandy or grayish. Some features may have a bit of red or white painted in. The black is all one flat color. They were original artworks, rather than a way of conveying oil paintings or other pre-existing forms. They are striking even in our own era, which has seen more adventure in image making than the 1890s had. They were arresting and very “different” when pasted up as posters or used to decorate houses in their own time. Except for perhaps the Rowntree’s Cocoa advertising poster, which features “historic” and jovial looking men in hats that bring to mind the kind of mythic Olde England seen in some Caldecott illustrations, the posters are not works for children, in particular, but the books of engravings are more clearly crossover material.

62 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde An Alphabet (1897) James Whistler, whom Nicholson much admired, took some trouble to introduce him to the publisher William Heinemann and helped him to receive his fi rst commission with the Heinemann fi rm. An Alphabet (1897) was a project suggested by Nicholson, who made the fi rst cut (A was an Artist) as a prospectus.

Figure 3.1 William Nicholson. Self-portrait as pavement artist from An Alphabet ©Desmond Banks.

William Nicholson • 63 The book is in an engraving style that had roots in books that a late eighteenth-century or early nineteenth-century child would have owned, as well as in the innovations of the 1890s. Nicholson was using a method of wood engraving revolutionized by Thomas Bewick, although the effect that he aimed at was not the same. (He later copied the distinctive ovals in rectangular borders of the Bewick Aesop’s Fables, for example, in his drawings for Clever Bill and The Pirate Twins.) The nouns he used for his alphabet show familiarity with A Was an Archer, which was produced commercially for a children’s market, as well as being a folk artifact. Hence, although, as several commentators note, the influence of Joseph Crawhall, a rope manufacturer and revivalist of quaint old-fashioned chapbook-style woodcuts, is important, the antecedents are more varied and closer to children’s literature than this implies.21 Crawhall’s Chorographia of 1884, offers an example of the style that interested Nicholson.22 As James Hamilton explains, William Morris (1834– 1996) with his encouragement of artistic furnishings and handmade domestic decoration (his company started in the early 1860s) encouraged “the growth in interest and enjoyment of the style of rough country woodcuts.” Industrialization, in other words, had given a cachet to the rarer commodity that was—or looked to be—hand produced. Chapbooks—cheap, widely available, short books, sometimes with black and white primitive woodblock illustrations or engravings—were sold by peddlers and at other popular venues. They are famous in the history of children’s literature because, from about the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century, they provided adventurous narratives, rhymes, and street calls with illustrations, and, eventually, children’s stories such as Goody Two-Shoes or other novels with child interest such as Gulliver’s Travels in condensed and simplified forms. Because they also included such things as gallows confessions and dubious or sensational history, they can be criticized as unsuitable for the young (see Chapter 5, for example). But at their best they offered folk culture, ballads, and non-didactic literature to children of varying classes, as well as to adults with elementary reading skills. Until the early nineteenth century when some of the familiar works were produced by publishers for a children’s market, they were a cross-over adult/child form of popular entertainment. Thus, the craft revival and children’s literature history overlap, just as the audience for Nicholson’s An Alphabet—bold prints in this new, more casual, style—was expected to be children, adults and adult home decorators, and investors in Modernist prints. The historic costuming of some characters in An Alphabet also might bring to mind other children’s standard works of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. In the 1890s, Beerbohm evoked these robustly purveyed moral tales with punishment for evil-doers and rewards for virtue as being more appealing to the young than contemporary sentimental stories, as well as a contribution to the no-nonsense approach that was necessary if children were going to live to grow up successfully:

64 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde For the inherent nature of childhood is far brighter than the inherent nature of maturity. Childhood has no alien responsibilities, it is free from all the bitterness of knowledge and of memory, is careless and hopeful. So that, if the nursery be turned into a free republic and be rid of its old gloom and vigilant authority, it must be the scene of absolute happiness, and its children, when the time comes for them to leave it, will be appalled by the serious side of life. Finding no pleasure in a freedom which they have always had, incapable of that self-control which long discipline produces, they will become neurotic, ineffectual men and women. In the old days there could have been no reaction of this kind. The strange sense of freedom was a recompense for less happiness of heart. Children were fit for life.23 Indeed, if one looks at the old standard A Was an Archer, in the re-illustrated 1819 edition that the Opies attribute to the bookseller and publisher John Harris, one finds that some of the topics that were considered inappropriate by Heinemann for a children’s market in the 1890s (“executioner” or “toper”) were popular and acceptable earlier in the century.24 “D was a drunkard,” “V was a Vintner/A very great sot,” and so on. Some of Nicholson’s letter choices (Q was for Quaker, R was for Robber, L was for Lady, and so on) also are the same nouns found in the earlier work, although the illustrations are very different. The “tough” look of Nicholson’s alphabet characters, then, might also be seen as a statement about what children need or enjoy or are like. In other words, the wood engraving form, the “archaic” look of the lettering, and simplicity of the pictures, combined with this association with older children’s literature, made the ambiguous avant-garde material more traditionally childlike than one might think. Both An Alphabet and An Almanac of Twelve Sports were published by Heinemann in 1897.25 An Alphabet is an unusual, but striking, collection of full length portraits: the letters all stand for human occupations or conditions. An Alphabet follows the format of many alphabet books for the young in representing only one image and a simple phrase ending in a noun, per page: A was an Artist. The large lettering was done by Nicholson, and the letters form a significant part of the look of the pages. The conception of the book, however, is more complex. In the first place, one might call it a book of stock character parts because many of the letters seem to be represented by actors playing the part identified.26 The second letter, for example, B was a Beggar, is a kind of joke, because it is a portrait of James Pryde (the other half of J & W Beggarstaff)—as a beggar with a staff. But Pryde does not look like a street person; Pryde looks like a striking character actor in a histrionic pose on a stage. The setting in most pictures is slight enough that a stage, rather than a street, could be envisioned. As Michael Joseph has noted, it is “as though they were actors modeling their roles for an illustrated theater program.”27 Some portraits definitely appear to be on a stage because of the shadows or other indications. I is for Idiot, D is

William Nicholson • 65 for Dandy (which Joseph identifies with Herbert Beerbohm-Tree), E is for Earl and so on also feature historical costuming and old-fashioned acting gestures. I is for Idiot, for example, is so detailed that it suggests a real performance. Moreover, the character himself is perfectly composed and competent; it is the gesture and costuming (feather) that are antic and unusual. Nicholson was familiar with a great many plays in this era. In the second place, using a classification of people for the alphabet recalls, as do the further series, a kind of genre painting that Manet exploited in the early 1860s, which was also a feature of many contemporaneous French illustrated papers. As Hanson notes, The convention, having its roots in seventeenth-century genre, thrived in eighteenth-century travel literature, where plants, animals, and people are described not according to their particular features, but to the features common to them as a class. This organization of the unfamiliar into clear concepts as classes or types allows for an appropriately “scientific” understanding of a great mass of disparate material. With a growing concern about man’s role in nineteenth-century society, descriptions of the Frenchman in his own habitat had become interesting to the Parisian, and narrative elements in illustration and literature often gave way to a deft combination of acute observation and preconceptions about the typical. 28 Manet’s Absinthe Drinker, for example, might well bring the Nicholson alphabet portraits to mind because it is (like his other genre portraits) a single full-length figure, because the late addition of bottle and glass to the painting seems to be making a “type” of a real man whom Manet knew in the neighborhood, because the background reveals little detail about his surroundings, and because the man in that portrait has his feet posed in a way that suggests that he might be about to dance.29 Manet actually added stage details to his portrait of a Spanish dancer (Lola of Valence 1862–1867). Indeed, Manet painted many portraits of “types,” rather than individuals, including one called The Urchin, the noun that Nicholson also used for U (both are rather timid, inoffensive lads). Nicholson’s paintings recall Manet in a number of ways; here, the alphabet wood engravings do so, as well. The ostensibly educative function of a child’s alphabet (to learn the letters and to learn information that is alphabetized) ties in with a tradition that Manet and Nicholson were consciously following, in addition to the contemporary Parisian desire to make sense of the new Paris or to classify the contemporary world. The scandal that Manet had caused with his Absinthe Drinker also suggests some mischievousness in Nicholson’s subsequent use of the form. There were a great many genre paintings created in nineteenth-century England as well as France, an Academic pursuit influenced, in part, by the novels of Charles Dickens, and created by artists who presumably wanted

66 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde to make the public sympathetic to the plight of the poor. Such a painting as Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (Fildes, 1874) or Newgate: Committed for Trial (Holl, 1878), both part of the Royal Holloway Collection, show the viewer realistic details of everyday life among the unfortunate, with touching and sentimental detail.30 And Diego Velázquez (the seventeenth-century Spanish painter much admired by Manet and Nicholson) also can be classified as producing “bodegones” that might be called “genre.” His master paintings such as Old Woman Frying Eggs, however, focus on portraying the humanity and distinct individuality of this poor woman and her personal daily environment, which perhaps conveys respect bordering on objectivity, rather than sympathy. Velázquez, however, also did a single figure, backgroundless painting that Manet praised called The Jester Pablo de Valladolid, (1630s). Manet drew upon the painting for one of his own works, The Fife Player. Valladolid “stands like an actor in a particularly undefi ned space in which there are no indications of a floor,” his shadow is visible and the seamless background was a “luminous grey” originally, which has turned to a “dull ochre” over time.31 His costume is a dramatic seventeenth-century black with a touch of white at the color. The black/sand/touch of white is reminiscent of many Nicholson’s prints, although the medium is, of course, oil paint with many additional qualities. But this was a famous “innovative” painting: Manet called it “the most amazing work of painting ever produced”; Whistler painted himself as Valladolid (1896), so it is reasonable to assume that the painting influenced the kind of arrangement Nicholson settled upon for his alphabet pages.32,33 Alphabet characters in a book, taken collectively, inevitably create a world and suggest relationships within it, relationships that might first be introduced to a child by such a book. Many of Nicholson’s characters are representatives of social positions, although the sort more often met in costume drama than in daily life: the Earl, the Countess, and the Gentleman. The Robber is the swashbuckling historical sort. Some of the letters are humble occupations; these recall the “Cries of London” tradition in English chapbooks. They also recall the more intentionally pedagogical tradition of teaching children the kinds of people who live within their community. “Yokel,” however, a towheaded smocked farm hand, is not the same as the seriously conceived agricultural laborer in Aelfric’s Colloquy or Froebel’s songs about workers. The image is not intended to encourage gratitude and a sense of oneness, although it is also not as negative as the term today implies. If they were less theatrical, the images would surely tell us that gentlemen are snooty (as “esquire” did in A Was an Archer), countesses a little crazed, and that earls resemble Henry VIII. One would get irreverent messages about the upper classes—and maybe one does. But the figures look like character actors from identifiable plays or, taking into account the “portraits” of Pryde and Beerbohm-Tree, real people amusingly displayed in character roles. A third point to be made about Nicholson’s alphabet is that the expressions on the characters’ faces are unusual; as Schwartz notes, they have a “wariness,

William Nicholson • 67 even a ferocity.”34 They are not cheerful (as we might reasonably expect in a contemporary alphabet book), and in some cases they might be seen as ill-atease or—in the case of the expurgated E is for Executioner (which only appeared in the expensive versions)—truculent. Z is for Zoologist, viewing a picture of a horse skeleton in a book, is downright creepy; O is for Ostler is a manly man sizing up the viewer. L is for Lady is one of the vulnerable ones; her colorless face and aimless stance contrasts with the red cheeks of the flower girl and milkmaid, both of whom can clearly take care of their business and themselves, but neither of whom is giving away whatever she has on her mind. Manet’s Victorine had a more idiosyncratic, compelling gaze, and Whistler’s Woman in White a blanker one, but the same kind of distance and refusal to reveal characterizes the lowerclass female figures. “No one is kind,” is one of the complaints I have heard from college students reading Alice in Wonderland for the first time. It is hard to explain that the grotesques Alice encounters can seem quite matter-of-factly adult to those who are not yet grown. An Alphabet presents a similar world. Finally, “A” is a self-portrait of Nicholson as a pavement artist, sitting on the sidewalk with some of the other portraits displayed beside him. The cover of the volume has a chapman shilling for a similar selection on an over-theshoulder tray. There is no reason why a child—or anyone who didn’t know Nicholson—should realize that “A” is a self-portrait. But the artist as street person or as artisan is a message, as well as a possible indicator of ideology. One of the stances of French painters in the nineteenth century was the idea of artist as laborer, a stance taken by Gustave Courbet, one of Manet’s teachers, for example.35 Nicholson shows no such solidarity with peasant farmers (e.g., Yokel), but he does, as Schwartz notes, emphasize physicality in this self-portrait—an “honest manual labor” appearance.36 The pose reiterates the avant-garde fellow feeling for urban outsiders, as well as what seems to be a preference for people who do things. A was an Artist also shows children where pictures come from and their nature as commodities. These themes are continued in the wood engravings that followed the success of An Alphabet, also works that were published in inexpensive forms as well as in the hand-printed boxes of originals with Nicholson’s own finishing for connoisseurs of Modernist prints. An Almanac of Twelve Sports and London Types were not works especially or exclusively intended for children, but a few of their connections to children’s culture and the avant-garde should be mentioned. An Almanac of Twelve Sports Andrew Nicholson notes, “Rudyard Kipling had been lent a house in Rottingdean on the Sussex Coast, and in the summer of 1897, William went down to make a woodcut portrait of him for the New Review. They became friendly, walking the Downs together with their children.” . . . “William showed him some

68 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde of his proofs for An Almanac of Twelve Sports, on which he had been working for Heinemann. Kipling liked the cuts and wrote some rhymes for them, and so a collaboration began.”37 An Almanac (1898) was an actual calendar, whose dates had to be changed for subsequent annual printings. It, too, was a revival of a nineteenthcentury popular form. The wood engravings are more distinguished than the verse, and the engravings are apparently the part that people remembered. For example, Nicholson was given a special medal for the Almanac at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games 30 years later, so it is reasonable to believe that the prints were taken seriously as excellent prints of favorite sports. Yet the sardonic Kipling verse is valuable in getting the tone of the age, as well as being able to assess the collaboration between print and verse that marks the “art book” as one of the predecessors of the modern picture book. That Kipling (1865–1936) should have been allowed to write verse about sporting appears ludicrous today. But that a calendar should be printed with his outrageous anti-sporting sentiments on every page—through several printings—gives some information about its audience. For example, “March,” for which the sport is “racing,” suggests a cross-over audience. Nicholson’s print is a formal sand/grey and red and white composition that fi lls the frame with close-up portions of the riders. It is an animated print because the middle horse, the white one that draws the eye, is springing forward and because the bottom horse’s face appears to be looking at the viewer. Perhaps because Nicholson liked animals, the picture is rather sad. The horses look a bit desperate. The red-jacketed rider on the springing horse has his arm over his head with a whip that parallels the top of the print. His face is at an angle we might call reflective or dejected, which is odd in the middle of a race. Kipling’s verse to this print seems in tune with the conception: The horse is ridden—the jockey rides– The backers back—the owners own But—there are lots of things besides, And I should leave this play alone. Exploitation, boredom, and nursery advice when viewing the “sport of kings” is an edgy position when applied to sporting prints. The cricket print (“June”) is a famous one, arresting and interesting, but, of course, Kipling’s view of “flannel’d fools” makes itself felt. Thank God who made the British Isles And taught me how to play, I do not worship crocodiles Or bow the knee to clay!

William Nicholson • 69 Give me a willow wand and I, With hide and cork and twine, From century to century Will gambol round my Shrine. The print shows two figures, the wicket keeper and the batter, with a sandycolored sky and a blue cloud, above, and a sandy brown ground. The wicket keeper is behind the wicket crouched in a top hat with wide spread legs. The level brim of the hat obscures his expression, but his mouth, at least, is straight. The larger, closer figure is in a batting position with the bat down in front of the wicket. He is a large stout man in white, with hair on each side of his head like a Toby jug. He has pink cheeks and pink hands. He looks seriously intent but, of course, he is not a fit young athlete of the “Vitaë Lampada” variety. The beauty of the picture, and Nicholson’s characteristic emphasis on skillful hands, might disguise this distinctive choice of player. But Kipling’s verse ridicules the life-long enthusiast. There is a certain wonderment in noting that Nicholson was often associated with Kipling as distinctively English—unlike those Continental types—when both were so fond of France all their lives, influenced by French trends in the arts, and so distinctively not “ordinary” Englishmen, in spite of Kipling’s contemporary nationalistic war enthusiasm. Kipling’s message continues in a blatant way, for example (September) Shooting (“Oh Christian load your gun and then,/O Christian, out and slay!”), but the November print, Boxing, warrants a second look. The Nicholson picture is of two opponents in a ring (ropes behind them), with an audience indicated in black from about the middle of the print down to the canvas. The man whose face we see is on the right with his hands up in gloves, light brown skin, a small smile on his face and steady-looking eyes. He is bald with hair around the edges, white pants and stockings, bare chest. The opponent has his back to us but is leaning in such a way that we can see a resolute fighting profi le. He is a black man, muscular, with a shape of hair, and his view of his opponent is more nearly ours. Something is about to happen, but it is a static moment. Kipling provides an uncharacteristic verse: Read here the Moral roundly writ For him that into battle goes– Each soul that, hitting hard and hit Encounters gross or ghostly foes:– Prince, blown by many overthrows Half blind with shame, half choked with dirt Man cannot tell but Allah knows How much the other side was hurt! Boxing was a fashionable turn-of-the-century pastime, and it appears that Kipling, in reading a brutal contest promoted for wagering into a model of battle, with sympathy for the loser of the contest rather than admiration for

70 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde the prowess of the winner, takes the courage involved in this kind of sport seriously. The name “Prince,” combined with the African heritage of one of the opponents, probably identifies the boxer as Peter Jackson, “the Black Prince” or “Peter the Great,” considered one of the best heavy-weight boxers of all time. John L. Sullivan (in America) refused to fight him because he was black, but many people felt this was because Jackson would have won.38 By the time of the creation of the Almanac his career had declined due to serious illness and age, yet he still had to fight—which does, indeed, seem to remove “boxing” from the other sporting categories. An Almanac is distinguished for the beauty and avant-garde qualities of Nicholson’s wood engraving. Of the Nicholson print series’ (though de la Mare had special affection for Characters of Romance), this collection seems to me to be the most exciting and new. The Japanese-influenced alterations of the horizon, the unusual points of view or–in the case of the wager boats, apparent absence of the athletes on first glance—make many of the prints a fine surprise. In contrast to what might be called the universality of the engravings, however, the verses have the more direct connection with children’s literature. Kipling’s Stalky & Co (1899) was published the following year. The school story, based in part on his own experience at the United Services Academy, sarcastically emphasizes the sports enthusiasm expected at schools (“by games, and games alone, was salvation wrought. Boys neglected were boys lost”)39 and celebrates his own characters’ firm refusal to play (while successfully wreaking revenge on the sports-master). Nicholson, too, though he (unlike Kipling) had miraculous hand/eye coordination, disliked school and school sports, and left Magnus Grammar School when he was about 16. The collaborators, in other words, must have had a fine giddy time over those verses. Both Stalky and An Almanac also advise that reading R.S. Surtees’ humorous sporting novel Handley Cross (1843), with his character Mr. Jorrock, is much better than actually engaging in field sports. Some of Nicholson’s sporting prints are of young women (fishing, archery, skating), a sign that the “New Girl” was making herself felt The child of the Nineties considers With laughter The maid whom his Sire in the Sixties Ran after, 40 but because Kipling’s verses (and schoolboy adventures) did not conceive of young women in any but courtship roles (in spite of Nicholson’s pictures of sport being pursued), they are another piece of adolescent silliness. London Types W.E. Henley (1849–1902), mentoring literary editor and author of “Invictus,” was near the end of his life when he did the 14-line verses for London Types, a volume

William Nicholson • 71 with less obvious youth appeal than sports, but one with perhaps two children’s concerns.41 Because Nicholson could choose whatever figures he desired, his choice of a drunken sandwich-board man in the gutter, with ecce homo on his signboard, for Trafalgar Square, or an impoverished, grizzled over-the-shouldertray toyseller for Kensington, or “squatting” flower sellers, overlooked by more prosperous passersby for Any Corner, identifies the plight of the working poor and also represents the kind of “types” present in continental publications and paintings; moreover, the fuss over the emphatic division of rich and poor in Gustave Doré’s illustrations to London: A Pilgrimage (1872), might well make representing urban problems a kind of mischievous or principled choice.42 As a family coffeetable sort of book, it presents an atypical souvenir view of London to the young reader, but these are situations that children might be exposed to in Burnett and Nesbit, as well as in nineteenth-century religious stories in which they would be encouraged to help. In Nicholson’s pictures, however, the figures are not sentimentally treated, and the rough men, in particular, look like portraits.43 Children, themselves, are represented as the subject of two pictures: Newgate Street and The City. The first is a Christ’s Hospital bluecoat boy in the (then newly obsolete) school uniform. He is a nice, plump, pink-cheeked chap, but the wall behind him looks like bars, and the pavement, with the great shadow of the boy, is flagstone. Henley’s approach is to note his “quaint, privileged, liked and reputed well” status; the picture is not so optimistic. The other children, in contrast, are newspaper sellers in The City. The main boy is emerging from a shadow from the waist down, with papers draped over him like a shawl as he gazes at another newsboy approaching a horse-drawn vehicle. Marks on his face and hands suggest potatoey homeliness and hardworked muscles: “nothing can stay the placing of his wares”—a tough child, part of the city’s commerce, doing business—and one of the best in the collection, as a contemporary reviewer noted.44 The final work of engravings with child interest was The Square Book of Animals, which was designed in about 1896 and published in 1899.45 In this case, the collaboration between print and verse is completely unsatisfactory. Neither Kipling, to whom the commission was offered, nor Arthur Waugh who eventually wrote the verses, seemed to have an idea of the charm of the pictures and their obvious nursery application. The Square Book is a collection of farm animals, a traditional idea for children: many of the urban children of today still learn the names of farm animals and their sounds among their very first words. They are also the work of someone who likes animals and is interested in their behavior. For example, the lucky duck and the swan both could serve as illustrations (or inspirations) for A.A. Milne’s verses. But Kipling refused the offer on the grounds of grumpiness over imported provisions: the English farm animals pictured were not being eaten in sufficient quantities by the British population! (“The only way I tried it, my verses became so deeply political (not to say protectionist) that I stopped.”)46 And Waugh’s prologue calls attention to the collection as a similarly nationalistic matter:

72 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Yet fresh the life of farm and grange As that which o’er the ocean roams; Take for a change a narrower range– An English book for English homes!47 The Bulldog, which is the first selection, is “an Englishman who loves and guards his home!” A number of the animals are mentioned as future provisions.j. As Andrew Nicholson points out, the Pall Mall Gazette stated that “Parents and guardians should buy the book, cut out the pictures, have them framed, and hang them in the nursery. If a few thousand parents would nerve themselves up to this undertaking, a future generation of Englishmen might know something about decorative art.”48 The pictures can be obtained as a frieze, and the pictures, cleverly fit into the square format, strikingly fresh in sand and brown and black with occasional touches of red, are both sophisticated and loveable. The “types” format identifies a specific time, as well as an eternal method of putting the world into a book for children, from Orbis Pictus on down. The Paris genre work apparently arose out of the perception that human nature should be studied scientifically and that the new, rebuilt and populated Paris should be known. The London of the 1890s, with the abundance of new illustrated books and advertising and money and prints, seems more to have been trying to hold on to a time that was slipping away. It is easy to see a contrast between the “unreal city” of Eliot (1919) with its varied and unknowable cosmopolitan citizens and uprooted traditions and the “knowable” suggested by the many portraits and types and characters that Nicholson was commissioned to do for Heinemann and such journals as Harper’s in the 1890s, as well as the many caricatures of the famous that Beerbohm created. Collections of images help identify fin-de-siècle human need, as well as the advertising advantages to be gained from them. Notably, a vast number of images of actors, beauties, Boer War generals, famous sportsmen, animals, lighthouses, and many other souvenirs of the time were collected by children, as well as their elders, coming as newspaper supplements or advertising cards from the 1870s onward. It seems best explained as a societal impulse to order, control, or memorialize the moment. The Dictionary of National Biography was first published in 1882, and the National Portrait Gallery founded in 1896. Such images also seem, as always, an admission that whatever is displayed is now in the past—that was a moment, now it’s gone. As Susan Stewart notes in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, “The souvenir is destined to be forgotten,” which the late nineteenth century seemed to know very well already.49 Livestock is changing, young girls are changing, methods of reproduction are changing, childhood is changing, the public’s fancy is changing, and Nicholson, himself, at about the same time he received a gold medal for his woodcuts at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, altered the course of his career back to painting, especially portrait work.50

William Nicholson • 73 Because Nicholson was a major innovator in the history of the picture book in the 1920s, we might consider how or whether these earlier collaborative woodcut/rhyme books fit into the discussion of that form. They are, for one thing, carrying on the tradition of illustrated verse in an era when it was particularly sought out. Young children had already had the illustrated rhymes of Lear and Mother Goose in distinguished volumes; a number of Caldecott’s other books, such as “Babes in the Wood,” “John Gilpin,” and “A’Hunting We Will Go” were also written in verse. Kate Greenaway’s books, myriad lesson-learning books (What little crooked man is this?/He’s called INTERROGATION, Miss), and alphabet books—the books, in other words, that had a picture on every page—were written in rhyme. The Golliwogg series books were also written in varying kinds of verse, although the stories were continuous narratives. The “art book” in France was, rather like the collaboration of Nicholson and Kipling, a cooperative venture between two important talents, a poet and a painter. Manet’s illustrations for “The Afternoon of the Faun” (1876) and for Mallarmé’s translation of Poe’s “The Raven” (1875) were meant to be equal in importance to the texts, a true collaboration. In that case, the collaboration probably succeeded in the translation of “The Raven,” which is significantly altered by Manet’s witty take (and is catalogued by the Library of Congress as a children’s book) but probably failed in “The Afternoon of the Faun.” The conception of the “art book,” then, was defined by an ideal that the picture book emulates, although it is achieved more easily, perhaps, when the author and artist is the same person. In practice, Nicholson’s later picture books are a more important innovation. The individual prints of animals or sports were probably a greater contribution to children’s culture in terms of room decoration rather than to their literature, and this also can be an important influence—the future generation “might know something about decorative art.”51

Painting and Children’s Books Nicholson gave up wood engraving as his primary endeavor about the turn of the century and turned back to painting. His society portraits eventually won him a knighthood and the ability to provide for a growing family. It might be instructive to think of the example of Velázquez, his favorite painter, while considering this move, because his life and work validated the path that Nicholson chose to follow. Velázquez’s world was related to Nicholson’s boyhood and young adult enthusiasm for Alexandre Dumas’ novels: The Three Musketeers, and the like. Dumas’ D’Artagnan books are set in Velázquez’s time: the people in his paintings are clothed in the picturesque clothes of what was, in England, before and around the Civil War era, and was, in Spain, the era when the Spanish empire was lost.52

74 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Velázquez, although he was a seventeenth-century Spanish painter, “had inspired the Avant-Garde art scene in Paris,” particularly in his influence on the painter Manet, which makes him even more important in France than in Britain, where Whistler and Sargent (Americans who worked in England) were similarly inspired. While he was variously praised and touted as a preImpressionist, among other things, he was like Nicholson in being very hard to classify, and consequently called excellent but not of his own time.53 “He knew what he wanted” is one of the best things that critics say about Nicholson, as well. Velázquez worked by patronage: King Philip IV of Spain was his patron and daily visitor, and his children, including the little blonde Infanta, were the subject of many portraits. Las Meninas, often called a (seventeenth-century) Modernist masterpiece, is one of them. Nicholson copied an Infanta during his Parisian art school days, and, he, also, hoped to make something distinctive and worthwhile of commissioned portraits (“I really believe I have said something interesting and new at last.”) Nicholson was well known, moreover, for his portraits of children.54,55 Velázquez’s attempt to be knighted, rehearsed again in an important volume in 1895 (Robert Stevenson’s Art of Velasquez), and his Recessional moment in Spanish history offer additional reasons for his relevance to Nicholson’s life and time. Nicholson’s interest in Velázquez’s treatment of reflection, his brush strokes, his earthenware pots and knives, and his approach to perception and capturing a likeness is revealed in both his paintings and his children’s works.

Shadows and Light Illusion with Narrative Potential Sanford Schwartz, Colin Campbell, and Merlin Ingli James analyze and insightfully discuss Nicholson’s use of light and shadow in his paintings and prints. 56 Schwartz notes its importance, additionally, in The Velveteen Rabbit, a discussion that should also extend to The Pirate Twins, both of them important children’s books with Nicholson’s illustrations. Considered as a cultural element, lighting constitutes an enormous and appealing body of considerations that is evocative and interesting but not precise. Turn-of-the-century citizens, as well as artists—both impressionist and non-impressionist—were unusually aware of light as a group. The reasons are manifold. An article called “A Wonderful Candle” published in St. Nicholas Magazine in March of 1879 is an introduction for a child and family audience to the changes taking place in domestic lighting in the coming decade.57 The writer (“Aunt Fanny”) describes an informal lecture given by a learned professor on different light sources—candles, argon, gas, kerosene, and so on—and the different colored illumination achieved by each. For example, “I am told that when ladies purchase silk for an evening dress, they request to have it shown by gas-light. Some of the larger stores have a little room lighted only by gas

William Nicholson • 75 for this purpose; and it is surprising to notice how a silk, beautiful in daylight, will alter and become dingy in color the moment the gas-light flashes upon it.”58 The “exquisitely beautiful pure white electric light” of the future, then, is the source of general congratulation for its ability to make everyone in the room handsomer, and all the colors “perfect and true; blue was blue, and green, green”—colors that had been indistinguishable in a lighted room previously. The purity of air and evanescent quality of natural color is, as we have noted, a matter of urgent concern for the Impressionists and other outdoor painters in this era, an era that was, of course, especially subject to industrial pollution in industrialized nations. Patricia Reed notes that Nicholson wrote to T.W. Bacon that the foggy, smoggy atmosphere of London obliged him to get “daylight” lamps in order to be able to paint in his studio: “My new light has nearly ruined me again isn’t it dreadful to live in a city where one has to make and pay for one’s own daylight?–but it is good and most successful. I shall never stop working now.”59 Merlin James emphasizes the experimental and conscious effects that Nicholson worked with, inside and out: He achieves amazing variety, investigating different qualities of illumination, sources and directions of light. In still-life he might sit an object in its own shadow, by setting a lamp directly above. Or he creates a low, dramatic “footlight,” stretching shadows above the main feature. He might have illumination coming from behind, through a window.60 James emphasizes the extent to which Nicholson was trying to do very difficult visual effects, which often, in turn, set a puzzle for the observer of the finished painting. And Schwartz and Campbell note, among many other relevant connections that Nicholson had with dramatic production and costuming, that Nicholson had experimented with stage illumination during his art school days.61 Nicholson’s acute interest in the effects of light and shadow, while unique, sits within an era that had more hands-on experience than most of us do with such things as art photography, tableaux vivants, shadow puppetry, and amateur home theatricals. Ordinary citizens also had much experience of illusionism in pantomime transformation and in melodramas, such as the long-running Henry Irving play, The Bells, which Schwartz notes as a play from which Nicholson habitually quoted, possibly to tease Max Beerbohm who later lambasted an attempt to revive it.62,63 Although Nicholson’s uses of light and shadow are varied, in some of his pictures, the lighting adds a narrative effect. The portrait of “The Earl of Plymouth and Family” (1908), for example, which has many unusual features—the family is scattered front to back in a large drawing room, with the father in a forward position in shadow—invites speculation, as well as simply considerable visual interest. The shadow is hard not to take metaphorically. Do these people have a family secret? A family curse? What can their relationship to one another be? This is not one of Edvard Munch’s shadows (see, for example,

76 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Puberty), where anyone can see what the painter is getting at in a symbolic way. Instead, it seems to flutter on the edge of a narrative or (like some of Munch’s other paintings) be a scene from a play. When we consider the extent to which Nicholson animates Williams’ Velveteen Rabbit and Skin Horse by the use of flickering light and shadow, the movement into picture book seems like a logical next step.64 A mark of difference between Nicholson’s illustrations to Velveteen Rabbit and those of later, usually banal, illustrators is that he does not animate the toy Rabbit and Horse as fantasy characters nor the live rabbits as talking fantasy animals. The pictures are of ordinary toys, still as real toys are still—alive only in the imagination. The placement of light and shadow highlight and interpret the features that are of interest to the narrative—how is the Rabbit taking in what the Horse is saying? How does a shabby stuffed bunny interact with Nature outdoors, where its shadow is cast importantly on the grass before it, but the sunlight reveals its inadequacy to the live rabbits? How can we know the Rabbit’s heart is breaking? Joseph traces the more profound evolution in the tale from inside to outside lighting that parallels the maturation of the rabbit, strengthening the story: “evoking a dynamic reciprocity between the developing self and the world, asserting an active engagement.”65 Nicholson’s ability to use light and shadow in such a sophisticated and moving way in the picture books helps to explain why the illustrations for the children’s stories in the 1920s have such importance in the career of an artist who could do so many things so well. They seem to have a kindly wisdom that is not so directly revealed in his other work. The children’s literature of the period used shadow, as every era does, even without new inventions or ubiquitous live theater, to create atmosphere. Chris Van Allsburg, for example, is often cited for his unusual illumination in our own (Nicholson’s Judd Farm brings him a bit to mind). From the fin-de-siècle, however, we remember the startling shadow effects in N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations to Treasure Island, the frightening silhouettes of the conspirators on the cave walls when Tom Sawyer and Becky are lost, and the nocturnal scenes, already mentioned, in The Jungle Book. There is an additional aspect of shadows, which constitute the direct relationship to fantasy that the idea of illusion in theater represents. Schwartz notes Peter Pan’s shadow.66 The shadows we remember from The Child’s Garden of Verses (“All the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp,/With the black night overhead.”) have transformed into malignant creatures or an easily metamorphosed friend (“My Shadow”). Sara Crewe’s banquet hall evolves in a candlelit garret; in E. Nesbit’s Enchanted Castle a whole shadowy garden, illuminated by bicycle lamps, comes to life at night. The Rat and Mole see shadows change to enchantment as the moon rises and Pan plays his pipes. In these cases, the uncertainty that comes from being deprived of sensory information leaves a window for the imaginative to slip in. There is a further kind of visual magic, however, that also leads the way into fantasy.

William Nicholson • 77 Marguerite Steen’s introduction to her biography of Nicholson begins with an early childhood memory that he must have described to her: Nobody knew, either, about the magic. That happened when one was tucked up for one’s afternoon rest. It was a magic made up of the soft, enclosed silence, hardly disturbed by the humming of a mower across the lawn, or May (too old to be put to bed in the afternoon) thumping downstairs and being shrilly hushed by Nurse: “Sh-h-h! Master Willy’s having his nap.” Such sounds seemed very far away, on the edge of the magic that was taking place on the ceiling overhead. Light refraction—camera obscura—such words meant nothing to the occupant of the cot. There on the ceiling, minutely reflected, was the gardener, bending over the flowerbeds, were the ladies coming to call on Mother with card-cases in their gloved hands, was the errand boy, swinging his basket and whistling on his way from the kitchen; there, on certain precious afternoons, was the old woman with the one-legged hurdy-gurdy, which had an explosion of red satin in the middle of its front panel.67 This effect is camera obscura, as Steen notes. There must have been a pinhole in the shutter or shade of Nicholson’s bedroom window that looked down over the front of the house and allowed the images of visitors and workers to pass through upside-down to his ceiling. Much has been written about the camera obscura, by Michel Foucault, David Hockney, and others, but its significance to the late Victorian population—and to Nicholson—is contradictory. Foucault’s points are applicable to the Age of Reason: the camera reduces the three-dimensional to two-dimensional, and it strips the image of the sensory qualities that might deceive the mind: one can, therefore, know the subject more rationally and truly. Because the image only appears in a particular place, the “camera” controls the image. By creating the actual “box” that the spectator must stand inside in order to see the reflection—one can further control the experience.68 The issue of manipulating the way that the spectator sees an image seems to speak to one side of Nicholson. Most astute commentators on Nicholson’s work remark on his experimentation with visual perception: how simplified can one be, and still create a three-dimensional effect? Which is the essential element that turns something fl at into life? That turns something small into a vast acreage? 69 Nicholson was concerned with the frontiers of perception and how we see, and illusion was central to his love of painting. To leave the natural world behind would have been to abandon the pleasure he took in solving this kind of problem. The second view, however, is visionary rather than rational. The Victorians loved camera obscura rooms, which were placed on holiday wharfs and in parks and places of public amusement. Eleanor Farjeon, for example, describes her early Margate experience (probably about mid-1880s):

78 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde The Jetty! There are Mites in Cheese through the Microscope, and there’s the Camera Obscura. Papa says, “I’ll blow my nose,” and Mama takes you inside where it is all dark, and you stare on the queer pale round table, and see the pier and what you have left on it outside. And there, coming towards you, is Papa, blowing his nose like he said he would; and he smiles and waves his hand at you, and walks off the table.70 The issue here is primarily enjoyment but not analytical enjoyment. The reasons why a small hole can produce a kind of moving picture image are not easily explained. They do not allow of quick mastery. They are also irrelevant—as, for example, Kipling’s Brushwood Boy dismisses the adult who tries to explain the stage illusion known as “Pepper’s Ghost,” a technique featured in contemporary Disney parks. The grown-up was “just saying things.”71 For the Brushwood Boy and for G.K. Chesterton, that the illusion was the means to an imaginative experience was the issue. The moving pieces of wood that crisscrossed in pantomime were not real waves, but they were “the sea.”72 The magic mirrors of the era—Max Beerbohm’s, which miniaturized things; Dr. Jekyll’s, which revealed his transformed psyche; the Japanese fairytale mirror, which showed a daughter her dead mother’s loving face; the picture of Dorian Gray—are giving poetic, symbolic information but not interacting with the scientific. Chesterton’s commentary is relevant because he raised the kind of question that some who love Nicholson’s work also ponder: what did he mean by “magic”?73 Is this “let’s pretend” or is it vision?

A Young Nobleman Surveys the City and Clever Bill Nicholson’s painting closest to fairytales, arguably, is A Young Nobleman Surveys the City (1910). The nobleman, in historic fancy dress, posed proudly with a long walking stick, is seen from a ¾ view with his head turned to view the city. It would be a fine illustration for Oscar Wilde’s “Happy Prince,” seen from a point of view—apparently—roughly even with the figure, who stands a little closer to the edge of his pedestal or cliff. The “king of the castle” pose supplies the psychology for the figure. In a moment, though, one notices a part of a china sugar bowl-like object on the right edge of the picture and notes that the blue and white checked crumpled material on the “ground” is probably an item of wearing apparel, and ones sees that the nobleman is a fancy china ornament on a mantel or table.74 The gleam of reflection on his coat and cane makes this clearer, although the texture of the canvas is pronounced in the painting, and the illusion of hard reflective surfaces is uncanny. The “city” the nobleman surveys is either a street scene that the viewer (and nobleman) see through a window glass or a painting propped up against the table with reflective glass in the frame, not a misty twilight scene observed outdoors, as the first glance suggested. The “proof” of a reflective surface being involved is that the painter

William Nicholson • 79

Figure 3.2 William Nicholson. A Young Nobleman Surveys the City © Desmond Banks.

is also dimly reflected in the mirror to the left of the nobleman, wearing a white collar, with a cigarette in his mouth, sketching the scene.75 This reflection, more than Nicholson’s other reflection experiments or those of Velázquez or Manet seems to belong to childhood because its effect is to animate the inanimate figure and to capture the moment (in our minds at least) when the toy comes alive. The juxtaposition of the painter’s front (much lower and just slightly larger) and the figure’s front make it seem as though they are facing each other, but they aren’t. The aristocrat in fancy clothes confronts the working bloke; the living being confronts the artifact; the man and the figurine appear nearly the same

80 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde size. That the first (false) appearance co-exists with the discovered reality is the first of the compelling juxtapositions, as is the idea that the “artificial” man has more solidity or reality than the human in this drama, and that both are equally “alive” on a flat canvas 32 × 24 cm. If we think about Nicholson’s Clever Bill, the “perfect” picture book, we can see some similar ideas at work.76 For example, the lack of eye contact with the figures in the “nobleman” picture is echoed in most of Nicholson’s portraits and also in the illustrations. The figures are objects of our gaze, but—as Schwartz has noted—in Nicholson’s hands this treatment seems to reserve some privacy or secrets to the sitter.77 Beerbohm’s “A Defense of Cosmetics” ironically defended the painter’s right to “prod the soul with his paint-brush,” but Nicholson appears to have consciously avoided doing this, or, at least refrained from peering into people’s eyes as one might “a barometer.”78 In Clever Bill the characters invariably have downcast eyes because they are writing or packing or bowing or otherwise engaged in activity. The interaction of living person and china ornament is echoed in the picture book because Clever Bill is a toy, a soldier doll with a Busby and with cymbals on his hands, one of playthings that Mary is packing to take on a visit. The “surprise” about Bill, however, is the opposite of that in the “nobleman” picture: not that he is inanimate but that he is alive. When Mary accidentally leaves Bill behind, we suddenly find him on page 11 shedding tears onto the floor. And thereafter he leaps up, chases the train through the Downs to Mary’s Dover destination, and presents her with a bouquet. As Nathalie op de Beeck, who gives a close reading of the story, notes, earlier pictures of Bill must then be re-examined.79 Every toy in the story has to be re-examined, in fact, for hints that their poses may not be those of inanimate objects but intentional expressions of living toys. Like the nobleman, however, Bill (though a toy) is the most prominent character in his work: he appears on most of the pages—14 of 23—while Mary appears on only six, even though his “living” quality is unknown until halfway through the book. Two related issues contribute to the interest and excellence of the story. One, as in the nobleman picture, is the ambiguity of size. Bill is small enough to stand as a tiny tin-soldier figure next to a letter printed in the text when we first meet him. He is doll-sized when he is being squished into Mary’s suitcase. But then he is big enough to run down a road at approximately the same size as an adult would be (measured against the two frolicking dogs), and he returns back to a large doll-size at the end. Of course, the issue of his ability to race a train to Dover is also a mystery, even though the train’s speed is being joked about.80 This changeable-size quality is, Schwartz asserts, characteristic of the age.81 In children’s literature we might note that a character’s changing size within a book is characteristic of de la Mare’s midget in Memoirs of a Midget, as well as of Toad in Wind in the Willows (who has to be able to drive a stolen human automobile, as well as share a boat with the little creatures living in the riverbank). Alice’s perplexities about her changeable size and pos-

William Nicholson • 81 sibly changed identity in the 1860s may have set the era thinking on this topic, in a literary way, but Manet’s distortion of presentation is also an antecedent. The issue of an observer or the presence of a human in the doll world is more complex in Clever Bill than in the nobleman picture, but signals the same kind of pleasant ambiguity. In the first place, Mary’s world is something of a puzzle. She says, “O! I must take Apple Grey,” but the book has no information about whom she might be speaking to, if anyone. Perhaps she is talking aloud in play but maybe not. And no other person appears—she has a father who gave her the “box”—but he has no presence in the book. No one escorts her to the train or otherwise appears to be taking care of her. The real oddity, however, lies in her mysterious invisible presence between the pictures of the center section. The suitcase packing episode, in which the toys are shown as still-life arrangements in a sequence of four pages, are labeled “fi rst she packed it this way and/then that way and/then she packed them that way and/then this.” The suitcase has a different jumbled arrangement in each picture. But we don’t see Mary make the change. She is in the “gutter” between the sequential pictures, having to be imagined by the reader. Her point of view is there but not her image.82 Although the downs, the little Queen Victoria print, the horse, the gleam on the teapot, the shoes, and the sunbonnet on Mary are familiar subjects from Nicholson paintings and prints (as is, in short, Nicholson’s ability to lend intimacy to inanimate domestic belongings—a glove, shoes, things sitting on a table, food), the combination of Mary and her belongings is notably different. Nicholson portraits most often depend upon a pose of a casual nature—no symbolic items or other props representing character or importance. On the other hand, gloves and shoes, by themselves in some still lifes, show affection, some humorous empathy—but they are telling their story alone, evoking a bit of narrative, perhaps, but not spelling it out. Mary’s possessions, on the other hand, are used within the Clever Bill story to tell us many things about her. In a book with minimal text, an innovation and milestone in the creation of the “continuous” picture book style, much of what we know about the little girl is developed from what she wants to bring on her trip to her aunt’s house. The “arrangement” or pattern of the story is important—as indeed is true from page to page, as colors repeat each other, as oblongs and ovals, succeed each other, and outdoor and indoor scenes do, as well.83 But the actual objects in the still lifes are also meaningful, as signs we are meant to read to explain everything about Mary’s age (young enough to pack toys rather than frocks in her suitcase and to think she might need a fur mitten at the beach), loyalty (she loves Lucky Susan, although she has lost an arm), economic condition (these are modest toys, some of them broken), personality, and preferences. Here, in the children’s book, the portrait specifically utilizes possessions to develop character.

82 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde

Figure 3.3 William Nicholson. Heinemann’s poster for Clever Bill © Desmond Banks.

The Pirate Twins is like Clever Bill in introducing a “new way” of reading, a kind that insists that the reader be able to assemble the tiny fragments of text and the consecutive but momentary images on each page into a balanced composite creation.84 The “new way” of reading was recognized by its initial audience, who saw that it was a book that would amaze adults as well as appeal to children. Barbara Bader notes that the use of a horizontal picture of equal weight on every page was a rarity, but the way the words are distributed “singly and in short phrases with lots of connectives and punctuates very sparingly—

William Nicholson • 83 chiefly a dash here and there—so that he never comes to a stop even when he has to emphasize a point or explain this and that but contrives to keep the story moving along” is revolutionary. “The debut of the running text, spare and suggestive, fluid, suspenseful, a form of writing unique to picturebooks.”85 The “continuous” fragmented form is a “modern” aspect of the book, which demands—in spite of its simplicity—the new skills that readers had to bring to any Modernist works at their initial inception. Maurice Sendak has said that the book was a notable influence on Where the Wild Things Are.86 Like Clever Bill, The Pirate Twins is created by casual drawings with Nicholson’s hand-drawn cursive lettering—no print at all, as Bader notes—a technique permitted by Nicholson’s use of lithography. The unity of overall book design entirely in the artist’s control suggests roots in the Arts and Crafts movement, or the related Art Nouveau, which applied this unifying principle to domestic space. It looks forward to the later application of Bauhaus design principles to picture books. Both Nicholson books are specifically created to be reproduced by machinery, but they also hark back to the wood engravings of the 1890s, with their premium on artisan work. The surprises, however, are real enough. The Pirate Twins begins with the child, Mary, finding a scallop shell in the surf, which, by the third picture (when we are able to look inside it—and it has gotten much bigger, relatively speaking) is shown to contain the Pirate Twins, two black childlike figures with minimal facial detail (Nicholson’s model for the twins was a doll made out of silk socks with small stitches for eyes and mouth, but the twins are not toys in the story). They wear antique pirate costumes with black and white horizontal striping, gold earrings, large buckled belts, and stocking caps. Mary, with a bunchy maternal bottom apparently caused by stuffing her dress into her underclothes in order to wade, takes them firmly by the hand and leads them home, where she starts bringing them up properly. She engages in bathing, feeding, teaching various lessons, and otherwise “playing house” with these unexpectedly encountered creatures that had risen (in the endpapers) like Venus from the surf. Their intractableness to domestic management is subtly evoked in the pictures first, then in the narrative, until the moment when they steal a boat and sail away but always come back for Mary’s birthday—a particularly festive sunlit picture with sun streaming in the window, curtains blowing, gulls sailing by, and a fine cake. The range of interesting details runs from the slight to the profound. These are not the first pirates that Nicholson drew, for example. His first “pirate,” if Steen was correct, may have been his father defending the family home against Election Day rioters with a Turkish cutlass.87 But there was a pirate/robber in the Alphabet, pirates and a pirate captain in Nicholson’s costume designs for the premiere performance of James Barrie’s Peter Pan, and pirates in his illustrations for Polly (the sequel to the Beggar’s Opera, published by Heinemann in 1923 with Nicholson’s designs). Of course, there are many turn-of-the-century pirates (St. Nicholas had Howard Pyle’s pirates, Gilbert & Sullivan had

84 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde pirates, and Treasure Island had pirates (and W.E. Henley [who did the London Types verse] is always noted as the real-life model for Long John Silver).88 Like Dumas characters, pirates had raffish and glorious clothing and represented a form of heroic adventure literature that Nicholson enjoyed, which was in the process of becoming “children’s” literature.89 Nicholson gave these pirates the initials of his oldest sons. The costumes, vital to this identity, have a special twist. Nicholson’s “dressing-up” box was a feature of his life and his studio (and, indeed, his own clothes were a costume; he painted in formal wear, had polka dots where most people don’t, and exciting braces of the sort that would overset Piglet). But the Pirate Twins, though urged to do so by Mary, DON’T dress up. The illustration on page 10 above“She taught them how to dress” shows one pirate retying the back of his Twin’s pirate clothes, while he pulls off a frilly blue garment that must have been Mary’s idea. The only items they add to their original apparel from the dress-up box are two curved swords that accompany them thereafter (and on the cover), which enhance rather than disguise their essential characters. Second, the still lifes of food in The Pirate Twins take on narrative life. They are funny initially because Mary’s spoon sticks down into page 6 with white food on it, while the pirate twins look at it suspiciously or with a certain lack of cooperation. This is probably because they are far too old (though small) to be fed by hand with a spoon—Mary is infantilizing them for her play. But the three subsequent pictures show a large, rich-looking cake or pudding and another filled pastry; a platter containing a large crab with great claws, a pot with a lobster snarling from the top, and a stack of shellfish; and a third with garlic, bottles of wine, filled shells, and probably hot sauce (which turns up later), all of which have more appeal to them. In other words, the foods in the house Mary lives in are startlingly inappropriate for the “make-believe” very young, and, as in Clever Bill, she is caught carrying out firm nursery routines in a home where apparently no one is doing this for her—what is SHE eating, one wonders? The silliest aspect of the food, though, is that it parodies some of Nicholson’s most attractive still-life paintings. Merlin James in “Words about Painting” mentions that the “many knives” of Nicholson’s still lifes speak of “peeling and slicing.”90 It is true that there is a narrative aspect evoked by the inclusion of manifold pieces of cutlery or scissors—someone has cut the flowers, sliced the bread, will spread some butter, polish the silver, and quarter the pears. There is a charm and a manifesto in such little corners of domestic tables and rooms. Charm because the arrangements look as though they could belong in anyone’s home that likes nice jugs, flowers, and a wholesome tea. Manifesto because Nicholson has chosen to put some of his greatest work into these objects. But in The Pirate Twins the cutlery’s narrative possibilities are realized. In the first place, it is horrifying to see the little hands snaking past carving knives to capture provisions off the adult-sized tables. Clearly, children should be guarded against exposure to this kind of danger. The satisfying and fresh still life has been turned into a symbol of irresponsible parent-

William Nicholson • 85 ing! But, secondly, these are pirates! The large cake has a vicious serrated knife propped against it, and the missing piece of cake flanked by crossed pirate bones. The text on this page is “on this” (she fed them/on this/that/and the other), with no indication of the unexpectedly dramatic pictures above. The bones and knives, though, are telling us—before there is any textual indication—that pirates are pirates. And that there is a collective will that will not tolerate nursery life very long. It is fair to note that the blackness of the twins has made some late twentieth-century commentators nervous. Sometimes, as in the case of Schwartz, a consideration of Nicholson’s partly African heritage defines the reading.91 In the unlikely event that the reader feels that pirates should feel grateful and happy for Mary’s haphazard attempt to colonize them, their rebellion might be construed as pejorative commentary on racial difference. This is to ignore the humor in the book, however, which is directed at Mary, and to ignore the book’s attempt (described below) to gain the reader’s complicity in the twins’ activities. Mary can also be seen as an addled Aunt Polly to the twins’ Tom Sawyer in the “bad boy” tradition contemporaneous with Nicholson’s young manhood. Or (closer to the truth, probably), a bigger little girl co-opting smaller children’s services to play games that she can direct. The narrative, however, requires the twins to be pirates.

Figure 3.4 William Nicholson. [She Taught Them]—How to Dance. The Pirate Twins (page 14) © Desmond Banks.

86 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Most of the pictures in The Pirate Twins are action pictures of the twins pursuing various activities instigated by Mary, interpreted—in some cases—in unusual ways: “how to play,” for example, shows the twins playing bagpipes while striding through the surf on a beach. The assumption is that while Mary is determined to teach, the twins— who apparently already know how to do many things—are seeking for clues about how to resume their old lives. Their very professional observations at the globe, for example, look as though they are planning how to escape—to return to the Caribbean (where people may be of African descent and where pirates prey). Their running-away note, though a bit misspelled (it is spelled as Mary’s is spelled in Clever Bill with the “o” before the “r” in “from”), is considerably more advanced that “what the letter S stands for”—which Mary “taught” them. Did Mary actually get them far enough in reading to be able to write a note? Or are they ALL playing “school” or other imaginative games, pretending to ignorance that they don’t have in order to accommodate Mary’s need to playact being a motherly teacher? Finally, there is a real departure from Clever Bill, and, indeed, most of Nicholson’s portraits: about halfway through the book, the pirates begin to look directly at the reader. The bagpipe picture is important to how we see the book, because it is the fi rst (or possibly second) picture in which the twins have evidently discovered that there is an audience for their actions. Up until this frame, they are feverishly absorbed in their activities, and we spy on them from the viewer’s usual invisible position. In contrast, in the bagpipe picture, they have evidently found us. It is hard to know when a character looking out of a frame is involved whether the character has become an object of gaze or whether the character is the gazer. In this case, I think that the twins are taking control, because something sets them free from Mary’s spell. The next picture is the picture of open defiance—“but they didn’t care.” In the lozenge-shaped close-up, the twins, seen from the waist up, have their tongues sticking out, their hands clasped behind their backs, and their dress-up swords swaggering as they stride—and they are looking at us. From this moment, to my mind, they are conscious that they can shape the story themselves; it is this moment which, for me, invalidates a perception of the story as one about black as alien. We have already been prepared by Mary’s misinterpretation of the twins (or deliberate attempt to make them babies for her own imaginative needs) to perceive the twins’ point of view that has been previously present in the pictures, not the text. From this moment, they recapture their lives with our complicity. For most of the rest of the pictures of their amusing defiance—sucking thumbs, playing dominoes in bed, stealing a boat—one or the other twin is conscious of our eyes or meeting our gaze. In the homesick picture, for example—the twins have run away, but they miss their “home”—one twin actually turns around to look at us while crying. Although it might be fanciful to consider at this juncture the two soldiers’

William Nicholson • 87 gazes in Velázquez’s Surrender at Breda, those selective eyes meeting ours cause a jolt and start an interior reconstruction of the event. Our emotions are involved with the twins’ lives. And what this means for the story is, once again, a matter requiring some thought. Were the twins, like some other children, content to be Mary’s creative playmates, even though the game was silly from their perspective—until they knew someone else saw them doing it? Are they now ashamed to be seen playing with this little girl? They act in a self-conscious way, it seems. And what their position seems to require is getting on with pirating. Perhaps, because we have seen the deviance in their ostensibly obedient behavior—the knives, the oysters, and the pirate swords—we might be seen as authority figures backing up Mary’s nursery views with more than Mary’s knowledge? Because, however, the reader is presumably always rooting for the twins and amused by their activities, is it perhaps our comradeship (critical mass) that makes them decide a rebellion is possible? Either way, the twins leave for their own lives and destiny, enlarging them to include Mary’s birthday and to miss her when she is not there but not enough to agree to be played with forever. Nicholson’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth Banks, considered the Pirate Twins to be self-portraits of her father.92 In The Pirate Twins Nicholson seems to be more nearly opening himself to his child audience than he did in many works that he created for adults. Nicholson’s lack of commentary about his paintings encourages many of his critics (even those ignoring the children’s books) to try to capture the man behind work that they fi nd satisfying and fresh, partly because his technique appears to raise philosophical questions. For example, writers about Velázquez sometimes feel justified in saying that his ability to work so dexterously with illusion points to a sensibility that denied meaning— everything is an illusion; there is no reality.93 One cannot say, however, that noticing that the eye is easily deceived is necessarily the same as saying that no point of view carries authority. In Chesterton’s mysteries the visually misleading scene is a staple, for example, but Father Brown’s ability to remain undeceived is based upon his superior spiritual understanding. In our own day, Diana Wynne Jones’ fantasy tales continuously mislead readers and characters by her sleight of hand, but her “solutions” are based solidly upon family, community, about recognizing the divine and the hero within. Nicholson’s work seems attuned to similar influences, perhaps because of his boyhood reading. As Chesterton (again) noted, in connection with books for boys, We want to realize that the instinct of day dream and adventure is a high spiritual and moral instinct, that it requires neither dilution nor excuse, that it has been the mother of all great travelers and missionaries and knights errant and the patroness of all the brave.94

88 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Nicholson hated war, but his picture books are narratives of gallantry and adventure. In them, reconciliation and joy exist. In them, the action plot is preserved into the new century. Nicholson was one of the men who wrote for and with particular family children. The Pirate Twins and Clever Bill were written for his second family and grandchildren, and the physical separation from those children left at least three other books undone. Like Tolkien, Grahame, Kipling, and Milne, then, the picture books were a kind of collaboration with this adoring and beloved crowd, as he claimed that his portraits also were. Mary’s and the fellows’ personas benefit from this eye-to-eye rather than top-down view. They are resilient and selfconfident characters. They know, or think they know, what to do. Nicholson’s World War I picture, The Belgian of Tomorrow, for the King Albert’s Book benefit shows a similar child in tragic circumstances.95 In the nearly monochrome composition, the little boy in the damaged and barren room lifts a rifle and bayonet in his hands. The reddish hue of the pool of liquid on the floor in front of him and the shadowed wall to the figure’s left, reinforce the gravity of the picture, but it is not a picture of helplessness and passive appeal. There is shock in recognizing the inappropriate juxtaposition of a child in wooden shoes with a military rifle, but the point of the picture is that the future will be altered by the boy, who has been changed by the invasion of his country. Nicholson’s work inspires love in many people, and the love extends to the artist whose eye and emotions were engaged in the ways that he shows us: we may not know him, but we feel that he is someone we would like. Merlin James notes in “Going Along with the Light,” Nicholson walked these landscapes and lived among these objects in youth and old age, in all frames of mind, in love, in mourning.96 The somber tone (and Nicholson’s often somber palette) is balanced by the self-assurance of a Golden Age child. The objects and the natural landscapes are the encounters that bring pleasure, noticing and painting them is the thing to do and keeping moving is the thing to do. And transcendence can happen, as well as sorrow. Nicholson’s Modernism contributed most strongly to the children’s literature and culture market, although both An Alphabet and the picture books encapsulate materials from older traditions, as well as using new technologies and pointing to future ones. Their manufacture for the mass audience has made Nicholson’s print work and picture book drawings more accessible than almost any of his 900-odd paintings and, thus, a source of influence in this field. Reproducibility—one of the mantras of his youth and time—may yet provide a proper forum for his privately owned paintings, as the originality and lasting qualities of his vision can now be better seen with improvements in color reproduction. But he came to children’s literature, in the picture books, first.

Chapter Four Paula Modersohn-Becker Someone Who Has a Long Road in Front of Her Doesn’t Run Someone who has a long road in front of her doesn’t run. Paula Modersohn-Becker (July 6, 1902)

Paula Modersohn-Becker was a German avant-garde painter who left the art colony, Worpswede, outside Bremen to seek the wider world of Paris. She was one of the thousands of young people in her era who flocked to the cosmopolitan art scene to receive art instruction at the famous art schools, compete (when possible) for the prizes that could make a reputation, and fi nd their artistic potential.1 In her lifetime, she did not generally show her work, and her first favorable reviews came just before her early death. But the posthumous publication of her journals and letters, which showed her dedication to art, her difficulty in combining her longing to be a Modern painter with the roles of wife and mother, and her love of life made her widely known.2 The most famous letters are those to her friend Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote a famous and mysterious requiem in her honor.3 Her artistic legacy, however, was somewhat obscured by the critical interest in the details of her marriage to Otto Modersohn, a Worpswede painter, whom she left before her final year in Paris and with whom she reconciled before returning home. Her death of an embolism following childbirth complicated her achievement for many; for example, Adrienne Rich’s poem “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff” discusses some of the conflicts arising out of ModersohnBecker’s pregnancy.4 Now, however, she is called one of the most important German painters of the twentieth century. Her centenary exhibitions in 2007 to 2008 were an opportunity for scholars to reassess the older scholarship, to publish an expanded collection of the letters and journals, and to otherwise try to fit a difficult-to-define personality and canon of art into categories that 89

90 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde seem in the twenty-first century to be more accurate. The largest of the exhibitions was entitled Paula in Paris.5 Like the other painters in this volume, Modersohn-Becker was not a beginner when she came to Paris in 1900. She had already had eight years of formal art instruction. Building on her mother’s encouragement, she started art lessons in London (1892), when she was 16. She was staying with a wealthy aunt in order to be exposed to another culture and to domestic arts, and her aunt provided this opportunity. She received further lessons in Bremen in 1893–1895, during the time in which she also attended the Janson Lehrerinnen-seminar (teaching/normal school for women) because her father desired to see all his children, girls and boys, self-supporting. Although her immediate family became less prosperous, a small inheritance, the generosity of her extended family, and, eventually, her marriage to a successful painter gave her further chances to extend her art education. In 1896 she began a two-year art course in Berlin, and in 1898 to 1899 she had lessons with painter Fritz Mackensen at Worpswede, living among artists who were attempting to get back to Natural roots. Her husband and most of the artists and writers who were important in Modersohn-Becker’s life lived there at least periodically. Modersohn financed her study trips after their marriage in May of 1901. Unlike most of the young people—and other artists in this book—who flocked to Paris, Modersohn-Becker’s tuition there was lengthy. She stayed six months during the spring of 1900, returned during February and March 1903, from February–April 1905, and from February 1906 to March 1907, her anno mirabilis. During every stay Modersohn-Becker took drawing lessons; indeed, even in her last year she actually made a formal application to the École des Beaux-Arts— submitting work and credentials—in order to take more lessons at a school that would not allow beginners to take life-drawing classes but set them to copying casts of classical works. Various theories about this prolonged student status have been ventured, including the assumption that it speaks to personal insecurity. I believe, however, that it has to do with her absorption of the innovative educational methods that she was exposed to in the Janson Lehrerinnen-seminar in Bremen.6 Because Modersohn-Becker’s life was short, it was at one time commonplace to decry her father’s insistence on this “fallback” schooling. But although Modersohn-Becker wanted to be a Modern painter, not a teacher, she was a thinker, and she evidently took some portions of her curriculum seriously: There are many sessions which are anything but interesting. Nevertheless, they do direct our attention to all sorts of things that please me a great deal. I can return to them and study them thoroughly on my own. And then I discuss them with Anna Streckewald and we have wonderful discussions.7 The influence of theorists such as Johann Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel on nineteenth-century educational ideals can be seen in Modersohn-Becker’s fervent views of motherhood, familiar in children’s literature and public dis-

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 91 course in that era. More radically, they can be seen, as well, both in the forces drawing young people to Paris in that era, as well as in the methods and the aspiration that set her apart.

Secrets of Nature and Creativity Modersohn-Becker’s artwork was an exploration of the truths of Nature, as well as an ongoing discovery of the way to best convey those secrets to the world. The Nature closest to children’s culture is that portrayed in her many portraits of mothers and children. Modersohn-Becker loved rural beauty at Worpswede’s country location outside of Bremen.8 She celebrated spring, bought and arranged and wove garlands of flowers with abandon, and frequently had to dart out of the Paris streets to grass and trees for refreshment in the sun. Motherhood, moreover, was something like a religion to her; children and mothers were not only favorite subjects, they were the source of fervent emotion. “Truth” in Nature for Modersohn-Becker was something like the Darwinian overwhelming life force of the decadents, but she persisted in believing that Nature was full of “supreme joy” rather than a terrible, bullying mistake. She is, in this belief, at one with Froebel, for whom the harmony of God’s universe was fundamental, if somewhat unorthodoxly conceived. But for the potential artist, her era’s inspirational adult reading suggested that while faith in Nature was vital for creativity, living without the belief in an orthodox heaven of rewards and punishments and without the conventional definitions of sin and virtue was much harder than Froebel implied. Friedrich Nietzsche, whom she studied and discussed in the 1890s, insists that only “the Strong” look at the truths of Nature and laugh: Life is a well of joy; but for those out of whom an upset stomach speaks, which is the father of melancholy, all wells are poisoned. To gain knowledge is a joy for the lion-willed! . . . To will liberates, for to will is to create: thus I teach. And you shall learn solely in order to create.9 Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), the Belgian Nobel Laureate whose Wisdom and Destiny (1898) she ordered and read during her Paris stay in 1900, puts more faith in evolution to effect positive change than Nietzsche does. But he similarly states that personal effort and faith in Nature is the appropriate stance for a person who intends not to give up his moral existence to someone else but to accomplish “the task for which we were created.” 10 But if all who may count themselves happy were to tell, very simply, what it was that brought happiness to them, the others would see that between sorrow and joy the difference is but as between a gladsome, enlightened acceptance of life and a hostile, gloomy submission.11

92 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Many things happen that seem unjust to us; but of all the achievements of reason there has been none so helpful as the discovery of the loftier reason that underlies the misdeeds of Nature. It is from the slow and gradual vindication of the unknown force that we deemed at first to be pitiless, that our moral and physical life has derived its chief prop and support.12 In short, as his translator states, “Everything that exists fills him with wonder, because of its existence, and of the mysterious force that is in it.”13 In Modersohn-Becker’s portraits, Nature has to be seen clearly: it is a force, not a sentimental concept, and it means death and illness and deformity, as well as flowers and spring. But she insists that Nature’s whole has to be embraced: Being true to Nature means, more or less, creating work that also inspires others with joy based upon what really exists. Conception of a child in her world is sacred, not only in the Christian Annunciation. Modersohn-Becker treats it, as her friend Rilke insisted one should, as “bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and understanding.” Rilke added, to the young poet in 1903–1908, “ If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery—which the world is filled with, even in its smallest Things–, could bear it, endure it, more solemnly, feel how terribly heavy it is, instead of taking it lightly. If only they could be more reverent toward their own fruitfulness. . . .”14 Modersohn-Becker’s reverence for creating life seems much like her reverence for the development of her creative artistic powers. Her loving letters to Otto even after their marriage (May 25, 1901) suggest that she has a hierarchy of intimacy that she is building, step by step, for which procreation will be the apex: Nov. 7, 1902 How remarkable that this separation makes our love so jubilant. When you return you shall have everything, everything. I shall lay everything in your hands. Except for the final thing, the most precious, the jewel—I shall wrap that in a silken cloth and bury it in the earth and plant a little flower above it and in May, when my flower blossoms in fragrant bliss, then I shall gently lift the cloth and together in devotion we shall gaze upon the holy of holies. When I write and think about that my heart beats from the happiness to come and my breathing grows louder, and I hear the beating of wings over my head. I kiss your hand.15 Clara Westhoff’s disclosure (and Otto Modersohn’s later admission) that Modersohn-Becker was grieved that the marriage had not been consummated when she left for Paris for the final time (some five years after their marriage) has made her sixth-anniversary portrait the focus of critical interest because her bare abdomen swells out in the picture, framed by her hands. Alexander Sturgis, Rupert Christiansen, Lois Oliver, and Michael Wilson in their catalog for

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 93 the 2006 exhibition Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century, provide valuable context for the painting. The pose duplicates that of the self-portrait of Victor Emil Janssen (1828), from the Kuntshalle, Hamburg, based upon a pose of Albrecht Dürer that both Janssen and Modersohn-Becker knew. Thus, Modersohn-Becker is exhibiting herself in a personal “laid bare” pose taken from male creative artists, with the striking addition of a symbol of “explicitly female creativity.”16 Rilke, who had spent many years discussing the artistic life with Paula when he advised the Young Poet, equated the two: Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely of itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.17 The literature that Modersohn-Becker mentions in her letters and diaries are works about lives lived creatively for Art or Truth in Nature. These works stress the difficulty of overthrowing conventionality to get closer to Nature, and the conventionality that most clearly destroys the artist is domestic life. Jens Peter Jacobsen’s novel Niels Lyhne has a radical poetic hero who manages to die without sending for a priest but who fails miserably by praying when his child is dying. The novel notes that “He had been tempted and had fallen; for it was a fall, a betrayal of himself and his ideal.” “He had not been able to bear life as it was.”18 Modersohn-Becker severely points out to her brother, “He didn’t manage it. But you can.”19 She frequently quotes directly and indirectly from another work, Nobel Laureate Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Sunken Bell (1896), which pursues an identical theme in a play that owes a great deal to the work of Henrik Ibsen, Hans Christian Andersen, and F. de la Motte Fouqué. Towards the end of the play, Heinrich, the bell founder, fails to be true to his knowledge that conventionality caused the death of his deserted wife, and repents. As a result, his bells self-destruct and he dies, crying, “The Sun . . . the Sun . . . draws near! The Night is . . . long!”20 As Nicole Fluhr points out, Ibsen (who was another of Modersohn-Becker’s favorite authors) created women to whom domesticity and childbearing was, at best, disastrous. Nora has to leave the Doll’s House and her children to grow herself. Hedda Gabler commits suicide when she fi nds she is pregnant. Rita Allmer suffers tormenting guilt over her failure to love her children who, eventually, die.21 We can also add Brand’s wife, whose child dies due to her faithfulness to Brand’s higher calling, and who dies, in response, herself. Modersohn-Becker’s wonderful optimism about childbearing and motherhood, while sustaining the confidence that her duty as an artist was to complete her own work, is quite unlike that of these men whose literary work she so admired. She was also able to incorporate death into her young life much

94 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde more easily than, for example, Vincent van Gogh, whose (much more prolific) letters attest to the difficulty of “natural religion” and whose reapers and grain studies are an attempt to find the consolation that she does not appear to need. As such, her life and work appears closer to the optimistic and mystical pedagogical texts by Pestalozzi and Froebel than it does to her later reading.

Mothers and Their Children A substantial amount of Modersohn-Becker’s artistic output from her earliest days at Worpswede to the end of her life consisted in pictures of mothers with their infant children, which makes her a part of the larger public discourse on motherhood pervasive from the late eighteenth century into the twentieth. Modersohn-Becker’s perception of motherhood, as we might expect, is close to that of Anglophone children’s writers influenced by continental sources, although the English discourse about motherhood contains disparate and varied elements, as Claudia Nelson and Ann Sumner Holmes note in their introduction to Maternal Instincts: Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875–1925.22 While we may, for example, safely rule out any interest at all in the “virginal” mode of motherhood extant in English publications, the familiar Victorian perception of “intensely selfless” motherhood, as we will see, is the source of Modersohn-Becker’s admiration. E. Ann Kaplan’s contention in Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (1992) that the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762) had varied but strong influence on maternal discourse in countries outside of France is relevant to Modersohn-Becker’s work, because the mother role in Rousseau’s work is primarily physically demanding attention to an infant’s needs, including his insistence on the importance of maternal breastfeeding.23 The nursing mother, the mother “who fed me from her gentle breast” in the words of Ann Taylor’s “My Mother” (1804/1805), is the mother who became a secular Madonna and icon of submission to the life force in ModersohnBecker’s thinking.24

Ideal Mothers Paula Modersohn-Becker’s desire to draw mothers and children was fostered by the example of Jean-François Millet (whose work, often of French peasants) she admired, or of Fritz Mackensen, her painting instructor when she first came to Worpswede. In her late avant-garde period, the Tahitian Madonnas of Gauguin also are an influence. It would not be true to say, however, that her ideology was identical to those of these painters, or that she embraced Romantic or nostalgic ideals about rural peasant life, as some of the Worpswede painters did. As a woman, she seems to be thinking more

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 95 about mothers, for example, than any advantages enjoyed by rustic people. The Worpeswede peasants were, as she well knew, much more conventional than she was herself, and she was thinking forward, not backward. But it is not necessary to restrict Modersohn-Becker’s influences to images created by nineteenth-century painters. She was also a reader. For example, some standard classics of the nineteenth century, widely available to teacher training students, as well as younger students and their parents, were the literary works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Pestalozzi celebrating domestic life.25 Pestalozzi’s Leonard and Gertrude (1781) and Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea (1796/1797) are different, by the gender of their authors and their nationality, from those of the similarly Rousseau-influenced educators such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and Anna Letitia Barbauld writing for children and parents in late eighteenth-century England, but they share some common ground. The enormous importance of women in connection with the right rearing of children is a theme to be discerned in each, but to what extent this service depends upon female biology—qualities of mind uniquely female, as well as the organs of reproduction—differs, to some extent. Separation of a teacher’s ability from a mother’s inborn sensitivity to nurture is difficult. As Nelson has noted, the Victorian period was one in which “Even for many feminists, . . . women’s reproductive system was their most essential characteristic.”26 In the work of Pestalozzi, the mother is the natural teacher and enjoys unlimited power in family life. Pestalozzi’s novel, Leonard and Gertrude (1781), is a tale that might have suggested the T.H. Arthur story, Ten Nights in a Barroom (1854).27 That is, it is the tale of a village entirely ruined by a tavern that allows men to drink on credit and causes their mental and spiritual degeneration and inability to earn a living. Gertrude, the heroine, saves the town (and her husband and seven children), by pluckily taking the problem to the local squire/magistrate who investigates because he is impressed by Gertrude’s poise and judgment. He removes the illegal dealing, initiates a church building project that he gives to her husband to superintend, and restores prosperity and hope. Gertrude’s children are well brought up, a task she easily manages while pursuing many domestic activities. They cheerfully sing songs to their father about the blessings of peace and home. Although the paternal power of the landowner is notable, Gertrude, wife of an enfeebled and defeatist husband, is a type of female domestic intelligence and strength. Pestalozzi’s early education methods titled How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (1801) and Letters on Education Addressed to Mothers (1803) demonstrate the essential role that Gertrude/ mothers play in children’s mental and spiritual culture. Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea (1796/1797) also was recommended to girls’ and normal school curricula. The epic poem of village life, an enormously popular work in Germany and elsewhere, was an inspiration for other works both in Germany and abroad (Arthur Hugh Clough, for example). Schiller considered it Goethe’s masterpiece.28 Hermann and Doro-

96 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde thea (much more than Faust ) is a very accessible narrative concerned with one day in the life of Hermann, a good son, who fi nds love when he goes to relieve some displaced refugees (who are retreating ahead of the French army). There are two model women in the poem: his mother (he, too, has a ridiculous father) and Dorothea, the refugee girl who agrees to serve his family and becomes his bride. In the story, Hermann’s father has bad values (wants his son to marry money) and doesn’t have the intelligence to see that his son is everything that a loyal and industrious son should be. When poor Hermann goes outside to recover from his father’s abuse, his mother takes his father to task for not recognizing virtue when he sees it: We cannot mould our children as we will. As God has giv’n them, so must we accept And love, and bring them up, as best we may, And suffer them to follow their own bent, One has this quality, another that. Each needs his own, and can be only good And happy in the way that suits him best.29 Every educational reformer noted here has been convinced that parents and teachers cannot add anything to the young person that they teach: children are like plants. They can be cultivated by a teacher/gardener, but one cannot add qualities (nor should one try) to the ones that they already possess. Here, the quality of understanding the son better than the father is given to the female parent, which suggests that mothers have an advantage in childhood education, a point of view emphasized by Froebelians in their turn. Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Mother Carey, when trying to convince a cold and neglectful father that his daughter should be given art instruction, says “Oh! Professor Lord, I am very bold because your wife is not living, and it is women who oftenest see these budding tendencies in children,” endorsing this point of view a century later.30 Dorothea, the potential bride, exemplifies different aspects of the womanhood role. Although she is a young woman, herself, she is clearly in charge of the whole group of refugees—men, women, and children—and is a dearly loved figure. She is a tall, strong girl who kills four or five soldiers with a sword when they attempt to rape her and the other young girls of the group. She shows her good judgment in her questions about Hermann’s parents, when she agrees to join his household as a servant. She is sincere and straightforward in her acknowledgment that she, too, had felt attracted to Hermann during their fi rst conversation. Her discussion of why she should take the servant’s position in his parents’ house, however (though it is the result of a misapprehension on her part), endorses a sacrificial division of duties:

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 97 Let women learn to serve, As circumstances and their state demand. By servitude alone they come to rule, And gain the well deserved authority They then may claim at home. The sister serves Her brother gladly, and her parents too, Her life is spent in running to and fro, Labouring, bearing, doing, setting right For others. And ‘tis well for her, when she Is used to it, and when the hours of night Are to her as the hours of the day, And when she thinks no work too delicate, No needle-point too fine,—when she forgets Herself entirely, giving her whole life For others. As a mother, too, she needs These virtues, when the ailing baby wakes And cries for nourishment, and cares are heaped On suffering. Not twenty men in one Could e’er endure a hardship such as this, Nor is the duty theirs. Yet man should view The lot of woman with due tenderness.31 In a way, Dorothea is in agreement with someone like Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mrs. Mason or Wollstonecraft, herself. Dorothea is rational. She has powerful leadership abilities. She is disciplined and helpful to her neighbors. She is a hard worker. The kind of duties involved, however, are different and the emphasis different. Dorothea is discussing household chores and the physical burden of childrearing responsibilities. The Mothers and Governesses we see in the works of the rational moralists are, like all the followers of Rousseau, taking on an extremely time-consuming activity in rearing children on a minute-by-minute basis. They are not, however, routinely doing physical work for them. Theirs is the mental and spiritual task, and it may be undertaken by those women who are not mothers. The ideals, in fact, contrast the sturdy (yet enlightened) peasantry in the German models, against the middle-class writers who are arguing that women can be entrusted with a rational task hitherto officially denied them. The men are romanticizing simple folk (who are intelligent and show good judgment, as Émile would, “a thinking love”), the others are cultivated women themselves, who, as Mitzi Myers frequently argued, created heroines who have self-discipline and rational education, and can guard and guide childhood to a similar position of female power.32,33 Discussions of the power of mothers over themselves and their well-kept homes, is frequently extended, in England and Germany, to a belief in motherhood as the foundation of the country. Mathilde Lammers was the head of the Jansen Lehrerinnen-seminar during Modersohn-Becker’s tuition there (she left the year that Modersohn-Becker graduated). Her earlier feminist

98 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde work Die Frau. Ihre Stellung und Aufgabe in Haus und Welt appeared when Modersohn-Becker was a year old. In it, she declares [Trans.] In the hands of German mothers lie the fortunes of our nation; may they all be aware of their high task, to raise a vigorous, dutiful, strong-minded, warm-hearted and God-fearing generation!34 Ellen Key, who was acquainted with Modersohn-Becker and who advised Rilke on his own childcare arrangements, promoted both the necessity of motherhood training and an exclusive devotion to motherhood as the only hope of regenerating society.35 The lofty goal—the welfare of society—could require that the German home be stabilized by systematically teaching domestic skills to future mothers. Modersohn-Becker herself was sent off twice during her life to learn to keep house, once at the age of 16, when she was sent to her aunt in England to learn such skills as butter-making, and once upon her betrothal to Otto Modersohn, when she was whisked away to Berlin to take a series of widely available domestic cookery lessons. (“Well, I’m learning, I can say that. I can already do a meat loaf, and a veal fricassee and have almost learned how to do carrots.”)36 The philosophy behind the practical training insisted upon in Modersohn-Becker’s comfortable background resembles that found in Louisa May Alcott’s stories (see, for example, Little Women and An Old-fashioned Girl, among others), in which there can be no happiness without disciplined, practical domestic work. Modersohn-Becker, who valued cleanliness and order, could see ways that an unconventional life might alter this kind of regimen for the better. Nonetheless, the discipline of motherhood and that of avant-garde painter were bound to be hard to assimilate. Wiggin, a Froebelian, also conceived of motherhood in connection with discipline and practical skills. Her Mother Carey (1913) is a defense of motherhood—an example, for those women “who don’t care to be mothers,” that motherhood is “a great help to God,” in the community and the world and of critical importance to children.37 In the story, Mother Carey is an accomplished widow with five children in her care, whose presence transforms the Maine village where she takes refuge after her husband, a naval captain, unexpectedly dies. Although she “had made her curtsy at two foreign courts,” there is “never any grumbling in her heart over the weary days and unaccustomed tasks” she finds throughout the long New England winter.38 As she notes to a villager who remonstrates over her self-sacrifice, “Ah, well, you see, ‘myself’ is all I have to give them.”39 The story, however, contains mothers who have not been able to carry out this ideal—whose children she is called upon to help on their way; Wiggin, a childless teacher of multitudes, does not consider every mother a heroine, nor, for that matter, consider that marriage and children are necessary before maternal care can be given. For example, in her kindergarten story Marm Lisa (1896), Wiggin has “Miss Mary,” head teacher

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 99 at a kindergarten, rescue the twins and hapless ward of a woman with missions—vegetarianism, free thought, dress reform, etc.—who, like Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, is neglecting her duty for a life of giving speeches in hired halls. In this case, the single young women in the school who have “perfected their womanliness” by becoming kindergartners certainly have the advantage over biological maternity in being able to provide an orderly, clean, nurturing haven; indeed, no experienced teacher of young children could believe in the infallibility of the mothering instinct. As Wiggin’s teacher, transcendentalist Elizabeth Peabody, notes, “we are all suffering the ignorance and injury inevitable from having begun our own lives in the confusions of accidental and disorderly impressions, without having had the clue of reason put into our hands.”40 Lammers also stresses that a systematic course of kindergarten methods will be much more valuable to a young mother than either instinct or desultory reading. She combines belief in sacred endowment with firm commentary on the need for special training: [Trans.] Ever new, the inexhaustible spring of warm motherly love bubbles up in the hearts of the happy women who call a child their own. They draw tenderness, devotion, understanding, patience, and faithfulness from this unfailing source. With qualities no human could teach them and they themselves could not procure, they have been richly endowed by the all-bountiful Father of all who are called children. But things they can acquire for themselves He naturally did not include: insight into the nature of a rational approach to the care and raising of the child; moral seriousness with which to enforce the perceived good; continual self-discipline, without which all disciplinary action becomes unsustainable. If many mothers today, despite their tender, devoted love, are lacking in these qualities, it is because their sense of the huge responsibility of their task is insufficient; and because the raising of young girls has focused far more on the future liberated woman than on the future mother.41 Wiggin, then, is in the camp of this woman close to Modersohn-Becker’s young womanhood in celebrating the life of selfless devotion to children in an orderly, inviting home, while suggesting that the ideal mother is trained, disciplined, neat handed, liberally educated, and rational as well as spiritual—an exceptional combination. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s example of Mrs. Sowerby, Dickon’s and Martha’s mother in Secret Garden (1911), however, is more instinctive. Like Gertrude, Susan Sowerby is a simple woman who can tell the truth to a great landowner and solve the problems the rich are too depressed and ineffectual to manage. She is intelligent and rational, like the romanticized peasants in the German stories, and has a large group of children whom she has brought up beautifully with no income. Like Dorothea’s “sister” in her exposition of a

100 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde girl’s tasks, for example, Martha cannot wait to rush home on her free afternoon to do all of her mother’s chores and baking and delight in her perfect cottage life. Burnett, whom Ulf Boëthius notes as influenced by Έmile Zola’s “La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret (1875), might also be thinking of Zola’s Fécondité (1899), in assigning this kind of moral power to mothers.44 Her “Dearest,” Fauntleroy’s mother, is—like Dorothea—a poor girl whose social position her father-in-law disdains—but, like Dorothea, her virtue, self-sacrifice, communal helpfulness, and excellent judgment are much superior to the qualities that the father-in-law exhibits (Little Lord Fauntleroy, 1885/1886). Wiggin and Hodgson Burnett corresponded after their works appeared, and Wiggin reprinted Burnett’s remarks in her autobiography: Thousands and tens of thousands will flock under the wings of Mother Carey. How sweet, how warm she is! She is not a Yorkshire moor woman, but she and Susan in my “Secret Garden” mean the same thing. I think it beautiful that we were making those two mother-creatures at the same time.44 Ideal mother examples in children’s literature often emphasize the enormous power of the mother in the home, whether for good or ill, rather than the possible oppressiveness of carrying out this cultural aim. As Daphne Kutzer notes, Hunca-Munca (and other fortunate mothers in Beatrix Potter’s books) establishes a domestic space for herself and settles into her role.45 Sharon Smulders notes that Ann and Jane Taylor’s mothers are rather fierce, but they are clearly representatives of what Elizabeth Peabody calls, “the first form in which God reveals Himself to the child.”46,47 From the point of view of a child, this kind of mother offers stability and care, although the price for stability may come too high. Modersohn-Becker, herself, was not only guided to see mothers this way by her acculturation and pedagogical training, but her own mother—who took care of Paula’s step-child as well as Paula and her husband—was this kind of person. Strong, caring, intensely interested in her children, encouraging her daughter’s art though not appreciating it, contributing to community culture, and running her depressive husband and her nest-like home, she had the power: “We have known you always as the one who can make the lame walk again.”48

Vessels of the Life Force: Portraits of Mothers Modersohn-Becker’s portraits of mothers do not tell us much about her conception of the role of women of her own class, because they are mostly of mothers without homes; she was not a society portraitist. While at Worpswede (from the mid-1890s until her death in 1907), she hired most of her models from the work house—old women, young women, and children most often—

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 101 who, for a small sum, would agree to pose for her. But Paula’s writing about the maternal is lyrical and religious, enhanced by her intimate view of the hardships of her models’ lives: Oct 29, 1898 I sketched a young mother with her child at her breast, sitting in a smoky hut. If only I could someday paint what I felt then! A sweet woman, an image of charity. She was nursing her big, year-old bambino, when with defiant eyes her four-year-old daughter snatched for her breast until she was given it. And the woman gave her life and her youth and her power to the child in utter simplicity, unaware that she was a heroine.49 Dec 15, 1898 I am drawing Frau Meyer aus dem Rusch. She was in jail for four weeks because she and her man mistreated their illegitimate child so badly. A voluptuous blonde, a marvelous specimen of nature, with a throat gleaming like the Venus de Milo. She is very sensual. But isn’t it true that sensuality, inborn and natural sensuality, always goes hand in hand with this kind of ripe and robust energy? For this sexuality contains something of a great Earth Mother with full breasts. And sensuality, sexuality, to the very fingertips, when it is united with chastity, that is the single, true, and proper concern of the artist. Journal (Dec 16) My blonde was here again today. This time with her little boy at her breast. I had to draw her as a mother, had to. That is her single true purpose.50 Christmas, 1900 This little piece of Christianity warms me and I accept it for the fairy tale it is. And then, you know, it is such a celebration for women in particular, because these tidings of motherhood go on and on, living in every woman. All that is so holy. It’s a mystery which for me is so deep and impenetrable, and tender and all-embracing. I bow down to it wherever I encounter it; I kneel before it in humility.51 Sketchbook I think I should like to paint an Annunciation. In a garden with many flowers, more gentle. She is walking or sitting. There must be water there, too, and several pious animals that are under the holy spell of this pious moment.52 Fall 1902 I took a warm bath today. I felt so cozy. Little Elsbeth [her stepdaughter] helped me. She touched my breasts and asked, “What are those?” “Yes, my child! Those are mysteries.53

102 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde March 10, 1903 I look at little children with love, and when I’m reading I look up words like swaddling and nursing and so on with great understanding. I have been very aware how these two years at your side have gently turned me into a woman. When I was a girl I was always full of jubilant expectation. Now, as a woman, I am also full of expectations, but they are quieter and more serious.54 Clara Rilke’s description (from Otto Modersohn) of Paula’s death of an embolism on the first day she was allowed to leave her room after childbirth has the effect of tying the artist to her ideal of motherhood forever : There, candles had been lighted everywhere in the chandelier, on a garland of candle holders around the body of a carved baroque angel, and in many other places. She then asked for her child to be brought to her. When this was done she said, “Now it is almost as beautiful as Christmas.” Then suddenly she had to elevate her foot—and when they came to help her she said only, “A pity.”55 Modersohn-Becker was not, in other words, one of the women who rebelled against the cultural narrative idealizing motherhood as, for example, some of Freud’s patients did.56 Yet she could not bear to give time to the conventional role that she needed for painting or living in stimulating art environs while she still felt her potential had not been reached. The beauty of maternity that she specifically values, however, is the sacrificial, unconscious giving of the nursing mothers, and her rebellion against the role comes as an artist rather than as a woman. We see in the writing, then, the limits of her early art from the point of view of expressing her particular vision. What she has in mind is something like Zola’s celebration of Marianne in Fécondité (1899): Never had he thought her so beautiful, possessed of so strong and so calm a beauty, radiant with the triumph of happy motherhood, as though indeed a spark of something divine had been imparted to her by that river of milk that had streamed from her bosom. A song of glory seemed to sound, glory to the true mother, to the one who nourishes.57 Or, The milk was ever trickling, bringing flesh to little limbs which grew stronger day by day, spreading through the earth, fi lling the whole world, nourishing the life which increased hour by hour. And was not this the answer which faith and hope returned to all threats of death?—the certainty of life’s victory, with fine children ever growing in the sunlight, and fine crops ever rising from the soil at each returning spring!58 But pictures of women who are perilously close to the edge of survival when they offer their breasts to their young are not automatically “glorious” to the

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 103 uninitiated. In particular, pictures such as Modersohn-Becker’s Nursing Mother (1903) are ambiguous works. Averil King notes, “her body sagging with exhaustion, her eyes glancing sideways out of the picture plane, evidently abandons herself to a weary sadness.”59 Even Peasant Woman Nursing Her Baby (1898) might elicit pity for the mother. Such pictures might even provoke calls for social reform. Fin de siècle French Malthusian, Nelly Roussel, for example, would have pointed out that the “role of Science was to mitigate the law of nature”. . . . or “suffering and self-sacrifice is not fundamental to female nature.”60 Even when fatigue is not evident, the early mothers and children in her drawings may be compelling but hampered by the fact that only Paula was apt to see the models as radiant with the life force. Sometimes the baby’s distraction and sometimes the mother’s austerity, keeps the picture from being the holy relation she wants us to see. If they have biblical resonance, it is because Modersohn-Becker is painting pictures of uncovered maternal breasts outdoors, and her families are wearing simple clothing. As King notes, the early portraits are of mothers in the Worpswede colony, while the paintings after 1906, the iconic figures, were painted in Paris.61 By 1906/1907, Modersohn-Becker achieved something that we, as well as she, can see was closer to her vision of triumphant surrender to the life force, influenced not only by those traditions that had been present in her life from the beginning, but also by the interests of the Parisian Avant-Garde who showed her the way to achieve the visual image. Woman with Baby on Her Arm (1906), for example, is vibrant. She is not one particular person, but a kind of assertive

Figure 4.1 Paula Modersohn-Becker. Reclining Mother and Child II (summer 1906) Kunstsammlungen Böttcherstraße/Paula Modersohn-Becker-Museum, Bremen, Busch/ Werner 657. Published by permission of the Modersohn-Becker Foundation.

104 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde fertility goddess—surrounded by fruit, holding fruit—a healthy, strong, smiling, “monumental” figure with a healthy contented child. Wendy Slatkin and Anne Röver-Kann discuss how the example of Paul Gauguin contributed to the greater simplicity of image she had sought.62 Röver-Kann describes how the work done with her own models in her own atelier resulted in free and powerful images.63 In Reclining Mother and Child (1906), Modersohn-Becker has established a “good mother” that conveys maternal power and family intimacy. These pictures are not illustrations of Mrs. Sowerby’s wise and practical life skills or Marmee March’s religious elevation, but they are images of the bedrock upon which the other qualities are built. That she kept faith in the initial vision, until she attained the ability to convey it, is a marker of Modersohn-Becker’s personal success. That she kept the holy vision of motherhood when she, herself, had to leave home like Nora to fi nd the opportunity to finish (as it happened) her lifework and to bring forth the other creative work she had lived to do, was a paradox notable in her generation. It is an indication of Modersohn-Becker’s fi rm conviction on this subject that her friend, Rilke, seems unable, in his “Requiem,” to imagine her without her affirmative passion. Talking to her as a disturbingly returned spirit that died in becoming a mother, he is startled “that out there, bewildered for the first time, inattentive, you didn’t grasp the splendor of the infinite forces.” Rilke and Paul Gauguin are among the artists who felt as deeply about motherhood as Modersohn-Becker. Many critics note, for example, that Gauguin’s Madonna and Child Tahitian paintings are source material for ModersohnBecker’s final developmental stage. But neither Rilke nor Gauguin could support their children.64 Nor could they create while living in their children’s domestic space. Mary Cassatt, who painted many maternal pictures during Modersohn-Becker’s Paris years, made the decision that the two vocations could not be combined. “Avant-garde” requires patrons or a supportive family because it means work for which there is no present economic demand. Paula’s helplessness without someone to take fi nancial care of her is the rule, rather than exception, among those who aspired to be artists, but without private means. “Avant-garde” meant, in fact, the need to remain at the child stage of the Life Cycle.

Drawing Objects as Knowing Objects: The Secrets of Nature Educational innovators were responsible, in part, for the emphasis on maternity found throughout the nineteenth century. Their influence on the generation that flocked to Paris to be artists, however, was of a more fundamentally radical nature. Anne Röver-Kann notes that there are a 1,000 drawings in the Modersohn-Becker canon, and half of them are life drawings from the nude.65 This unusual attention to academic drawing classes can also be seen as a reflection of the principles of the great educational theorists.

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 105 Jan Amos Comenius’s Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658) is often called the “fi rst picture book” or “fi rst children’s encyclopedia” in surveys of the history of children’s literature. It is an elementary text for teaching Latin by means of pictures and other appeals to the senses. The alphabet at the beginning is linked to the sounds of animals; the Latin nouns on the subsequent pages describe groups of items observed every day—the components of the schoolroom, the insects one might encounter, different types of land masses, and so on. “The world” is defi ned as the names of persons, places, and things. Each noun refers to a picture, and each individual picture (leaf) is part of a tableau (trees and bushes) that shows its relation to the other parts of creation. The educational innovations of Comenius (Moravia, 1592–1670) within and without this text are numerous. The aspects of Orbis Sensualium Pictus here discussed are twofold: that learning starts with objects that the child can see and that drawing the objects is a great aid to comprehension. Comenius’ introduction demonstrates that it is not Latin, but good judgment, that is his goal. Now there is nothing in the understanding which was not before in the sense. And therefore to exercise the senses well about the right perceiving the differences of things, will be to lay the grounds for all wisdom, and all wise discourse, and all discreet actions in one’s course of life.66 He notes, “If anything here mentioned cannot be presented to the eye, it will be to no purpose at all to offer them by themselves to the scholars.”67 In other words, there must be something concrete available to the sense before the idea of it can take shape in the scholar’s mind. For this reason, drawing copies of the pictures is also recommended: Let them be suffered also to imitate the pictures by hand, if they will, nay rather, let them be encouraged, that they may be willing, first, thus to quicken the attention also towards the things, and to observe the proportion of the parts, one towards another; and, lastly, to practice the nimbleness of the hand, which is good for many things.68 These ideas about how children learn and the best way to teach them were repeated by the educational reformers that followed Comenius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile of 1762, about 100 years after Comenius’ volume, added such ideas as that of stages of growth—that learning should not only be tailored to the child’s ability to learn, but that the ability to learn certain kinds of things changes during the child’s development. Both Rousseau and Comenius, however, are concerned that the child’s nature be the guide. Rousseau’s greater stress on Nature as teacher is accompanied by a similar advocacy of drawing, although he sub-

106 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde stitutes real natural objects for pictures of objects. In both cases, drawing is intended for mental rather than artistic purposes: One cannot learn to estimate the extent and size of bodies without at the same time learning to know and even to copy their shape; for at bottom this copying depends entirely on the laws of perspective, and one cannot estimate distance without some feeling for these laws. All children in the course of their endless imitation try to draw; and I would have Émile cultivate this art; not so much for art’s sake, as to give him exactness of eye and flexibility of hand. 69 Nature should be his only teacher, and things his only models. He should have the real thing before his eyes, not its copy on paper. . . . so that he may train himself to observe objects and their appearance accurately and not to take false and conventional copies for truth. I would even train him to draw only from objects actually before him and not from memory, so that, by repeated observation, their exact form may be impressed upon his imagination, for fear that he should substitute absurd and fantastic forms for the real truth of things and lose his sense of proportion and his taste for the beauties of nature.70 Rousseau reinforces his sense of the utility of drawing with comments that became a commonplace in the nineteenth century: “he will certainly get a truer eye, a surer hand, a knowledge of the real relations of form and size between animals, plants, and natural objects, together with a quicker sense of the effects of perspective.”71 His final assessment, however, reaches further: “We will colour prints, we will paint, we will daub; but in all our daubing we will be searching out the secrets of nature, and whatever we do will be done under the eye of that master.”72 Of the educational reformers of the nineteenth century, those closest to Paula Modersohn-Becker’s life are Pestalozzi (1746–1827), a Swiss educator whose additions to the work of Comenius and Rousseau were most widespread in German education, and his German student, Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), the inventor of the kindergarten. Froebel elaborated Pestalozzi’s method into a formal structure of games and occupations, combining it with a level of symbolic mysticism not present in Rousseau and Pestalozzi.73 Although Modersohn-Becker does not mention her teacher training directly (which is also true of her discovery of Cézanne and other epiphanies her biographers wish she had discussed), she paraphrases one of the passages in Pestalozzi’s autobiographical writing in her discussion of a Worpswede painter that she encountered soon after leaving the Janson Lehrerinnen-seminar.74 She might have taken Pestalozzi as a model for the life of aspiration, as well. Writers such as Nietzsche, Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Jacobsen, whom she discussed with her friends, talked a great deal about the aspiring life of a thinker and creator, but

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 107 Pestalozzi’s aspiration is unique in being a happy story. Although Pestalozzi discusses, at length, his great poverty and the ridicule and wrong turns he experienced on his way to clarifying his vision of educational methodology, he was completely successful at last: writing in 1873, Joseph Payne notes with approval that Ever since the time when numbers of young teachers were sent by different German Governments to study Pestalozzi’s work at Yverdun, and when also some of the highest authorities in education became convinced, in exercising it, of the soundness of his principles, the ultimate effect was assured. The adoption of Pestalozzi’s principles by the Governments of Prussia, Saxony, Baden, Würtemberg, etc., has only been a matter of time, and to their adoption we may fairly ascribe the enlightened teaching, with its excellent results, in the common schools of Germany.75 Modersohn-Becker often seems to have the expectation that periods of ridicule or hardship must come in the course of any development, and Pestalozzi’s belief that they are necessary and essential to growth seems likely to be a source of her expectations. April 1900 I have been depressed for days. Profoundly sad and solemn. I think the time is coming for struggle and uncertainty. It comes into every serious and beautiful life. I knew all along it had to come. I’ve been expecting it. I am not afraid of it. I know it will mature and help me develop.76 Easter week, March 1902 And then I’ve had this experience: my heart has been longing for a certain soul, whose name is Clara Westhoff. I think we shall never again find each other completely. We are on different paths. And maybe this loneliness is good for my art. Perhaps it will sprout wings in this earnest silence. Blessed, blessed, blessed.77 Pestalozzi’s characterization of the child as “a bud that has not yet opened,” while not unique, is also entirely characteristic of Modersohn-Becker’s organic way of describing herself and her emerging realization as an artist.78 The idea is explicated by the Kindergarten representative (Susan Cooper) at the “World’s Congress of Representative Women” in 1893, a Congress that was also attended by the Head of Modersohn-Becker’s school, Mathilde Lammers: ”We learn through doing”; that is the foundation principle on which the kindergarten rests. The highest type of humanity which education can produce is reached by the equal and simultaneous growth of every faculty; hence the kindergarten provides for the nourishment of every fac-

108 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde ulty in its earliest stage, on the ground that all are essential to a perfect growth. The epochs of educational growth follow the divinely ordained epochs of vegetable growth; there is the root-life, the stem-life, and the blossom-life. That the blossom will depend very largely upon the care and nurture given to the root no one will deny. So, then, the germs of every faculty must have their appropriate nourishment at the earliest possible point of time, and there must be also simultaneous growth. True growth is the equal and constantly increasing development of every faculty. That is not genuine growth which is developed only on one side—that is only a bulging and misshapen condition. In order to proper growth there must be freedom, coupled with obedience to the innate laws of life and being, exactly as it is in the vegetable kingdom.79 Pestalozzi, like Schiller or any other educator in the same era, was not writing with small ends in view. Freedom in society and moral reform of the country are the aims of his works. Modersohn-Becker’s possible debt to him is not a matter of pursuing a narrow pedagogical aim, but of adopting a way of thinking that was meant to have tremendous impact. One of the young men whom he cites in his introduction to How Gertrude Teaches Her Children characteristically notes: “Knowledge of the method has in great measure restored the cheerfulness and strength of my youth, and animated my hopes for myself and the human race.”80 Pestalozzi’s own testimony about the improvement in his classroom when he had succeeded in laying the right foundation for the learning process conveys the ideal: “They wished,—tried,—persevered,— succeeded, and they laughed. Their tone was not that of learners, it was the tone of unknown powers awakened from sleep; of a heart and mind exalted with the feeling of what these powers could and would lead them to do.”81 Pestalozzi emphasized that “the most complex sense-impressions rest upon simple elements. When you are perfectly clear about these, the most complex will become simple.”82 He strove to be perfectly clear in his treatment of the earliest levels of infancy—for example, the learning of sounds before talking—and he used names of objects (nouns) as his first teaching. Step by step, from the students’ own meticulous observation and oral description of individual objects, relations in the world became clear to them. The absolute clarity of the observation process laid a foundation for future learning, a gradual and measured approach that would reveal their inner powers. Gillian Perry notes that Modersohn-Becker and Rilke felt the need to penetrate to the inner qualities of different objects, but that she did not pursue this philosophically.83 I would claim that much of the philosophy had been worked out by the pedagogical theorists. Pestalozzi’s drawing method, which reinforced the object lesson, involved learning to draw angles, squares, lines, and curves, in order to understand the form of objects. These exercises were introduced before reading (as in Rousseau’s system, where geometry was the earlier subject). As Susan Blow (a mem-

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 109 ber of the St. Louis Hegelian Society and a Froebel translator) noted, “As the mediation of word and object, drawing is of vast importance in its reaction on the mind.”84 Froebel noted, “For what man tries to represent or do he begins to understand.”85 Education classes at the teacher training institutions of the latter half of the nineteenth century uniformly stress the “object lesson,” and educational commentators touring Germany to gain Normal school expertise praise practitioners of good object lessons or chide American, English, and German training colleges if they fail to have a sufficient quantity of objects for every lesson at hand. The object lesson was the accepted starting point for any educational process. “No day should pass in kindergarten without a lesson on some object of nature or art.”86 As a means of making drawings serve judgment, making measurements exact, and enabling very young children (for example, three to five years of age) to draw accurately, the Pestalozzi and later Froebel systems used a formal, structured system involving slates or paper with squares or dots that could be connected, so that children could practice, say, lines that were exactly one half inch long or two inches and so on. These they would practice over and over as a class exercise together with their teacher and other very young students. This naturally increased both their manual dexterity and judgment, because the teacher was supposed to enable the children to exercise their powers of observation on their work, not correct it. As Pestalozzi noted, “drawing, as a help towards the end of instruction, making ideas clear, is essentially bound up with the measurement of forms, lines, positions.”87 Froebel understood the process in the same way: “the child is enabled by it [formal grid training] to reproduce quickly and easily the images imparted to his mind, and to give them a visible representation, whereby they become truly objective, and are only then understood.”88 The earliest attempts are, of course, very simple. In the Froebel kindergarten, three straight lines forming three sides of a square could be understood as a table. But such exercises were meant to be foundations for a lifetime of disciplined understanding and power. And Wiggin’s detailed instructions about the kind of apple that best takes light reflection when providing a suitable demonstration of light and shadow for five-year-olds’ freehand drawing—a lesson that will produce sophisticated results because the children have been taught to observe (and thus have an “innocent eye”) rather than having been exposed to conventional illustration—suggests that structured lessons in toddlerhood led to precocity in artistic productions of the more traditional variety.89 Children’s literature and culture were influenced by the European educational ideals for many reasons. First, a few famous authors, such as Wiggin (and later, Enid Blyton) were trained kindergartners whose ideas were broadly disseminated in their works. Wiggin was partly trained by Elizabeth Peabody of Boston and had a late share of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s conversation, making her one of the last of the New England transcendentalists. The educational reformer, Horace Mann, Peabody’s brother-in-law, visited Prussian schools

110 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde in 1842, acknowledging that they were the most advanced in the world at the time.90 Bronson Alcott was a Pestalozzi educator, for whom Peabody worked as an educational assistant for a time, and his influence was present in Louisa May Alcott’s work. As John Matteson notes, he had discovered Pestalozzi’s method at second hand in a series of anonymous pamphlets called “Hints to Parents.”91 After becoming more familiar with the method, he wrote an introduction of the method for the American Journal of Education in 1829.92 Modersohn-Becker’s lesson plans prepared for the Janson Lehrerinnen-seminar and preserved at the Modersohn-Becker Foundation, show a technique comparable to one that Alcott demonstrated for Peabody.93 For example, in her lesson plans on “the garden” and “compound sentences,” she uses the patient method of building on the students’ own prior knowledge, extracted by questioning, in order to move to the next step of introducing new material. The principle that “all knowledge proceeds through sensory perception,” noted by Sarah Elbert in her study of Louisa May Alcott, is part of the educational strategy of Mr. March and Professor Baer.94 Second, the kindergarten’s emphasis on learning by doing had the effect of uniting the most theoretical and the most pragmatic educators in support of early childhood education, particularly centered on training the eye and hand. Wiggin’s Silver Street kindergarten in San Francisco served very poor children, as did some other schools in her era; for example, the kindergarten at Jane Addams’ Hull House. Thus, the kindergarten improved educational resources for the poor immigrant as well as the prosperous and was seen by some apologists as a way to train children whose parents were not likely to direct them to employment or good citizenship. But this attempt at reaching very early childhood, before parents could conceivably expect their children to bring home wages, also served a purely ideal goal of helping every child have a chance to become what he or she had the potential to be.95 A specific result of the regimen associated with Pestalozzi and Froebel schooling for any child was adulthood facility with a drawing pencil, an ability that was presumed to have made a marked difference in intellectual ability and discipline, as well as physical skill. Ann Bermingham, discussing drawing by Englishmen in the eighteenth century, notes that many people at that time thought that drawing instruction ought to be underwritten by the government because it was advantageous to military reconnaissance and mapping, as well, increasingly, as aiding the rising industrialization of the country.96 Among the Froebelian educators in the nineteenth century, the utilitarian aspect of drawing was one of the ways to persuade the general population that early childhood education was a kind of schooling that they could afford. The basic and fundamental aspect of drawing to improve judgment, accuracy of observation, and clarity of thought was always present, but the ability to draw quickly and accurately in proportion and to have a trained hand was not disregarded. As Wiggin noted in 1896, “no art is merely ornamental; it is also useful. It has been said by experienced

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 111 and practical men that in nine trades out of ten a boy who can draw well has a vast advantage over one who cannot.”97 Because of this pragmatic aspect of drawing, it was not regarded as the domain of the gifted: “In all civilized nations children are now taught to draw. . . . The increased attention given of late years to drawing in our schools has proved, as Dr. W.N. Hailmann says, that ‘there is no child devoid of a serviceable amount of talent for drawing, that all children can learn to draw just as all children can learn to speak.’”98 There came to be, in fact, a great many children who were able to draw in the nineteenth century, far beyond the number that might be encompassed by young gentlemen taking the Grand Tour or young ladies learning a refined accomplishment that was necessarily the fruit of prosperity, opportunity, and leisure. The upper-middle-class desire to make a realistic rendering of places visited also contributed to an interest in drawing in the late eighteenth century.99 But the many children trained in worldwide institutions by teachers whose normal schools had inculcated the reforms of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European models came from every walk of life. Felix Driver in “Distance and Disturbance: Travel, Exploration and Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century,” explains that the learned professions were especially eager to find and train persons who could accurately record field results: “For reports from the field to be credible from the perspective of the scientific establishment, travelers had to learn not only what to look for, but also how to observe; and this meant following rules—or what might well in this context be called “observances.”100 Hence the burgeoning discourse on field observation during the first half of the nineteenth century, including manuals for surveyors and instructions to naval officers and field guides for zoologists, entomologist, botanists, geologists, and geographers. The common thread within this instructional literature was the belief that, as William Herschel had put it, “seeing is . . . an art which must be learnt.” Or, as the naturalist Louis Agassiz noted, “a pencil is one of the best of eyes.”101 The training of the powers of observation and the techniques of drawing were easily motivated because they increased employability in many fields. Driver notes that “aspiring midshipmen and officers” might expect that such training would lead to self-advancement in connection with navigation, mapping, and exploring.102 Camilla Murgia in “The Rouillet Process and Drawing Education in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France” discusses the many methods put forward to teach young people the skills demanded by the rapid expansion of industry: the “Rouillet Process,” for example, responded to the universally felt and “immediate need for exact reproduction of objects in reality” or “accuracy of volume and a sense of depth that may be said to be mathematically correct.”103 Rouillet’s (1836) David for Schools: An Elementary Summary of Drawing, Containing 20 Plates of Progressive Principles for the Use of Young People was one of a string of methods of “Teaching drawing from an Industrial Point of View” to fi ll a need that was at least partly fi lled by the invention of an easily used camera.104,105 Rouillet’s method involved a “net” that aided in

112 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde accurately tracing proportions, as well as in creating an exact reproduction of artwork already completed, a method corresponding to the grids and squares of early childhood learning current at the time. Even when the childhood training in question was ostensibly anti-industrial, the method of formal, small steps using grids for drawing contributed to this pragmatic result. For example, “Sloyd,” a method fostered in America as well as Europe, was a Swedish innovation that was Otto Saloman’s late nineteenth-century reaction to the lack of handicraft training among young Swedish children.106 Saloman reasoned that before the Industrial Revolution young Swedish children had learned native crafts and useful skills around the hearth as their parents worked at home. Sloyd schooling was a means of combating rampant alcoholism and other depressing results of the fragmentation of the Swedish home due to industrialization. As June Eyestone notes, Saloman asserted that handwork was beneficial “in developing skill, conceptual thinking, good work habits, respect for others, and aesthetic taste.”107 Because the children followed a sequence of prescribed exercises to copy the size, dimensions, shape, and qualities of a model object—here a handcraft made by the teacher—advancing from taking their pattern from actual objects to working from “abstract” geometrical drawings exhibiting dimensions, perspective, and projections, they were obviously also going to be skilled industrial tool makers or builders, as well as clean-living Swedish folk artisans.108

Running Off to Paris The mass of children who could draw, and who had had their talent for drawing evaluated and developed for so many reasons, helps to explain the number of adolescents who were inspired to run off to Paris to become artists, though other factors—such as family prosperity based upon industrialization—contributed. Paris, as Gillian Perry explains in Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and “Feminine” Art. 1900 to the Late 1920s, was internationally known as a center of artistic endeavor, with the ateliers, the galleries and agents, the schools that gave prizes, and the salons that held exhibitions, all of which were necessary in order to become known and to sell paintings.109 Too, the societal value placed upon drawing made it reasonable to assume that someone who could draw might be able to make a living by it, even if he or she did not win prizes or fame: improving one’s skills and getting closer to artistic innovation might be enough. Modersohn-Becker’s father certainly suggests that this might be the case for Paula and advises her, for example, that some kinds of pictures might have more marketable value than others.110 In her letters, ModersohnBecker told her family that at her Berlin art school, the 50–70 men and women in her class all intended to become professional artists.111 The head of the normal school she attended, Mathilde Lammers, identified the artistic career as one a young woman should be able to pursue. Noting that extraordinary talent

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 113 is required for a woman to become a professional artist and also conceding that women have succeeded in still life, genre, portrait, and minor landscape painting (but not in historical painting), she suggests that many areas of applied art may be available to those with limited gifts: [Trans.] We have already touched on this when we spoke of the help that a feminine hand can provide to a photographer, and in our discussion of commercial drafting. Also in xylography, lithography, and related crafts, many a talent could be put to use that is inadequate for the creation of original works. Fortunately, institutions that offer the preparatory training for this are becoming more prevalent and are open to women as well as men.112 Bermingham shows the reverse situation, as well, noting interesting examples of students trained in England for military drawing who later became landscape artists.113 In fact, as Hailmann noted, “the attention given to this subject [drawing] has stimulated in our youth the tendency to choose avocations in life that call for the exercise of artistic taste and technical skill”—and vocations and callings, as well.114 Jens Peter Jacobsen, in Niels Lyhne (1880), a novel that Rilke and Modersohn-Becker greatly admired, speaks condescendingly of his hero’s mother who had (as an adolescent), “a slightly morbid desire to realize herself, a longing to find herself, which she had in common with many other young girls with talents a little above the ordinary.”115 Modersohn-Becker’s goals developed as she practiced. However, trying to clarify her thinking about what “modern” expression should be set her apart from many of her classmates. Modersohn-Becker went to Paris first in 1900, as a young woman of 24. Her experience was that of a great many of the young people from other countries who came to France in this period. She stayed from January until June on this first occasion, taking life-drawing classes on the Rue de la Grande Chaumière at Filippo Colarossi’s academy. Colarossi was a former artist’s model who had established the first art academy in the area known as Montparnasse. The street lies five or six blocks south of the École des Beaux-Arts (the official French school of Academic Painting) on the Seine and two blocks west of the Luxembourg Gardens, where Henri Rousseau painted Sunday strollers and Ernest Hemingway (in the 1920s) snaffled pigeons. Her best friend Clara Westhoff, who was studying sculpture and eventually became one of Rodin’s pupils (and Rilke’s wife), lived next door to her or in her building in small rooms in the Montparnasse area. Colarossi’s was a traditional private academy, but it admitted women, offering classes with all women, all men, or a mixture. Colarossi also charged the same for women as for male students (other academies charged more, if they admitted women at all) and had a pay-as-you go method of collecting fees that allowed more flexibility in the students’ schedules. Colarossi’s students

114 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde

Figure 4.2

Rue de la Grande Chaumière (ca. 1905).

were primarily from England, Germany, North and South America, or the Scandinavian countries and included students of African as well as European descent.116 In other words, the students were in a cosmopolitan and multilingual, rather than exclusively French, atmosphere, bewilderingly different from the life Modersohn-Becker had experienced at home. The Rue de la Grande Chaumière is a short street, but the properties included large enclosed yards that could be used for the quickly developed ateliers and academy studios. Paula described her first reaction to the school in an early letter to Otto and Helene Modersohn: Cola Rossi has his academy buildings on the little rue de la grande Chaumière, by which I mean small, ragged, dirty, comical barracks which nevertheless have a kind of poetry of their own in the form of a staircase all overgrown with wild grapevines, a real balustrade which one goes out to during the recess to get a little air, and portieres which fi ll us full of awe with their age and fi lth . . . In these hallowed halls I do life drawing, in the mornings with the “little women,” and in the evenings with the “little men.” One can also paint here. But that gives birth to such monstrosities that I can forgo painting without difficulty. Among the women in the morning one sees much unkempt hair and unpolished boots, together with a few very clever heads and not much talent. They labor like beasts of the herd with little idea of what really matters. . . . At seven o’clock in the evenings I’m with my “little men.” With them things are even funnier. They are such comical figures! Not a single one of them, really, looks as sensible as the men at home. Velvet suits, long

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 115 hair, in shirtsleeves, with towels used as neckties, and other peculiar attire. Such is the appearance of these budding artists. Gala performance: bombardment with bread crusts, crowing like roosters, caterwauling, and general good-natured horseplay. Many Yankees, many Spaniards, Englishmen, some Frenchmen, and Germans. The conversation of these gentlemen is often unusual. The point around which everything revolves is elle. Whenever one of them suddenly sighs during his work, someone immediately asks, “Est-elle gentille?” The fact that it is possible to sigh for, and about, something other than a “she,” they either have not yet learned or have already forgotten. 117 The classes were crowded, and the opportunities for individual attention infrequent. In this first session, Raphael Collins apparently did a critique of Modersohn-Becker’s work (for accuracy) at the beginning of the week, Gustave Courtois “who has a fine feeling for valeurs,” a bit more frequently.118 Both men were successful Salon painters. In her first season she won the school prize, and was “top dog,” which pleased her but which she felt had little to do with her real progress.119 For many students, the availability of life-drawing models was a uniquely important aspect of the Parisian art scene. Modersohn-Becker does not give an overview of one phenomenon of the academy noted by others that has some bearing on children’s culture. On Mondays, a great stream of artists’ models lined up to pass before the students to be chosen as the focus of the week’s work. They were mostly Italians from Colarossi’s hometown, Picinisco in the Abruzzi region, whom he had sponsored into the business (and who, consequently, decorate the government buildings of France, as John Crombie humorously notes).120 They might be dressed in various costumes (for, say, historical roles) and included whole families of every age—including babies and small children who were in demand as cupids and cherubs.121Presumably, the language barrier, as well as the professionally structured arrangement, made Modersohn-Becker’s relation to her models in Paris quite different from that to her semi-professional poorhouse models in Germany. Montparnasse had already been established as an artistic center when Modersohn-Becker arrived. She mentions creameries in her letters, as places where a cross-section of humanity took inexpensive meals. An example is the small crémerie run by an Alsatian refugee named Charlotte Futterer that provided cheap meals across from the Colarossi Academy; her dining room was covered with the paintings of artists (including Gauguin) who had exchanged them for board or from whom she had gladly purchased them; these were, themselves, a source of interest for would-be Modern painters. Alphonse Mucha (the Art Nouveau master), Gauguin, Frederick Delius, the English composer, and the playwright August Strindberg had all lived there; Edvard Munch had visited, as well. By the time that Modersohn-Becker arrived, Mucha had enjoyed enormous prosperity and moved to a more elegant location, Gauguin had left

116 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde a final time for Tahiti (1895), and Strindberg for Sweden (1896), but Gauguin’s reputation was growing in his absence. The restaurant closed the same year as Colarossi’s in 1902. Modersohn-Becker’s weekends were sometimes spent in rural suburbs of Paris with Clara or, in later years, with another female painter or her sister. Her days were spent diligently drawing from live models, sketching bones and cadavers in anatomy classes, and visiting the Louvre, reading, and working on her own paintings in her small atelier/bedroom. Because the drawing classes were Academic training that did not have a direct application to Modersohn-Becker’s Modernist aspirations, the greatest advantage of Paris to her development as an avant-garde painter was the Louvre and her attendance at the exhibitions (the Paris Exhibition of 1900 was a great source of excitement; one of her final letters from Worpswede is an attempt to find out about the 1907 Salon d’Autumne) and the ability to see the work of Rodin, Cézanne, and Gauguin at art dealers and ateliers during her residence. She also benefitted from the exhibitions of Japanese prints and the Fayum mummy portraits that she saw during her second visit.122 Methods of reproduction had not made it possible to get a good idea of any artwork outside of a museum, in a way that would be meaningful to other painters. Modersohn-Becker frequently urges her Worpswede friends to come to Paris to see particular exhibitions— but, also, to see famous historic pictures in the Louvre that they know about but have never seen. The true “making” of Paula Modersohn-Becker comes from her witnessing of avant-garde techniques and approaches, her observation of “monumental” antiquities that helped to form her own “monumental” and “simple” style, and her reading on Modernist topics. Drawing instruction, in other words, is not exactly what ModersohnBecker was in Paris for, after she initially had taken in the life drawing and anatomy lessons more readily available in Paris than in the provinces. But up to the end of her career, she still signed up for drawing classes: (March 19, 1906) I attend the excellent courses in anatomy at the Έcole regularly, and I am also taking a lecture course in art history. I have even made a heroic vow to spend my afternoons there drawing from the plaster casts.123 The sculptor Bernard Hoetger, who gave valuable encouragement to Modersohn-Becker in the spring of 1906, claimed that he told her, “Remain true to yourself and give up further instruction,” although she does not, herself, mention this aspect of his critique.124,125 Modersohn-Becker was not entirely alone in pursuing this discipline for longer than most painters would have done; for example, Amadeo Modigliani, another admirer of Nietzsche and a Rue de la Grande Chaumière resident of the next generation, also persistently took life-drawing classes, though he was a precocious child artist and his art depended still less on realistic human

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 117 form. But I think that Modersohn-Becker’s drawing was serving a purpose that can be evaluated best in terms of her pedagogical understanding.

Organic Growth and Becoming Someone Modersohn-Becker overwhelmingly saw herself as a work in progress on the way to the kind of wholeness Pestalozzi and Froebel described. We find the human being even at the earlier stages of boyhood fitted for the highest and most important concern of mankind, for the fulfi llment of his destiny and mission, which is the representation of the divine nature within him. To secure for this ability skill and directness, to lift it into full consciousness, to give it insight and clearness, and to exalt it into a life of creative freedom, is the business of the subsequent life of man in successive stages of development and cultivation.126 Modersohn-Becker stressed, from the very beginning, that her path was, indeed, going to have “successive stages” and going to be lengthy and that years would pass before she achieved her goal. She is cheered by signs of progress, but she does not want to rush. She seems committed, as Pestalozzi and Froebel would have been, to the idea that one must go one step at a time in order to achieve the best result, and that rushing an early stage will mean less force later on. Throughout her whole sequence of art experiences, she reiterates this concept, up to the very end of her life. These are some early examples, after her teacher training, during her first stay in Paris: November 15, 1899 to parents And so the point of this letter is simply to assure you that I’m still your old Paula, even if a new Paula is on her way. And if this new Paula doesn’t please you, take consolation in the thought that there will soon be a time when the new Paula will be replaced by an even newer one. They come and go like the seasons outside. And it’s impossible to tell which season is the best. It’s also impossible to leave one out. Whoever loves the spring must calmly wait a year until the next spring comes. The old earth always remains the same. And so it is with each of its little people. The important thing is to be able to wait.127 Feb 29, 1900 to sister Milly One simply must grow older and older, quieter and quieter, and finally create something.128 April 12, 1900 177 to Heinrich Vogler (Worpswede)

118 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Well then, I was very pleased about your letter. First of all, about standing on your “own two feet.” It’s so good to see that one’s neighbor is standing firm. That gives me such happy encouragement for growth. And my own two feet are growing, too. As a person I’m almost at the point of being able to stand alone; and my artistic feet, well, they must now grow like the lilies of the field. Their time is coming. I’m certain of that now—129 April 13, 1900 (journal) If I could really paint! A month ago I was so sure of what I wanted. Inside me I saw it out there, walked around with it like a queen, and was blissful. Now the veils have fallen again, gray veils, hiding the whole idea from me. I stand like a beggar at the door, shivering in the cold, pleading to be let in. It is hard to move patiently, step by step, when one is young and demanding. . . . And then up speaks art, insisting on two more serious, undivided years of work. 130 April 26, 1900 to brother, Kurt Now and again I have to talk to somebody about the flower that blooms inside. I yearn for us to understand each other, so that you won’t think that I have turned into something foreign and strange. I haven’t. What happened was that after this life of dreaming and sleeping, a sudden development took place. I can understand how it might have shocked all of you. But what it did for me was to give me the feeling of life and happiness and youth and freedom. And something fine is going to come from it all, and you are also going to share this joy.131 March 9, 1903 to Martha Hauptmann It is my great wish and my most compelling desire to be granted the ability to express in my art that little message that is my whole being. And I still hope to get there someday.132 Sometimes Modersohn-Becker’s path seems to be self-development rather than specifically artistic goals, although they are essentially the same. She wants to become the person she was meant to be. In her letters written from her very last Paris visit, she has had personal success with her painting but still is conscious of undeveloped powers: “I am still an incomplete person and should so like to become someone. I still lack things inside and out, but I have private hopes that someday I’ll become something whole. Then again, I also feel that whoever thinks of me as incomplete needn’t really bother to look in my direction.”133 Near the very end of her life, she wrote to Rainer Maria Rilke: “I am a bad correspondent; in fact I’m one of those people who move very slowly and make people wait for them, and who also wait themselves. Just don’t expect

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 119 anything from me. Otherwise I’ll probably disappoint you, because it may still be a long time before I am somebody. And then, when I am, perhaps I won’t be the somebody you thought I would be. I would so like to do something beautiful.”134 Modersohn-Becker’s sense of change and life stages in her journals and letters is made concrete in her self-portraits. She created at least 30 of them, in addition to humorous cartoons of her daily life. Because her painting techniques went through various stages and because she believed in developmental stages rather than in an essential self, the portraits do not often resemble each other or, even, the photographs which also record her life. She was a pretty woman, for example, and the “pretty” (though avant-garde) portrait that is most often reprinted is a late one from 1907. Averil King notes that it is the only one that the art critic who bought it said that he would have recognized.135 Sometimes the portraits exhibit the attitude in the “whoever thinks of me as incomplete really needn’t bother to look in my direction” quotation. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, for example, claims that “she chose almost always to paint herself as confident, unconventional, even ironically self-aware, and undaunted by the dictates of the dominant society.”136 She also, a first for women painters, painted herself nude in a number of portraits. Modersohn-Becker’s absorption in her personal development was not unusual among artists in her place and time.137 Munch, for example, drew his own face on the character illustrations/program for Ibsen’s popular epic drama, Peer Gynt (1867). In that drama, by one of Modersohn-Becker’s favorite authors, Peer’s task is to prove to the Button Moulder that he actually has become a real person, not a misshapen mediocrity that must be melted down. But it is Peer’s choices, not his method, which is the object of Divine disdain. The aspect of slow measured stages on the path to selfcompletion and the disciplined effort to make the fundamentals a good foundation, instead reflects the pedagogical methods Modersohn-Becker had absorbed. The idea that thorough knowledge of an object is usefully increased by drawing it and that this method produces clarity and simplicity, seems to be the idea that she was carrying out. She wanted clarity in her thinking and simplicity in her painting. She is reading and looking for this organic moment. As Froebel, who stressed calmness, clearness, and simplicity, noted, “the child will come to look upon self-development as his highest need in every circumstance of his life.”138 This is appropriate because self-development is “a means to the highest development of the race and the highest happiness of Society.”139 If my thesis is correct, then the method of drawing over and over until insight about the nature of the object is clarified is what Modersohn-Becker was doing with her life-drawing classes, a grown-up version of the Pestalozzi and Froebel classroom. Because she already knew how to draw the human form and was trying to decide how to move away from Naturalism in her art-

120 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde work, it is probably best to think of the knowledge she was hoping for in this repetitive exercise as Rousseau’s “secrets of nature” within the human form. Even before she clarified what her art ought to eventually look like, she is quite sure that the path leads through, not around, the Academy. In this she is not only following the ideal of disciplining her powers in order to attain creative freedom, but also probably influenced by Nietzsche, who emphasizes in the “Three Metamorphoses” portion of Thus Spake Zarathustra that the discipline of humbling oneself to tradition and working hard at it is essential to the process of being able to break that tradition “to create new values.”140 Thus, near the end of her first Paris visit in 1900, we find that Modersohn-Becker, who has come to admire avant-garde work, does not respect people who try to do “new” things without learning the lessons the Academy can teach: May 1900 For two weeks I have been working at a half life-size nude (that is, I have been adding and subtracting highlights and shadow in the proper valeurs. One mustn’t really call that painting). But I believe that my feeling for form is being refi ned in the process. Short and sweet: I will endure. On the whole, I think more of the independent individuals who consciously reject conventionality. I think that they must fi rst have possessed it and practiced self-discipline and moderation. Then they can turn away from convention. But if someone speaks against it who has never practiced it, then I am tempted to think: sour grapes! It seems to me it’s that way in art, too. It’s a tricky business, this so-called “free and full life.”141 The “freedom” that comes from submitting to a discipline is a commonplace in the Lutheranism that this generation rejected, in Schiller (who discusses a person “whose emotions have been educated by reason so that duty and inclination are no longer in conflict”), in Nietzsche, and other adult sources.142 The organized pattern of the kindergarten, however, is a source close to Modersohn-Becker’s life that specifically mentions the outcome in terms she valued. As Elizabeth Peabody noted in her kindergarten lectures: There is no order which is more than skin deep, unless it be the free, glad obedience of the child to a law, which he perceives to be creative because it enables him to do something real. Nothing short of the union of love and thought can produce spiritual power, i.e., creativeness.143

Childhood: A Stage in Life Modersohn-Becker painted many portraits of children throughout her painting life, particularly little girls. Unlike Munch, who repeated the motif of the “3 stages of life” for women over and over, Modersohn-Becker did not paint

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 121 pictures called the “ages of woman.”144 But viewing the oeuvre as a whole, the numbers of little girls, maternal figures in their prime, and old women gives this effect (although with very different conclusions than Munch’s). The children, thus, are tied to a larger picture of fruitfulness, even when they are very young. Their time is coming; their current condition is a developmental stage. This perception—that she was applying the idea of development to the children that she painted, as well as to her own life—has everything to do with the way that she perceived them. Modersohn-Becker’s stance may offer some perspective on characterizations with which we are familiar in children’s literature. Louisa May Alcott’s best known works, for example, stress the whole life cycle aspect of children’s lives, by title and by narrative content: “Little Women.” With ModersohnBecker, though, as with Ellen Key, we adamantly are not looking at the “fallen” child, but the “uncompleted” woman: a Darwinian evolutionary rather than a Christian perspective. By placing the power in the maternal or developed

Figure 4.3 Paula-Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung. Sitting Girl (ca. 1899). Private collection. Published by permission of the Modersohn-Becker Foundation.

122 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde position—a person who has become what she had it in her to be—Modersohn-Becker is closer to the late eighteenth-century women writers, to the Froebelians, and to those German model mothers than to writers who prefer the Wordsworthian or Edwardian child. She is also closer to our contemporary authors of “Sheroes,” such as Tamora Pierce. Children may have a desirable naturalness that is better than being badly socialized, but their life stage represents what Rilke called “yearning,” as opposed to the wholeness felt when one has attained one’s destiny in the Life Cycle and the developed state.145 Yearning or developmental steps are more likely to look gauche or gloomy than adorable, and that is the state in which we find some of the children Modersohn-Becker drew and painted. Although their styles are substantially different, the sadness on the faces of the young people they painted makes it natural to think of the child portraits of Pablo Picasso when looking at Modersohn-Becker’s work. Picasso began the sad youth portraits when he came to Paris, slightly after Modersohn-Becker’s first stay at Worpswede. They arrived in Paris at approximately the same time. Robert Rosenblum, Maryanne Stevens, and Ann Dumas in 1900: Art at the Crossroads, speak of the “saintlike suffering of anonymous beggars,” when discussing the beautiful and melancholy youths of Picasso’s blue period.146 Edvard Munch’s beautiful and dying little sister was a famous image that he re-visited many times in his long career, and this, too, can be a touchstone for discussion.147 Although it is an over-simplification, I think that the melancholy that pervades the pictures by Munch and Picasso can be separated fi rmly from the wistfulness Modersohn-Becker’s children display. The Picasso portraits convey a young man’s sympathy with the street people of Paris. They address a compelling social issue, enter into a commercial transaction with the youths who are assisting as models, and demarcate the people as especially vulnerable and, possibly, doomed. Munch’s little sister in her chair is a doomed child, as well; a traumatic and beautiful memory from his own youth that shaped his life. But Modersohn-Becker’s children are not doomed. It is a critical commonplace to note that Modersohn-Becker’s child portraits, while sometimes melancholy, are “unsentimental,” and this can be seen as a matter of distancing technique.148 But it is worth exploring the idea that Modersohn-Becker simply did not see the children she painted as helpless or pathetic, although the children at Worpswede were usually poor children. Like Picasso, Modersohn-Becker does not include a picturesque background that would make the pictures into genre studies of the unfortunate (nor do they have the pretty domestic interiors that we might associate with the impressionists). The children are just sitting or standing there.149 The unclothed or simply clothed aspect of the pictures, although it is associated with Modersohn-Becker’s need for life-drawing models or her enthusiasm for the natural and simple, also sets the children free from conventional attitudes about childhood (think how often picturesque clothing defines childhood in this era) as well as about economic class. Although the children may be orphans or otherwise outside of a stable

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 123 family life, she does not enhance—or even visually allude to—the pathos of their situations. Yet she had the biographical material to do so: October 18, 1898 Today I drew a ten-year-old girl from the poorhouse. She has been there for eight years, she and her little sister. She has lived under four different superintendents—and now her playmate is little Karl, the son of the present one, who loves her very much, and says, “If I had children, she could play with them, too.” She can’t bear to listen when another child is being beaten, and so she runs out into the garden. And she is never a tattletale either, except when Meta Tietjen takes away her knitting needles: “That’s not nice,” or if Meta says that people in the poorhouse have lice, when they are really always so clean and neatly dressed. And she says she can allow herself to be happy because she came to the poorhouse when she was a small child and has known nothing else. She has it so good, she says, and she says it with a little beaming face.”150 September 18, 1898 This is a little five-year-old blond girl whose mother practically beat her to death and who is now permitted to take care of the poorhouse geese as part of her “recuperation.” By now this dear little creature has wrapped herself in a web of dream and fantasy and holds enchanting conversations with her white flock.151 Modersohn-Becker’s children, as can be seen here, are children who have been unfortunate but who are not doomed. They are adapting and living. And Modersohn-Becker greatly resembles the great educators—rather than the critics looking for prettier children, or the nationalists looking for blooming peasants, or the decadents decrying social ills—in having hope for all. Wiggin or Alcott or Peabody were not looking for good-looking children; they were looking for children who could be guided to achieve their potential, to become the people they were meant to be. And they had great faith that a disciplined and orderly environment could overcome virtually any affl iction: Marm Lisa, the eponymous hero of one Wiggin kindergarten story, is a “feeble-minded,” passionate, and neglected child, yet she is able to develop her power and, in fact, becomes the hero of the story. As her teacher notes at the beginning of her attendance at school: Let us watch her closely, both to penetrate the secret of her condition and to protect the other children. What a joy, what a triumph, to say to her some dear day, a few years hence, “You poor, motherless bairn, we have swept away the cobwebs of your dreams, given you back your will, put a clue to things in your hand: now go on and learn to live and be mistress of your own life under God!” 152

124 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde The tidy respectable, though not beautiful, child has future potential. When Modersohn-Becker uses a clock weight in one of her child portraits, it must be, in other words, a symbol of hope rather than mortality: you are young now, but your time is coming. Modersohn-Becker’s admiration for her child model I like sketching my little nude in the evenings. Though the girl is knockkneed, she moves with such a naïve grace. Today Mackensen had her pose in at least twenty different ways. I wanted to capture every one of them.153 is reminiscent of Wiggin’s description of a child playing a round game in her kindergarten: Carlotty had huge feet,—indeed, Carlotty “toed in,” for that matter; but her face shone with delight; her eyes glistened, and so did her teeth; and when she waved her ebony hands and fl itted among the children, she did it as airily as any real butterfly that ever danced over a field of clover blossoms.154

Figure 4.4 Paula Modersohn-Becker. Sitting Nude Girl with Vase (1906/1907). Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal Busch/Werner 699. Published by permission of the Modersohn-Becker Foundation.

Paula Modersohn-Becker • 125 And, in spite of the potentially equivocal relationship between a poorhouse and an artist’s colony, the “little nude,” blazes in Modersohn-Becker’s pictures with belligerence as well as grace.155 The vision to see the potential of a child who is a fellow traveller with a struggle ahead, is a vision that the National Socialists did not have when they banned Modersohn-Becker’s work as decadent and declared that she lacked maternal feeling.156 As in the case of the poor nursing mothers, it is clear that Modersohn-Becker’s vision existed before she had a method worked out to convey children in such a way that the potential for wholeness was visible to all. Modersohn-Becker’s most avant-garde children’s portraits, the “monumental” iconic works of her last year, demonstrate this point of view (see Figure 4.4). Accompanied by fruit, by a stork, and by flowers in pots and vases, the young girls await their turn to bloom.

Someone As in the biographies that we often give the young, Paula Modersohn-Becker’s dedicated life and disciplined, thoughtful work had an outcome that won her respect and admiration, a bit in her lifetime, much more afterward. For people who, on the basis of the writings and the art, want to speculate about her feelings at the end—when she re-entered married life, bore the wished-for child, and died—there is some encouragement. Her letters about the difficult but fruitful runaway year in Paris—1906—include the happy message that she loved living surrounded by her art: May 15, 1906 Working and sleeping in the same room with my paintings is a delight. Even in the moonlight the atelier is very bright. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I jump out of bed and look at my work. And in the morning it’s the first thing I see.157 Reminiscent of Henri Rousseau’s statement about his own tiny atelier, it appears that a measure of satisfaction did come to her and that her ability to take off a year to push to produce something before she was 30—perhaps even while she was still alive—gave her the ability to accept the compromises that were coming and to regard them peacefully and with hope. That she received a good review of her work in Bremen before she returned to Worpswede was not really her aim, but might somehow have signaled the change in critical opinion in the larger world, which meant that a “new world order” had been achieved. That this is the kind of partial “success” that comes to the person who wants to change tradition and re-imagine painting—if she is lucky—may not have been part of what Modersohn-Becker knew. She apparently was able to work because of her disciplined optimism and belief in her method, and the

126 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde goal probably did not include the word “partial.” She did not give up hope, I think, that she would create something that would make her family proud and happy, in spite of the rather obvious fact that “avant-garde” usually means something that the family does not understand. She had plans for her future paintings. Eric Torgersen notes that she created 14 pictures in her last summer in Worpswede.158 She was still developing. She got a great deal of work in under the wire.

Chapter Five Marc Chagall I Was Not Born Simply to Seek Pleasure I was not born simply to seek pleasure. Art and Life: Lecture delivered at the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, March 1958

Like Picasso, Nicholson, and Modersohn-Becker, Marc Chagall sometimes created pictures of the humble. In his case, these included his own relatives and neighbors that he knew as a child on the poor side of Vitebsk, a Russian town. Because Vitebsk was a memory for Chagall during most of his life, the painter’s view of Vitebsk street scenes and family gatherings are assumed by the viewer to be that of a child, a kind of shortcut into a child’s mind. Additionally, Chagall did some illustration work associated with childhood. For example, Chagall’s friend, Blaise Cendrars, included his work in a Parisian exhibit of Soviet Illustrators of Children’s books in 1929, for a book, “Le Conte du coq et du chevreau” published in Russia in 1917, and for 120 illustrations in gouache technique inspired by La Fontaine’s Fables commissioned by Ambroise Vollard in the 1920s.1 Partly because his paintings were an early influence on Maurice Sendak and more generally because many illustrators use bright color and buoyancy to signify exuberant emotion, some of the characteristic motifs of his painting—the flying people, the windows, the droll animals—have come to seem natural in children’s book illustration. Chagall’s paintings were early identified as a repository of hope to the world around them. As Yakov Aleksandrovich Tugendhold, Chagall’s mentor and friend who co-authored the first book written about Chagall in 1916/1917, noted, Chagall’s paintings are “childlike” defi ned as both acute and spiritually visionary: he “sees the real world sharply and senses another world beyond it” “Only ‘a childish poetic sensibility’ can introduce us to the true world.” 2 This earliest view of the young painter was sustained through a long career. For example, writing in the 1990s, long after World War II had destroyed Vitebsk 127

128 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde and decimated European Jewry, Mircea Eliade says that “Chagall’s world, this maternal and primeval Nature, inhabited by engaged couples, donkeys, and angels, is the mythological and sacred world of childhood.” 3 When discussing his career in his much later life, a career that manifested itself in biblical illustration and stained-glass religious windows executed well into his eighties, Chagall mentioned that “perhaps, I too at times have been beset by doubts. I painted pictures upside down. I cut off heads and hacked my subjects to bits, left floating in the air in my pictures.”4 The “times” Chagall mentions were most notably those concerned in this discussion: the years between 1910 and 1917, when Chagall was exploring the various paths that the Parisian avantgarde was taking and simultaneously painting pictures of his now-abandoned childhood home. These years, closest to his real childhood, are also closest to our experience of children’s literature.

Vitebsk Chagall was born in the town of Vitebsk, a town in the Russian Pale of Settlement. As Benjamin Harshav notes, Vitebsk was not a small village (although it can seem that way in Chagall’s paintings), and it was a much more cosmopolitan and less orthodox Jewish environment than the town of Lyozno from which his family had originally come; for example, the domed building that represents Vitebsk in many of Chagall’s paintings is the Spaso-Preobrazhensky (Church of the Transfiguration).5.6 Harshav says that the “lost world” of Jewish orthodoxy was already lost when Chagall was born: he was part of the “Modern Jewish Revolution” that had primarily abandoned orthodoxy and embraced Russian literature and European ideals.7 Chagall’s fi rst language was, for example, Yiddish, but he never learned Hebrew, and—with his siblings—stopped practicing religion at the age of 13; his parents, however, kept the orthodox traditions, identified as a northern and distinctive branch of Hasidism.8 The repression that took place in the Pale of Settlement—which forbade land ownership and restricted the living places, opportunities, education, and travel of Jewish people within a large area (Vitebsk is in Belarus today)—was not enough to prevent many determined young people of Chagall’s generation from seeking a better and freer life and making important contributions to the Russian Revolution and to Western culture and science. But, as Harvath notes, it was characteristic for these emigrants to look back at their grandparents’ lives to discover things of value in that lost world.9 In many ways, however, it is incongruous to use Chagall’s paintings for sentimental purposes. Chagall strengthened the association between his art and childhood himself. He wrote an account of his boyhood for the first time during impoverished years in Russia after the Revolution (perhaps 1922). He made illustrations for this book, as well as for his wife, Bella’s, later (1946) autobiography of her own

Marc Chagall • 129 girlhood in Vitebsk, Burning Lights.10 Bella was consciously writing to commemorate and preserve: My old home is not there anymore. Everything is gone, even dead. My father, may his prayers help us, has died. My mother is living—and God alone knows whether she still lives—in an un-Jewish city that is quite alien to her. The children are scattered in this world and the other, some here, some there. But each of them, in place of his vanished inheritance, has taken with him, like a piece of his father’s shroud, the breath of the parental home. . . . I want very much to wrest from the darkness a day, an hour, a moment belonging to my vanished home.11 Chagall also may have intended to commemorate by the time he worked on the illustrations for Bella’s book, because the manuscript was fi nished just before she died in America, where they had fled after the fall of France. But that was not an intention that shows itself in his own, much earlier, work. The accounts vary greatly, as did the childhoods. Bella Chagall was the daughter of a jeweler, and her book is a year-long recollection of traditionally celebrated religious holidays in a loving home. Marc Chagall’s father was employed at a herring packer’s, and his mother rented small wooden houses and ran a grocer’s shop to support her eight children, of whom Chagall was the oldest. Religious piety and the family is, at best, a skewed and sardonically treated memory in his story, although his mother and some early mentors are remembered with gratitude. The community of Vitebsk, as experienced by both Chagalls, then, is available in print and in book illustrations, as well as in the paintings that Chagall created over many years. When he was trapped in Vitebsk, away from Paris, by the outbreak of World War I, he made over 60 drawings that he called “documents” during this prolonged stay. Because Chagall did not ordinarily paint from nature in a physically realistic way, these works are substantially different from the works that came before or after them. They worked as a repository of images to ground the subsequent paintings, even when Chagall was far away, while also associating Chagall forever with his childhood self. It seems curious that Chagall would write an autobiography at so early an age, but there are explanations that support it. Harshav suggests that one reason might be that the Chagall paintings were mysterious to viewers, and Chagall thought it best to explain something about them—an impulse that also motivated Henri Rousseau.12 Or it might speak to the need to make sense of his life for himself, because the story would inevitably include the quick rise to fame in the art world that Chagall had achieved, from a background in which he did not know that painters existed.13 In writing this autobiography, which is fragmented, enigmatic, and poetic–Modernist—in style, Chagall was not alone. For example, Edvard Munch, his older contemporary and another painter critical to the development of Expressionism in Germany, kept a

130 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde journal at the original behest of Hans Jaeger, who had told the Oslo Bohemian circle to “write your life.” Munch also painted traumatic childhood moments over and over during his adulthood. Additionally, at a time with dwindling support for life, let alone art supplies—Russia, after World War I and the Revolution—a journal could be an alternative creative outlet. How a talent develops was, as noted in the previous discussions of pedagogy, a matter of public interest at the time: in general, as well as in the case of this unusual painter. And one might also say that the Pale of Settlement was already well established as a site for popular tales of growing up—a subject that had already found an audience. Mark Twain’s contemporary, Sholom Aleichem’s, humorous stories of shetl life were internationally popular (stories from about 1883 until his death in 1916, with some of the most popular series in the 1890s), and many of the stories involve children as characters. Finally, although a warning not to interpret his life story in a psychoanalytical way occurs at the beginning of his autobiography, the contemporary interest in Freud would also increase audience interest in childhood memories.

Paris Chagall left Russia for Paris in 1910/1911, when he was about 23. He found a new life and new artistic methods: “My training has been French. I detest the Russian or Central European color. Their color is like their shoes. Soutine, myself—all left because of the color. I was very dark when I arrived in Paris. I was the color of a potato, like Van Gogh. Paris is light.”14 In Chagall’s case, the heady atmosphere of a city where art was important and artistic style was evolving in exciting ways was co-equal with his first taste of political equality. The ability to become a free man, as well as a painter, resonates in his discussion of the light of France. As in the case of the other painters mentioned here, the Louvre was the major influence; like Nicholson, and unlike Modersohn-Becker, he did not pursue formal classes long. It is usual to discuss the lightening of his palette colors, his introduction to gouache technique, his experiments with aspects of Cubism and Vorticism, and his fi nal conviction that anything that worked only with the outside of natural objects and people—as, in his opinion, Cubism did—was too restricted for a painter who wished to convey their inner reality.15 In spite of poverty, being unable to speak French, and sometimes being rejected as he energetically sought to enter his paintings in the salons, Chagall’s climb to recognition was much quicker and his acceptance much broader than that of any other twentieth-century painter. Nonetheless, Chagall looked back to his childhood in Vitebsk, and his early paintings are composed of clusters of images representing the town that he had left, images that continued in his paintings until nearly the end of his life.

Marc Chagall • 131 Childhood and Animals at Home Chagall’s memoirs and early pictures make a connection that children’s literature scholars often make between children and animals on the grounds of their mutual vulnerability. Chagall himself made the connection at a youthful age, and for this reason alone his memoirs are tragic rather than sweet. We find in the opening paragraphs of Chagall’s autobiography that he had a miraculous birth—a great fire starts the very moment he was born. But the occasion was, at the least, a serio-comic one: But first of all, I was born dead. . . . I didn’t want to be alive. Imagine a pale bladder that doesn’t want to live in the world . . . As if it were glutted with Chagallian pictures. They pricked it with pins, revived it, threw it into a bucket of water, and finally it gave out a squeal. But what’s important is that I was born dead. I certainly don’t want the psychologist to draw any unfavorable interpretation for me . . . Please! 16 The baby’s willpower, rather than some physical infirmity, nearly defeats the midwife: “I didn’t want to be alive.” Only a lot of unpleasant bullying drags him into the mortal world. “As if it were glutted with Chagallian pictures” reminds the reader that Chagall’s early pictures were not of moments of splendid celebration. The child was confronted, as everyone is, with a variety of unpalatable realities, which he could accept or reject. The most painful reality concerned the permitted sacrifice of animals to sustain human life. The early picture, The Drunkard (1911/1912), for example, is partly a discussion of this topic. The drunkard, himself, has been beheaded—a violent image. The head with whirling eyes floats above his body, which holds a knife. The table before him, though, has an indignant looking live chicken on the plate and a whole fish lying on the tablecloth, instead of a cooked meal. The implication, it seems, is the injustice that the animals—were they, in fact, cooked—would have died for this wasted life. To Russia, Asses and Others (1911/1912) raises the animal exploitation issue again.17 The picture shows an angry-faced red cow on the left hand side, in the position of the Capitoline Wolf, with a child and a young animal suckling in the positions of Romulus and Remus. On the right-hand side, above them, a large milkmaid is floating in the sky with a milk pail. Her head is cut off and floating above her. Her body is pierced with bull’s-eye-shaped marks, and the dome of the church below in the town also has broken pieces in it. Although the marks are sometimes interpreted as stars (a kind of dairymaid constellation), the headless woman, the angry cow, the building damage, the very suggestive shape of the “stars,” and the strong colors are all violent, disturbing features. Daniel E. Schneider, who offered a Freudian interpretation at mid-century, and called the Dairymaid the “weaner,” resented by Nature, is closer than many to the situation.18

132 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde The nurturing one, the cow, is oppressed. This reading is reinforced by the memories that the Chagalls relate about their early lives. Oppression comes in many forms, but the issue of animals is conveyed as the most traumatic and as a metaphor for the others (see Figure 5.1). Marc Chagall’s maternal grandfather was a butcher in the orthodox Jewish tradition, and Chagall’s recounts a childhood memory of being present when a cow is killed: In grandfather’s stables stood a young cow, with a little bulging belly, gazing somewhat stubbornly. Grandfather goes to her and says: “Well, listen, give me your legs. We have to tie them. We need merchandise, meat, you hear?” She falls down with a sigh. I stretch my hands to her, stroke her chin, whisper a few words to her, tell her not to be afraid—I won’t eat any meat . . . What else could I do . . . She hears the waves passing through the rye and beyond the fence is a blue sky. But the black-and-white butcher with the slaughtering knife is already rolling up his sleeves. You barely hear a blessing. He stretches her head and jerks the steel into her throat . . . A gush of blood. Then it’s quiet. They separate the intestines, remove the cuts of meat, the hide falls off. Pink colors flow, bleeding colors . . . Steam rises . . . What a professional skill is in his hands! I like that. I want to eat meat.19

Figure 5.1 Marc Chagall. The Cowshed (1917). Hannover, Sprengel Museum © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Marc Chagall • 133 The boy in the text identifies with the cow at her moment of death. On the one hand, he is traditional to do so because the scene resembles the directions for religious sacrifice in the Bible, in which the person offering the animal places a hand on its head to symbolize the fact that the animal is being sacrificed to expiate his sins. Chagall’s hand on her muzzle, showing his sympathy, is also this symbolic gesture. It ambivalently juxtaposes the tacit interchangeability of the domestic animal and the humans with whom it shares a life to his childhood culture’s understanding that the killing is divinely sanctioned. This scene is an uncompromising statement of an issue rehearsed throughout children’s literature from, notably, the Georgian period to Chagall’s time. As James Turner, Roxanne Harde, Gene Myers, Susan Pearson, and Mitzi Myers (among many others) have noted, the nineteenthcentury literary child, as well as the child reader, interacted with animals in many ways, in many decades, within the public mind.20 As Mitzi Myers notes, a child’s sympathy with animals was a moral touchstone in dozens of tales: good children are kind to animals, bad children aren’t, and are frequently horribly punished.21 Kindness to animals falls short, however, of the situation we fi nd in Chagall’s memory. Some kindness-to-animals writers, biblically trained, specifically deny the interchangeable identity of child and animal. For example, Sarah Trimmer’s mother in the Robin stories makes it clear that animals are under man’s dominion and are ordained for his needs, but their good treatment is still a priority. 22 This view was the conservative Christian standpoint on the issue. One could argue, however, that in making the robins resemble the human family, Trimmer blurred the dichotomy. The writers on animal “rights,” in contrast, based animals’ ability to have rights upon their resemblance to human beings. Aaron Garrett, for example, notes that Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), sometimes called an influence upon the American Declaration of Independence, saw a relationship between animals and children: ’tis plain there is something in certain tempers of Brutes, which engages our liking, and some lower Good-will and Esteem, tho’ we do not usually call it Virtue, nor do we call the sweeter dispositions of Children Virtue; And yet they are so very like the lower Kinds of Virtue, that I see no harm in calling them Virtues.23 Such late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century moral philosophers inspired the late eighteenth-century political revolutions, as well as the abolition of slavery and related rights movements. Although Mrs. Barbauld’s position upon animals is more ambiguous than the following quotation suggests, her “A Mouse’s Petition” (not to be used in her friend, Joseph Priestley’s, oxygen experiments), intentionally evokes the mouse’s relation to the Rights of Man:

134 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde If e’er thy breast with freedom glow’d, And spurn’d a tyrant’s chain, Let not thy strong oppressive force A free-born mouse detain. 24 And she does this by, among other things, suggesting that all Soul is one, divided into individual portions among living things. As is the case with other writers for children in this era, to Mrs. Barbauld the issues of the rights of Man, the rights of Woman, the rights of enslaved Africans, the rights of religious dissenters, and (in this case) the rights of animals were issues that could spring naturally from each other. The efforts of writers to sensitize children to the cruelties thoughtlessly or maliciously visited on birds (shot or nests robbed), puppies and kittens (tin cans tied to tails), flies (wings torn off), and so on coincided with (or prepared for) the first wave of legislation in Germany and England to protect domestic and household animals that continued through the nineteenth century.25 The consideration of animals and humans as near relations was also reinforced by the resemblance of their physical being, made more familiar by the interest in natural science that characterizes the century. Londa Schiebinger notes the significant (and upsetting) change that marked Linnaeus’s choice of “mammals” to identify the group of animals to which man belongs (1758).26 This classification, concurrent with Rousseau’s influential insistence on breastfeeding in Émile (1762), allowed the nourishing breast to carry tender and religious associations over into the animal kingdom. That humans were classified within the group denied the absolute barrier between humans and beasts and “humanized” the beasts. The public attention to this concept might help to explain the great popularity of French caricaturist J.J. Grandville’s The Metamorphoses of the Day (1829) and Scenes from the Private and Public Life of Animals (1842), which influenced such illustrators as John Tenniel (who uses a similar technique in Through the Looking Glass). Grandville combined scientifically accurate animal heads with fashionably dressed human bodies in a witty commentary on society. As Bryan Holme notes, “Grandville’s unique contribution lay not only in his use of animal forms to realize his penetrating insight into human foibles, but also in his ability to discern the humorous characteristics of both humans and animals to the point of finding the two inseparable.”27 Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), of course, further solidified the inter-connection of all life forms and their mutual dependence. One might say that Alfred Caldecott’s Some of Aesop’s Fables with Modern Instances Shewn in Designs by Randolph Caldecott (1883) applies this new understanding, juxtaposing naturalistic animal with human societal illustrations, bringing the applications of fables to human life closer than in the “dressed animal” tradition.28 Feeling a close kinship with garden birds, horses, or companion animals, however, is a different category from the Chagallian issue of identifying with

Marc Chagall • 135 an animal that one is about to eat—killing animals for food. The children who witness the killing of domestic animals in children’s books are sometimes farm or pioneer children who might even (like Chagall) anticipate a feast as an outcome of the process, as, for example, Laura does in Little House in the Big Woods (1932). They are either shielded (like the readers) from the details, or portrayed as accustomed to its part in the agricultural year. E. Boyd Smith’s masterful Chicken World (1910), for example, caps his matter-of-fact rehearsal of chicken development with a roast chicken on the last page. But Harde in “Better Friends,” points out that the Canadian author Margaret Marshall Saunders (best known for her kindness-to-dogs novel Beautiful Joe [1861]) does include some sharp commentary on this point in her later stories. For example, (1920) a Shetland pony sees his ranch family “spending a morning rescuing a pet lamb from a wolf and petting him all afternoon. In between, they have lamb for lunch.”29 Such ambivalence also arises in Ethel Parton’s Tabitha Mary (1933), in which a much petted cosset lamb is killed and eaten as soon as it gets big enough to annoy the family, although the pet-owner is excused from the meal.30 And the farmyard mortality issue is discussed, but not resolved, by the enduring classic Charlotte’s Web (1952), alluded to most recently in Maurice Sendak’s Bumble-Ardy (2011). The characterization perhaps closest to Chagall’s memory, however, was an eighteenth-century reader that had a strong effect on nineteenth-century children’s stories. M. Myers notes that Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Lessons for Children (1778/1779) contains a “startling” number of dead animals, a number of them killed by people (others by cats or similar carnivores).31 Her discussion of sport is reminiscent of Alexander Pope’s in “Windsor-Forest” (1713).32 For example, in Volume 4 (for children from three to four years) Little Charles’s attention is drawn to the sport of coursing hares: Then the hounds come up, and tear her, and kill her. Then when she is dead, her little limbs, which moved so fast, grow quite stiff, and cannot move at all. A snail could go faster than a Hare when it is dead: and its poor little heart that beat so quick, is quite still and cold; and its round full eyes are dull and dim; and its soft furry skin is all torn and bloody. It is good for nothing now but to be roasted.33 This experience is not offered with overt moral commentary but instead seems to fall under the heading of the natural order: “Men eat everything, corn, and fruit, and mutton, and fish, and eggs, and milk, and chickens.”34 Yet Myers’ contention that “so many unhoused or dying animals” work as “a gendered subtext—a woman’s experience of marginality and helplessness”35 appears convincing in Barbauld’s case, as well as directly applicable to Chagall’s story. Chagall is not a farm child, and he is unusually sensitive to imbalances of power between those of different ages, genders, and classes, as well as to animal life.

136 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Chagall’s conviction that “She hears the waves passing through the rye and beyond the fence is the blue sky,” is a statement of the kind of identification that influenced contemporary animal protectionists: the likeness between the child and the vulnerable animal. This was the reasoning of the animal protection societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, who expanded their animal saving activities to include children. As Elbridge T. Gerry noted in 1882, “The protection of children and the protection of animals are combined because the principle involved, i.e., their helplessness, is the same; because all life is the same, differing only in degree of development and expression; and because each profits by association with the other.”36 Gerry (1837–1927) was the legal advisor to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, famous for arguing the case of the child Mary Ellen McCormack—whose abuse by her mother was prosecuted under the animal protection law—before the Supreme Court of New York (1874).37 He subsequently founded the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1875). This kind of identification, however, naturally makes eating animals less easy to justify. The issue of humane slaughter of domestic animals, however, also incorporates another cultural issue. Sander L. Gilman’s article about Franz Kafka’s 1916 journal, “Kafka wept,” reminds us that the Chagalls’ lives also intersected with a turn of the century wave of European anti-Semitism disguised, in some cases, by righteous indignation over kosher butchering.38 The old, terrible stories about blood sacrifice of Christian children (or, as Gilman notes, young women) were reinforced in the period by animal rights’ activists proving the heartlessness and separateness of Jewish culture from the more humane cultures of the country (which, due to this century of reform movements, were required by law to stun animals before slaughter), while protesting animal pain. The question of which method of slaughtering cattle gives less pain seems to be a matter of individual skill and conscientiousness, frequently not found in large-scale commercial operations. No system is uniformly successful, and each system is about killing. Gilman’s reading of Kafka suggests that he, like some other Jewish artists, obsessively repeated somewhat caricatured versions of this violence in his stories and diaries because kosher slaughtering was the public marker of the Jews’ inability to become assimilated into the wider society, a matter of “blood,” in more senses than one. Chagall’s acquaintance with Chaim Soutine (and the publicity his animal carcass paintings excited—in the early period when they both were living near the Parisian slaughterhouses in La Ruche and later after Chagall’s return to Paris from Russia) gave him the opportunity to debate such matters. However, his introduction of the slaughter scene in both the early and late versions of his autobiography has more to do with the powerless child’s resistance to the natural order than to cultural issues. It is not the cow’s pain or suffering (neither are mentioned), but the cow’s sacrifice and his own reaction to it that is the source of meaning.

Marc Chagall • 137 The autobiography and the picture record recount Chagall’s despair and anger at the exploitation of the helpless: his status as a child, his grandmother’s as a wife, the peasants’ in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Distinctively, Harshav and others note that Chagall often painted himself (or spoke of himself) as an animal, sometimes as a cow: a change in gender as well as species.39 The symbolic use of animal sacrifice for human tragedy reached an apex when the slaughtering scene in the youthful autobiography became one of Chagall’s World War II paintings, Flayed Ox (1947). Here, the animal carcass with lolling tongue is displayed as in the crucifi xion, one of the terrible wartime pictures showing the blood sacrifice of the innocent with (because it contains a ritual butcher in the sky) the same idea of divine permission. The mystery of permitted sacrifice extends to the Holocaust, but the image is the same. Didier Schulmann says of the Flayed Ox, “Chagall waited more than fifty years to record this childhood memory in his painting . . . As the philosopher Élisabeth de Fontenay has noted of Chagall’s artistic predecessors, “When Rembrandt and Soutine portray a flayed cow or a side of beef, they practice a form of humanism; through their painting they express piety toward those killed so that men might be nourished” (Le Figaro, mars 6, 2001). Chagall’s treatment of animal sacrifice, both in his memoirs and his painting, reveals a similar sentiment.”40 The image of the slaughtered cow of childhood returned in Chagall’s maturity to visually articulate his grief over the slaughtered innocents of World War II. Any idea that the painting somehow regularizes the sacrifice or that it resolves the tensions of the fundamental problem of the slaughter of innocence, is not borne out, however, by this painting. Indeed, as in the crucifi xion paintings, the inefficacy of religion and religious example to reform the world is more obviously the point. Bella Chagall’s memories of childhood animals reinforce her husband’s, and in children’s literature may have had the stronger direct influence. The lengthiest animal passage in her autobiography, again, is devoted to her family’s cow which, like Chagall’s, “talked to us”:

The horses’ stable is at least open, they always have fresh air. But the cow is locked up like a thief in prison. A beautiful red animal—and people are ashamed of her. Her shed is dark, dirty; it is situated in the corner of the yard, next to the garbage box. Its walls are thin. The slightest wind blows through them. Rain spatters in through the cracks. A large hole in the door serves the cow as a little window. Through it I gaze at her. She lies there without strength, her belly and legs sunk into the dirty straw. A swarm of flies are biting her. The cow does not stir; she might be a pile of garbage. . . . Now one ear lifts, now the other droops. The cow perceives every noise that comes from the courtyard. In her quiet, day-long sadness, she slowly ruminates each sound separately. She has a wet, weeping snout.

138 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde Her eyes are full of tears that stay in the corners. Only now and then a tear rolls down her long nose. I cannot endure her gaze. Like a heavy stone, it weighs on my heart, as though it were my fault that she is locked up. “M-m-mu—m-m-mu,” I whisper to her through the dark hole. “M-m-mu—m-m-mu,” she answers heavily and slowly, and now stares at me with quiet joy because someone remembers her.41 Bella’s sympathy for the red cow and her recognition of its ability to feel and communicate resembles that of Anna Sewell’s in Black Beauty (1877)—both give a portrait of a time and place in which animals must be kept by all, permitting the kind of household that nowadays forgets to check fuel injectors and change the oil to practice on living creatures. Bella’s heartbreak reminds us, too, that by the time that Sewell’s protest against the bearing rein was written, the child members of “bands of mercy” were already a multitude, with more on the way. Two mid-twentieth-century picture books appear to be (perhaps unwitting) responses to Bella Chagall’s autobiography. The books by Ruth Krauss and Doris Orgel include little girls who are able to enter the “shed” and succor the animals.42 Maurice Sendak’s illustrations of these works show a Marc Chagall influence, as Selma Lanes and George Bodmer note.43 In Sarah’s Room (1963) by Orgel, Jenny, during a floating dream sequence, first talks with a sad glass cow shut up in her older sister’s forbidden bedroom. Later, when she has grown enough to be admitted to the room, she returns and solaces the cow with a thimble full of real grass.44 The Krauss story, Charlotte and the White Horse (1955), contains a shed with a white horse in it, that has Chagallian flowers (like those at the bottom of I and the Village) penetrating the shed wall and villagers floating out of windows during an evocation of the Song of Songs. The story of the little girl’s encounters with the little horse in the shed ought to be, and is, less upsetting than those of Bella or Marc Chagall—no one is neglected or killed. But the most powerful page in the story comes when the father determines to sell the horse so that Charlotte’s little brother can go to college: “Now just sadness is coming in, now just sadness is coming in.” The child’s slumped shoulders and hidden face evoke the pathos of Bella’s story. But it becomes a happy story: the father listens to Charlotte’s plea and doesn’t sell the horse, and the horse’s tears are happy tears: The tears come up in his eyes And they run down streaking his face.45 In both cases, the children acquire enough power to change things for their kindred animals. Chagall’s illustrations of La Fontaine’s fables show his sympathetic rendering of every kind of animal, but the early Chagall animals are barnyard animals, and their presence is due to their sacrifice for human lives, as well as

Marc Chagall • 139 to their symbolic relation to human emotions: cows for simple folk or maternal care, roosters for sexual desire, and so on.46 Chagall’s identification with animal life is unique, but Modersohn-Becker’s life force deserves mention as a related idea. Neither painter was religious in conventional ways, but both were unusually aware of the sacrifice demanded by Life, and yet fi lled with love for this Natural order. The calling of an artist was, therefore, to celebrate Life and to be worthy of its sacrifices.

Vitebsk: Home and Away One of the reasons that Chagall’s work as a painter seems allied to children’s literature is because his life and works are so often discussed in terms of motifs that we associate with children’s literature or illustration. For example, Chagall scholars often divide his life by physical location (as here), emphasizing the home and away binary with chapter headings indicating the themes associated with each country. Because Vitebsk equaled childhood in this equation, the biographical details that give way to adult concerns in the studies of other painters became the central point that many know about him: Chagall was a child in Vitebsk. Indeed, that Chagall seems to fit the structure of a children’s story may be due to the desire of some of his biographers or critics to see him as a child: a visionary child who told a truth that others needed to hear. It may also be that Chagall was the kind of person who required solicitude from more “adult” companions all his life. There is undoubtedly a great deal of subjectivity in the way that the story of his life and art is interpreted in the hands of different tellers, based upon his inclusion of his “home,” Vitebsk, in his paintings until near the end of his life. The late nineteenth-century Anglophone children’s book is sometimes discussed in terms of a differentiation between books for girls, who often seemed to be encouraged to stay at home or find a home, and boys, who were often encouraged to explore or create various empires. The home and away aspect of children’s literature, however, is arguably a fundamental concern of the genre, as Perry Nodelman has argued.47 As he notes in his most recent investigation of this binary opposition, “In my own previous work in this area I have moved toward the conclusion that the pattern is worth paying attention to exactly because of the ways in which it works to attach opposing values to home and to being away from home, forcing child protagonists to confront the difference and make choices between the opposed values in terms of how they understand what they mean and, consequently, which of the two places they would rather be in.”48 The struggle, as he concludes, is necessarily ambivalent. Chagall painted bits of Vitebsk into paintings covering many decades. Yet he was simultaneously aware, in the early years discussed here, that—in a life that included both fences and windows—Vitebsk often represented “fences”49 (see Figure 5.2). Obvious fences such as lack of civil rights and lack of oppor-

140 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde

Figure 5.2 Marc Chagall. View from Window, Vitebsk (1914/1915). State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris.

tunity are fundamental: Chagall depended upon his mother’s ability to bribe a high school teacher for his education and false travel documents from a wealthy patron to be able to move to Petrograd for art school. Moreover, his environment could not foster the abilities that he came to realize that he had, neither by monetary help for art training nor by appreciation for the arts. Children’s literature from the turn of the century frequently delineates fences in the home environment. Fences are often composed of gender expectations that allow too little freedom of choice for boys or girls, annoyances

Marc Chagall • 141 such as starch in Sunday collars and lack of stirring adventure, or too great a societal emphasis on hypocritical or unexamined customs. The degree to which the child in the story personally realizes the full array of obstacles, however, is often limited; we often note them instead. This is because without an obvious and publically acknowledged “territory” to set out for, knowledge of limitations depends upon knowledge of possibilities. Chagall’s early recognition of his own situation bears a comparison to Kate Douglas Wiggin’s satiric and pointed commentary on Maine villages because her narrative voice, unlike that of some of her more nostalgic contemporaries, tells and retells the tale of capable or talented people entrenched in cultures that fail to see the beautiful or visionary good: Poor misplaced, belittled Lorenzo de Medici Randall, thought ridiculous and good-for-naught by his associates, because he resembled them in nothing! If Riverboro could have been suddenly emptied into a larger community, with different and more flexible opinions, he was, perhaps, the only personage in the entire population who would have attracted the smallest attention.50 The feeling Chagall brought to the fences of Vitebsk, however, was not initially that of a humorous adult narrator such as Wiggin’s. Chagall’s autobiography is painful, his images grotesque. Sholom Aleichem’s autobiography, serialized in an American Yiddish journal the year before his death in 1916, has, as his translator notes, a “sunny atmosphere and good humor,” even when discussing serious family shortcomings, such as his abusive step-mother.51 In Chagall’s autobiography, on the other hand, and in the paintings closest to his childhood, the tensions are there. Of the family he left behind, it is Chagall’s father whose relation to him seems most fencelike, both in his lack of response to his oldest son, and also as an example of what Chagall dreaded might happen to himself. Although the surroundings in Vitebsk may have seemed exotic to his more Westernized friends, the story is David Copperfield, by way of Dickens’ own life. Chagall’s father’s father was known for religious piety. But strict religious observance did not prevent this grandfather from apprenticing his son, Chagall’s father, as a clerk in a herring concern. And this employment was not, in truth, really that of a clerkship: Chagall’s father carried 120- to 160-pound barrels of herring around all day, exhausting himself and demoralizing his son, who wanted to see him rebel against this situation and get a better life for them all. Although Chagall attempts to be balanced in his approach (“What is the worth of a person who has no worth: an inestimable personality. And precisely because he was of no value, I have a hard time finding suitable words for him”), and repeatedly apologizes in direct address to his father, it is clear that his father’s acquiescence to this hard fate made him terrified for his own.52 As David Copperfield notes,

142 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde I know enough of the world, now, to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything, but it is matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf.53 Chagall’s father’s lack of will to save Chagall encourages disdain for religious precept that seems to have no active compassion. Other than shifting herring, we only hear of Chagall’s father rising early to attend his prayer house to recite the Kaddish for “some dead man or other,” fi xing himself tea, falling asleep on the table, and addressing cold remarks to his son.54 Father is portrayed by Chagall as happy to have no further responsibility for him after his Bar Mitzvah (“Blessed is He who released me”), but Chagall keeps telling himself, “I am still a child.”55,56 Father gives him 20 rubles to go to Petrograd, but he tosses it so that Chagall has to retrieve it from the ground: With how many tears and with what dignity did I collect the paper Rubles father threw on the table for me (I forgive him, that’s how it’s given here). He had the highest intentions, and the Rubles flew over the other side of the table. I bent down and collected them. To my father’s questions of what, actually, it was and why I was going, I answered that I was going to study in an . . . art school. I don’t remember my father’s answer or the expression on his face. As usual, he got up right away to set the samovar, warning me on the way that, in general, he had no money, and there was nothing to send me. Don’t hope for any.57 Chagall’s bitterness about this situation contrasts with his fervent appreciation for his mother (who bribed the Russian school official with the “reasonable” sum of 50 rubles and took him to see the only local artist for appraisal and lessons). He appreciated the painters and patrons who showed him that a wider life was possible. His drawing of Father with the herring barrel and samovar is not an affectionate portrait, but it has more dignity than the father portrayed as creeping out from under the bed in Birth (1910), Father peeing against the house, or fussing at the children for relieving themselves against the fence because they are too afraid to use the outhouse at night.58–60 Harvath notes that the pictures of children squatting with bare bottoms appear in a number of more “romantic” paintings, and these seem humorously carnivalesque.61 Father (and grandfather) portrayed in such a way, however, indicates the resentment of a gifted child, who, like David Copperfield, “was so conscious of the waste of any promise I had given.”62 And yet, Chagall could not imagine himself without Vitebsk, in spite of his success in and appreciation for other places. And so Vitebsk also represented “windows,” an image repeated many times in his painting. William Moebius

Marc Chagall • 143 has noted the omnipresence of windows, gates, and doors in children’s literature. He notes that they represent “the unspoken meanings of thresholds,” but the meaning of the thresholds are not uniform.63 Windows in Chagall’s paintings sometimes function as a metaphor for the world of art, an escape from the narrow place of his youth. In the early Parisian masterwork, Paris through a Window (1913), for example, the city scene with the Eiffel Tower and a parachutist is viewed through a colorful window whose planes of sky represent a new art form as well as a new place. But the picture is an enlargement of the window in the Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers of the previous year, in which the image of the window is balanced by a thought balloon image over the artist’s head in which Vitebsk is pictured, as the painter composes the cow and dairymaid picture on his easel. Windows are an often repeated motif in Chagall’s paintings, and they also are important in children’s works contemporary with his early work. Every period has memorable windows, but some of the Golden Age ones are magic casements. For example, it is through the “round window” in Heidi’s hayloft (1880), that Klara first sees the stars; the garret window of Sara Crewe (A Little Princess, 1905) provides her with an enchanted perspective, as well as being the means for Ram Dass to enter and change her life. Mytyl and Tytl see the children’s Christmas party through their window at the beginning of their adventures in Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird (1908); Anne (1908) opens the sash of the bedroom window at Green Gables when she arrives, “which went up stiffly and creakily, as if it hadn’t been opened for a long time,” and finds that the broad, natural vista is “as lovely as anything she had ever dreamed.”64 Peter Pan’s Neverland (1904) is reached through a nursery window, which Mrs. Darling subsequently leaves unlatched.65 Selma Lanes calls the early portion of Maurice Sendak’s career as an illustrator his “window” period, partly because his career started with a job helping to design windows at F.A.O. Schwartz, partly because he practiced drawing children by looking out his apartment windows at Brooklyn children, such as Rosie, playing on the block, and partly because some early works incorporate imaginatively conceived windows.66 Kenny’s Window (1956), a story with a chicken and a goat and a horse, has a protagonist whose bedroom window is the portal to adventure, defining who he is and what he wants. The utopia in Very Far Away (1957), is “many times around the block and two cellar windows from the corner,” a cellar reached through its window, where the hero and some others create perfect places that they would prefer to be.67 The narrator in I’d Like to Paint My Bathroom Blue (Krauss, 1956), fi lls the centerspread with many windows, as well as a door, and flies from room to room, inside and out, gathering friends and nature (an ocean, grass, and trees) for his house. The work of Sendak’s mature period contains more complex windows. Higglety-Pigglety-Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life (1967), In the Night Kitchen (1970), and Outside over There (1981), for example, sharply differentiate between the kinds of things that happen inside and outside of

144 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde windows. And the “outside” in these examples are primal situations: “experience,” in the words of Jenny the Sealyham. The uncompleted nature of the house structure in Bumble-Ardy (2011), which precludes the function of windows because the walls have neither substance nor the ability to separate life from death (or innocence from experience), similarly operates as a metaphor for the work. The recurring “windows” of Chagall’s Vitebsk can be seen in other ways, as well. The childhood images, the “source forms” of his art, were valuable because they were a child’s view of a life that many of his contemporaries in Paris could not remember, acknowledge, or know.68 “I had the good luck to spring from the people,” suggests a connection with the authentic.69 Moreover, the stories told by his father were also a window. Not religious rituals, which are portrayed as anti-social or empty in his autobiography, but the visual images of the Bible conveyed to him there in his childhood had power. Vitebsk, his father’s house, gave Chagall the conviction that life contains the divine. His differentiation from the surreal or from fantasy rests upon his conviction that both human emotion and the supernatural are the reality of daily life. For Chagall, imagination may fly out through the window, but “something mystical” is also coming in.70 Thus, Chagall’s work as a stainedglass artist, a creator of windows, is directly tied to his earliest paintings— and, by association, to children’s books, as well. That Chagall returned “home” also carries out a familiar motif in children’s stories; his “return,” though short, was almost embarrassingly satisfactory. When World War I broke out, Chagall, who was away from Paris negotiating exhibits in Germany and reuniting with his fiancée, Bella, in Vitebsk, could not return to Paris. So he was in Russia again, returned as an improbably successful painter to the place where Bella’s parents had disapproved of their daughter’s choice. He was able to marry, able to help his family, and able to document the buildings of his past. The dizzying celebration of his betrothed and his happy marriage (1915) begin in this era. Additionally, the Russian Revolution, which gave equal rights to all citizens of Russia, liberated the Jews of the Pale of Settlement (1917), and inspired more celebratory work. And, in September 1918, Chagall (as an avant-garde painter) was appointed Arts Commissar with the right to conduct artistic enterprises in Vitebsk, an appointment that briefly allowed money to be spent on revolutionary art. Chagall formed the Vitebsk People’s Art School and museum. Following the example of his own rescuer and mentor, Yuri Moiseevich Pen, he set out to rescue poor children with talent from his own childhood circumstances: “there exists a tape recording in which E.M. Royak, a tailor’s son, describes how he was recruited for the school thanks to his father’s skill at restitching the Arts Commissar’s jacket: the artist saw the boy’s drawings when he came to pick up the repair.”71 Chagall broadly announced the beginning of a new era in art for the people and took in and taught many students of talent who formed a thriving renaissance in Vitebsk. As a local columnist wrote in January of 1919:

Marc Chagall • 145 Hundreds of young people in Vitebsk dreamed for many years about canvas and palette. The crowded and stuffy studio of the artist Yu. M. Pen was their shelter. There, bright little fires ignited sometimes and were soon extinguished, unknown not just to the world of art, but also to our despondent and gray city. And suddenly the doors of a new temple of art opened wide. About 300 persons already registered in the Art College. All lovers of graphic art fi nd a shelter there. At the Art College, a communal workshop was opened, where many young Vitebsk artists work.72 That the Revolution valued Avant-Garde figurative art (or freedom) for only a brief couple of years, the country was almost immediately sunk in direst, life-threatening poverty, and Vitebsk had only “one brief shining moment” (1917–1922) did not diminish the privilege of this kind of second chance or life resolution for Chagall, who could later envision his father, too, as one who sought to escape from fences: I see again the poor house of my youth where, it seems to me, on the door and in the sky, until night, shone also a burning bush. But I was then

Figure 5.3 Marc Chagall. Over Vitebsk (1914). Kuntshaus, Zurich © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

146 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde only in the house of my parents. Around me there were, haunting me, the bustle of the household, my parents’ worries, my life when I felt so lonely and saddened by my father’s tiredness . . . My head started to turn at the sight of his calloused and chapped hands, of his worn-out look. Haunted by all that, I left by another way which is, maybe, the same way as my father’s who, on looking then at my drawings, thought that they were a continuation of the wall.73 Chagall notes that “we are all, in spite of our stammering, pursued by someone so that we will perform our duty.” Chagall’s father interpreted that duty/ escape as religious ritual. Chagall’s was art: “looking for light.”74

The Wandering Jew: Legends, Popular Culture, and Children’s Books There are a number of iterations of a bearded man with a sack over his shoulder in the sky in Chagall’s work, a kind of signal that the fantastic or fairytale tradition has intersected daily life (see Figure 5.3). This figure, as in Over Vitebsk, is often referred to as “the eternal Jew” or “The Wandering Jew,” and Chagall himself is frequently referred to in critical texts as a “wandering Jew,” a term that he sometimes used himself. Benjamin Harshav includes a nuanced discussion of the symbol in his Mark Chagall and His Times.75 He notes that the image can be seen as a self-criticism of the diaspora existence of Jews in a landless state (living “on air” or “in the air”), as might be seen in actual beggars in Chagall’s childhood Vitebsk. It can evoke the biblical Exodus or related ancient wanderings. It can also be called simply a contemporary depiction of the million Jews who were expelled from border areas in World War I and who “flooded Vitebsk during 1914–15.” It can be a Jewish peddler making an itinerant living. It can reflect the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century diaspora due to pogroms and political oppression. And it can be the appropriation of the image of the “Wandering Jew,” an image that had come to mean more than one thing by Chagall’s time. Horvath notes that Chagall interpreted himself in these terms: In July 1948, when Chagall leaves America with his young Christian wife Virginia Haggard to return to Paris, he writes in a letter to Opatoshu: “I am toiling on the peklakh [wanderer’s packages] together with the thin, young Virginia, who must also taste a bit of what it means to be a Jew with the sack on your back.”76 Horvath adds, “Surely this was no exile but a triumphant return of a famous artist to France, but in his self-perception, and in his internal Jewish correspondence, Chagall often saw himself as a homeless Jew.”77 As Joanna Brichetto notes in her thesis on “Jewish images of the Wandering Jew,” throughout his life, Chagall included the Wandering Jew in his paintings,

Marc Chagall • 147 either solely (Le Juif Errant [1923–1925]) or included in groups or witnessing events.78 Chagall’s use of such an image reflects the breadth of interpretations that the figure had come to represent. The National Socialists made a propaganda fi lm of the “Eternal Jew” in 1940 as a vehicle to incite anti-Semitic hatred, and thus the image is notorious. The legend, itself, however, has had a long and ambiguous history. The medieval Wandering Jew (first in print in the twelfth century) is a legend that had widespread popular Christian belief, but its focus or intention is somewhat varied. It concerned a man (sometimes called Ahasuerus) who scornfully refused to let Jesus stop and rest on the way to his Crucifi xion, and whom, therefore, Jesus ordered to walk the earth until the Day of Judgment (“I go, but you will walk until I come again”). The man, therefore, repents his lack of compassion during endless ages, never able to be at home in time or space, never to rest (or rest in death). The legend works, even at this level, in various ways. The man can be seen as a symbol of those who refused to recognize Jesus’ divinity and thus can incite religious conflict. Or he can be seen as uniquely unhappy as well as uniquely punished (unless his punishment recalls that of Cain). He can be evidence of divine power, presumably, or excite wondering pity. He is also the only living eyewitness to the Crucifi xion and in some versions of the story attests to the truth of Christ’s power, thus becoming a kind of missionary, who expects forgiveness at the Second Coming. He can be a rationalization, as Martin Gardner notes, to justify the belief that Jesus’ apparent reference to an early apocalypse is literally factual (“There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom”).79 Moreover, as a metaphor for the “eternal” nature of the Jewish people, the possibility of a positive, as well as hateful, interpretation exists. In the nineteenth century, ushering in Chagall’s own time, the interpretations varied much more widely but were equally ambivalent. Brichetto notes the extreme popularity and widespread dissemination of the 1602 chapbook entitled Kurtze Beschreibung under Eizehlung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahasuerus (A Brief Description and Narrative Regarding a Jew Named Ahasuerus), which was reprinted 86 times before the end of the eighteenth century, and translated into many other languages, an addition to our understanding of the intersection of this kind of popular culture and children’s literature.80 Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796), encouraged more nineteenth-century interest in retellings of the tale in the countries that embraced the gothic; both Hans Christian Andersen and Goethe adapted it, there is a ballad in the Child Ballad collection, it forms the basis of several folk expressions, and there are dozens more literary productions.81 While all iterations of the story fundamentally separate Jewish people from the mainstream of whatever society is represented, the character is variously characterized. Monk Lewis’ Wandering Jew figure was helpful, learned, and well-dressed. His forehead, bearing a burning crucifi x (which he ordinarily keeps covered), inspires terror. Percy Shelley, who met Lewis at the Diodati

148 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde house in the summer of 1816, saw the Wandering Jew as a Romantic hero, and readdressed the story several times. A Wandering Jew is among the “chimeras” added in mid-century to the Notre Dame Cathedral. Gustave Doré, who had made memorable illustrations for the similarly fated Ancient Mariner, also made a series of illustrations for Pierre DuPont’s poem, La Legende du Juif Errant (1856), which, like the Ancient Mariner illustrations, came out in an enormous format suitable for parlor-floor viewing. These illustrations were used for other projects, and eight of the series also became a commercial magic lantern show.82 Although Brichetto rightly notes that the Doré illustrations include the purse clutched to his chest, a bushy beard, and related symbolic accoutrement of the medieval legend, the world has changed around him. The tone of the illustrations is, arguably, “legendary,” stormy, and Romantic. Jan Goldstein’s article on “The Wandering Jew and the Problem of Psychiatric Anti-Semitism in Fin-de-Siècle France” notes that in the early part of the nineteenth century in France, the “Wandering Jew” had become a universal symbol, as well as a particular one, among the middle-class and élite culture.83 For example, he exemplified “the vanity of the human wish for immortality which, if satisfied, would bring only the inability to enjoy the ordinary pleasures of mortal life.”84 Or, if the Jew-as-outcast motif is retained, there are examples, such as the much-cited bestseller, Le Juif Errant (1844/1845) by Eugène Sue, in which “the title character rarely appears and, reflecting the author’s Fourierist and Saint-Simonian socialist beliefs, represents the cause of the oppressed worker.”85 Goldstein also cites Gustave Courbet’s painting The Meeting (1854), “which drew its iconography from the best-known of the popular woodcuts of the Wandering Jew,” presenting a self-portrait of the artist-as-Jew “juxtaposed to the established and secure position of his bourgeois patron.”86 Goldstein notes a change, however, when France was confronted by the exiled Jews who were escaping the 1881 Russian pogrom, and taking the French capital as their destination. This political issue led to a widely disseminated (in newspaper accounts and medical debates) variation in early psychopathology, which identified “wandering” with neurosis, as an addition to other vulnerabilities to neurasthenia attributed to Jewish people. Thus the “supernatural” aspect of the legend was stripped away to reveal the truth of Jewish névropathes voyageurs.87 The obvious protest that pogroms were the reason for “wandering,” was made; however, Goldstein concludes that contemporary Jews were apparently ambivalent about the various arguments, in part because neurasthenia was, of course, a condition that could be associated at the turn of the century with brilliance, a high degree of evolution, and energetic productivity. As Brichetto notes, however, the legend was also being re-written by the Jewish community itself. Within Chagall’s childhood, the most famous example of appropriation of the image is the picture painted in 1899 by Samuel Hirszenberg, which was reprinted in Jewish newspapers and (later) used as a symbol for Zionism. It portrays an elderly man rushing madly toward the viewer in a loincloth resem-

Marc Chagall • 149 bling that of Christ at the crucifi xion, beset by ranks of oppressive crosses and bodies of those persecuted by Christians: an image of suffering but one that redistributes the blame. Arguably the most interesting is Reuven Rubin’s (1893–1974) multi-layered work, Jésus et le Juif, or La Rencontre (1919), which portrays a worn out Jesus and Wandering Jew seated on a bench, unaware of each other’s presence because the Wandering Jew has hidden his face in his arms with his back to Jesus and Jesus is blind. The depiction of both as suffering (and resting) Jews, however, partly echoes Chagall’s similar conception of Jesus as both a remarkable Jew and a suffering Jew; Chagall painted a great many crucifi xions. Guillaume Apollinaire’s “The Wandering Jew,” published at approximately the same time that Chagall came to Paris in 1910, is of interest because Apollinaire was a friend and important encourager of Chagall (and many other avant-garde artists, including Henri Rousseau), and the subject of one of his remarkable early paintings: Homage to Apollinaire (1911/1912). Amy Ransom notes that the fairy tradition influenced several of Apollinaire’s early productions, which also included stories about the Lorelei and Merlin.88 Just four years after the final winding down of the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906, when Dreyfus was reinstated in the army), the Wandering Jew in the tale takes the narrator on a tour of Prague, discussing his identity in a cheerful fashion, and dismissing old myths: “the life I live is almost divine, and like that of Wotan, never sad.”89,90 He concludes, “Keep peace in your soul, and be wicked. The pious will be grateful to you. As for Christ! I have deceived him! It was he who placed me above humanity! Farewell!”91 The protagonist’s serious devotion to eating, dancing, and whoring (“he walked the whole time!”) is consistent with the tone of its decadent time period, but in connection to the legend, perhaps just another offensive variation.92 In contrast, a children’s story, The Crusaders: A Story of the War for the Holy Sepulchre (1905) by the Rev. A.J. Church, uses the Wandering Jew as a sympathetic framing narrator for a work decrying war, particularly war in the name of religion. As an eye-witness to history, a doctor, and an individual who loves Jerusalem, he is a convenient and benevolent spokesperson. As a sinner, his legendary misstep is gravely explained, but in terms that any religious reader would expect—that is, his fall from grace came from being willing, as a Jew, to take employment in the household of Pontius Pilate.93 Lack of attention to virtue came, basically, from the consciousness of guilt in so doing, and it amounts to an ordinary (and long ago) issue. Obviously the grave and virtuous narrator has worked out the problem before now, but, of course, he has worked it out in a way consistent with Christianity. His message is an anti-war protest.94 The issue of critics using the familiar legend to describe Chagall, however, requires a bit of scrutiny. As Harvath noted above, “Surely this was no exile but a triumphant return of a famous artist to France.”95 Because Chagall had, indeed, lived in many countries, but only the move from Nazi-occupied France to America in the 1940s was motivated by the special condition of

150 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde being an endangered Jew, Harvath’s wonderment is justified. Moreover, the use of the phrase implies a lack of subjectivity that is not characteristic of the painter, whose initial “away” emigration to Paris was so triumphantly not only voluntary but the right thing to do. [I would like to say here that my moves from country to country have always been dictated essentially by artistic considerations. I will not say that, like some other foreign painters, I could not adapt. On the contrary, in France, I had the signal honor of being invited to participate in international exhibitions in the French pavilions. And—forgive such presumptuous comparisons—would Van Gogh have been Van Gogh if he had stayed in Holland, Picasso in Spain, or Modigliani in Italy?]96 Thirty-five years ago, as a very young man, like thousands of others, I came to Paris to fall in love with France and study French art.97 In fact, Chagall-as-Wandering Jew, Chagall as worker, and Chagall-as-sacrificial animal are parts of the same decision, and it is a decision, not something simply inherited or given. The images represent the desire for solidarity with “the other,” and a closer relation with innocent suffering, as a fundamental artistic concern: To be an artist, to feel and understand the other—what do I feel and what do I understand? Perhaps I don’t understand myself. And sometimes you think you live far away from the world. But, on the contrary, I am in the same world as in a bathtub.98 To some extent, children’s literature scholars may be unusually attuned to the floating figure in Over Vitebsk, a painting that exists in many versions. While children’s literature may have acquired from its illustrators’ familiarity with Chagall’s work a kind of expectation that figures may float in pictures for reasons having to do with dreaming, for example, or exuberance, we are also aware that floating people are not, simply by reason of buoyancy, humorous. The peddler might be literally illustrating an idiom (“in the air” = homeless) in a way that a child might misunderstand it, for example, but the uneasiness caused by such a large, somber figure defying gravity nonetheless creates tension in the picture. The position and size of the figure, however, gives it more power than it would have had trudging by in a realistic way. Flying and floating often seem to be a matter of ambiguity, really, because they suggest an easy solution for problems or issues that a narrative raises but cannot solve. The flying children in the Sendak illustrations mentioned earlier use imagination to get the things they need; Jenny, too young and too short, flies high enough to reach the latch on her sister’s door, for example. The cats in Pilkey’s When Cats Dream, which incorporates details from the works of Henri Rousseau, as well as both Paris through the Window and I and the Village, fly out of their

Marc Chagall • 151 open back door, past their everyday fears, to a dream world of compensation and safe excitement. As Teya Rosenberg notes, Pilkey “simultaneously presents the process of entering the world of dreams and records an artistic movement that led to the visual representation of dreams.”99 But the acknowledgment that even cat life requires a great deal of compensation is not entirely cheerful. The kidnapped Africans in the Dillons’ illustration to The People Could Fly are beautiful, and they are rising from the ground, but they are grave and concerned, not ecstatic, and they are not “flying” by their own physical efforts.100 In contrast, Faith Ringgold’s Cassie, in Tar Beach (1992), is a heavy, but self-powered, presence in the skies over Harlem. What is she doing up there? Raised up by her will and imagination, she is claiming for herself and her family the good places that she loves in a city that has discriminated against her father.101 “Anyone can fly. All you need is somewhere to go that you can’t get to any other way.”102 In the case of Over Vitebsk, a picture that is not in thrall to a narrative, the omnipresence of sadness, the possibility that the figure represents mythic or religious surveillance, as well as power—perhaps through endurance—contribute to the image. The oppression that pervaded Chagall’s twentieth century had to, somehow, be accommodated so that love and art were possible. The presence of the tragic, as well as the happy, in Chagall’s early paintings makes them appropriate inspiration for serious as well as exuberant picture book moments. Susan’s Guevara’s use of Chagall’s The Dead Man (1908), for example, strikes the right note in Gary Soto’s Chato and the Party Animals (2000) because behind the frantic fear of Novio Boy’s friends as they search the East Los Angeles barrio is the tacit acknowledgement that they believe he has killed himself. Not realizing that his friends are creating a birthday for him, their homeless friend has wandered off alone. The Chagall picture was a childhood memory: his first view of someone dying. Chagall noted By the faint light from the night-lamp, I managed to make out a woman, alone, running through the deserted streets. She is waving her arms, sobbing, imploring the inhabitants, still asleep, to come and save her husband. . . . Our street is no longer the same.103 About this pre-Parisian painting in dark colors, Jackie Wullschlager notes, “Chagall always dated the start of his career to The Dead Man in 1908. The painting . . . predicts many strands that would characterize his mature work: the Jewish-Russian small-town setting; the harmony of contrasts; the sense of life as a theatre of the absurd; the visual image, distorted and disorientating, as a metaphor of a spiritual reality.”104 In the Guevara picture book, the narrative scene of distorted walls and figures too large in proportion to buildings, the anguish conveyed in simplified gesture, the absurdity of the fiddler on the roof (or, in other iterations, the street sweeper) and the dead man formally laid out on the pavement were substantially changed. Yet the

152 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde greater exaggeration, more folkloric motifs, and more obvious humor still carry the intensity of the situation, and—importantly for a book for children about depression and abandonment—“paint a street, with psychic forms but without literature.”105 Soto never has to spell out the nature of the crisis in the text, yet the emotion is there. Because Guevara acknowledges the intensity of fear and pain with allusion to the dark Chagall painting and because the barrio, like Vitebsk, exists in a

Figure 5.4 Marc Chagall. I and the Village (1911). Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Marc Chagall • 153 hostile world, the evocation of the most famous of Chagall’s Parisian paintings, I and the Village, (1914) successfully resolves Soto’s plot. As Rosenberg notes, the relief of Novio Boy’s sudden return is amplified by Guevara’s use of Chagall’s pose from the exuberant Onward! (The Traveller, 1917–1920), which leads to the loving confrontation of the cat friends in place of the cow and peasant in Chagall’s famous image.106 Simplified of many of the ambiguities of the original, using Mexican rather than Russian motifs, the image still carries the peaceful reassurance of the original painting. In the midst of the images emerging from the darker paintings of Russia into the world of Parisian light, I and the Village (see Figure 5.4) shows the life force, still absurd, coming together, momentarily, in a symmetrical unity: life/death, man/woman, animal/human, manmade/Nature made, nurturer/ nurtured, sun/moon, Christian/Jew, and growth/harvest. The painter may be the cow on the left. This early vision of harmony on the eve of war is a kind of shorthand explanation of a reflection of Mircea Eliade: “Chagall takes his place among the very few contemporary artists who have recovered the holiness that is present in the world and in human life. Thereby he takes his place among the few who have re-discovered happiness. . . . The work of Chagall shows us that it can be recovered.”107 Thus, the frequent concern of children’s literature—to portray a world in which Order, or perhaps more accurately, Meaning—is possible in life, would seem best served, if Chagall is the exemplar, by an attempt to integrate rather than separate the strands of life. The clarity that results from separation denies the irrational, art, and very likely, also denies the existence of holiness, if it is to be found in the way that Chagall finds it: We don’t even know exactly what kind of men Cimabue, Giotto, Masaccio, Rembrandt were. But very fortunate is the hour of our life when, facing them, we are moved to tears.108 Tony Kushner, writing of Sendak’s Brooklyn kids, says that they are “doing the tough work of holding themselves and their world together.”109 Chagall did not abandon the task.

Conclusion The painters considered in this book show us a multinational, multivalent array of reactions to the Parisian moment, and they are typical in their variety. Robert Rosenblum, Maryanne Stevens, and Ann Dumas in 1900: Art at the Crossroads note that the Exposition Universelle of 1900 represented a bewildering array of opposing and jostling ideologies and techniques.1 Love of art and Paris did not undo the forces hurtling the world toward the Great War, but it prompted many young people, reared during years of nationalistic antagonism, to open their hearts instead. The intersection of children’s culture and the avant-garde did not end either with the figures mentioned in this book or with the war, itself. Modernism and childhood were deeply intertwined in the following decades, although the ideas of children’s literature were involved to a lesser degree. Margaret Higonnet, in her article “Modernism and Childhood Violence and Renovation” surveys some of the notable groups that were interested in the conception of childhood in the post-Freudian era, as a metaphor for the forward looking in art, for the violence of the uncontrolled unconscious, and for the creativity that rebuilds.2 The interest in childhood is associated with the Russian Revolution, and such phenomena as the children’s theater in Vitebsk (1919) and the artists, like Chagall, working on books for young comrades.3 “Childhood” to the Russian neo-primitives, however, but not to Chagall, could also mean a denial of the value of the past and of the contemporary West, as exemplified in Parisian art, and a return to nationalistic roots.4 The wartime Dada group centered in Zurich, did not, like the neo-primitives, actually collect children’s drawings as inspiration, but, as noted by Jonathan Fineberg, thought of their anti-authoritarian, anti-war protest as childlike.5 Hannah Höch and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, for example, used dolls, puppets, and doll-like theatrical costuming in their various forms of ideological expression. The doll-like in Höch’s work sometimes expresses dissatisfaction with the position of women. The Swiss/German painter Paul Klee, a member of the Blue Rider (Blaue Reiter) group who later taught with Wassily Kandinsky at Bauhaus, also created 155

156 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde puppets and collected children’s drawings.6 His painting on the cover of this book, Senecio, is not about children or childhood, but it borrows from childhood for its stylized form. Indeed, Klee is perhaps the artist most involved in tracing creative roots and style to children’s art. The discovery of his own early drawings in an attic completely changed his artistic direction, and he nourished the connection with childhood throughout his career, retrospectively re-examining it during the last months of his life.7 The decades-long showing of children’s art along with that of adult avantgarde artists, which started around 1900, is documented in Fineberg’s The Innocent Eye. The popularity of childhood drawings coincides with a related popularity of Anglophone children’s writing in this era. Starting with Daisy Ashford (English) in 1919, the 1920s, according to David Sadler, saw 18 books by 11 child authors sold to an adult audience.8 The authors, distinctively, were not seen as precocious or especially gifted children by the adults who encouraged and bought their literary output. The work was, rather, conceived of as “direct access to the childish imagination,” the imagination of any normal child.9 Although this adult enthusiasm brings Marjorie Fleming’s Romantic fans to mind, the interest in imagination separates the adult enthusiasts in the 1920s from many of those writers who endorsed JeanJacques Rousseau in his praise of the untutored child in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The 1920s did not wish to help the child discipline and strengthen his abilities but rather to celebrate freedom from constraint in the present moment. Surrealist artists continued the dream imagery discussed in the Henri Rousseau chapter, an approach to art partly inspired by Chagall’s devotion to painting the inner consciousness and reminiscent of the responses to Rousseau’s dream work. Both can be associated in the now post-Freudian world with his construction of the childhood mind. The artisans of the Bauhaus, an artistic experiment to combine fine art with architecture and innovation in people’s living spaces, were , as Magdalena Droste notes, indirectly inspired by Ruskin’s abjuration of the ugly and mass-produced in daily living, by way of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement in England.10 The interests of both William Nicholson and Paula Modersohn-Becker anticipated some of these activities. Bauhaus, for example, combined fine art with advertising in the way that Nicholson and his generation had done, producing handsome posters and engravings.11 The artists of Bauhaus were, like Nicholson and Chagall, designers for the theater and living spaces, and influenced picture book design in the later century. Leo Lionni, for example, was so influenced.12 The influence of Froebel and Pestalozzi were seen in the toys produced by Alma Siedhoff-Buscher for Bauhaus.13 Although suffering gender discrimination in her studies, as noted by Anja Baumhoff, Siedhoff-Buscher prevailed at wood carving, producing toys that were meant to give children freedom in their creative process, a specific reaction against the Froebelian gifts that were for structured play and to discipline the powers. The toys, however, were ultimately produced and marketed by

Conclusion • 157 the Froebel-Pestalozzi foundation.14 Norman Brosterman has noted the influence of the practice of abstracting that was fundamental to the Froebelian drawing method, which may also have influenced the abstract in art, as it did, for example, in the famous case of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose “Fallingwater,” is an expression of the natural world in the form of blocks.15 Fineberg and Reinhold Heller both note that child models were a significant part of the Brücke movement, with the child Fränzi, for example, whom E.-L. Kirchner painted, living with the members of the group.16 Indeed, the list of the painters and sculptors who collected children’s art and sought inspiration from its spontaneity, sincerity, and stylization included an enormous number of the Modernists.17 The influence of this particular vision of childhood and childhood art on Modernism increased in popularity and scope throughout the century. Among the features that touch every member of the group of artists included in this volume is that, their rebellion against the traditions of the Academy notwithstanding, they retained the figurative in style. Equally obvious, although not a choice, is the influence of economic necessity on each. At the historic moment when the forces of anarchy converged, artists were starving in garrets, but they were representative of many of the world’s people, not alone. In some of these cases, the fashion for children’s goods—picture books, entertainments, and lithographed items—created a contemporary market for innovative ideas. The artists of the early avant-gardes gave back to children’s culture. The strong influence on picture book form in narrative and whole-book design that Nicholson’s work represents has already been discussed here, as have the varying allusions to this era in the work of much later children’s book illustrators. Margaret Higonnet and Nathalie op de Beeck have both drawn the attention of children’s literature scholars to the innovations of early Modernism in picture books by Ed Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, and Mary Liddell.18 Barbara Bader, speaking of the American William R. Scott, Inc., books of the 1930s, which included the work of Leonard Weisgard, Clement Hurd, and Margaret Wise Brown, notes: What was in the air was a new non-imitative way of working generally, a way of expressing intangibles, communicating emotion, sensation— one which invited the viewer, too, to see things in a new way. To picture books, it brought an alternative to story-telling illustration; and it is not too much to say that, beginning with the early Scott books, modern art—or as we now style it, modernist art—enabled picture books to cease being primarily stories.19 Thus, the avant-garde, already divers at its conception, might be said to have both greatly benefited narrative style in picture books—and also taken story away. Or deserted the high-culture book for sequential art in comics, while simultaneously producing established children’s classics. The idea of childhood defined as the uncontrolled consciousness, however, seems to preclude in some ways the shared interests between children’s

158 • Children’s Culture and the Avant-Garde literature and culture and avant-garde art noted here. Children’s literature did not change immediately after the Golden Age, with good examples of the kind of works previously mentioned in this era continuing into the twentieth century. But while there is room for the unformed and spontaneous in children’s literature, there are surely forces against it, particularly when spontaneity focuses attention upon the extremely young, otherwise powerless, child. To use a particularly bald and glaring example, Nancy Drew (1930 to present), as noted by Anne Scott MacLeod, was conceived as a notably disciplined and rational character, yet she was a representative of an international popular culture phenomenon propelled by children’s desire.20 The artists discussed in this volume represent a continuation of the grotesque strand in children’s literature that had been well represented before the turn of the century and the Avant-Garde moment. The Golliwogg and dolls, the jungle pictures of Rousseau, the strange beheadings and carnivalesque upturnings of Chagall, the scrupulously observed children of ModersohnBecker, and, to some extent, the magical realism of Nicholson share some of this quality. Now it is usual, rather than unusual, to see the world as incongruous. Then, it was a statement. But this strand has also proved lasting and important in children’s works. The Natural world is, as we traditionally expected to find it in children’s literature, a focus of investigation in these works, and the painters’ approaches represent positions we expect to encounter in the post-Darwinian world. The toy stories and the jungles of Rousseau replace the ebb and flow of reality with permanent, fantastic forms. The narratives of Nicholson and Upton embrace the excitement of life, and suggest that the realities are something that the artist can work with, and play with, not simply accept. In keeping with the spirit of their age, they embrace both the non-European character and an ironic and humorous attitude toward life, which keeps them stirring among the more sentimental or protective approaches to children’s culture. Chagall and Modersohn-Becker are painters of the natural cycle; both painters are emphatically not dreamers and both are open to the sexual and the animal in ways that, as noted, also reflect nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children’s literature and cultural concerns. The shared and nonhierarchical relation between humans and animals in the cycle of Nature, the sexual drive, and the sacrifice of the vulnerable are concerns that children’s literature is apt to approach with mystification. The more open mode that sometimes occurs, however, might be seen as a legacy of works of art that presented the evidence, acknowledged the inner life of emotion, and raised the questions. The Golliwogg and dolls live to demonstrate that life is an adventure and the only response after falling is to get up. They, in spite of their high spirits and enthusiasm, may be the closest to the spirit of the age that embraced conceptual forms. The rest of the painters are believers in the consolatory power of the natural world, and they often were carrying out their tasks to benefit an

Conclusion • 159 audience, as well as themselves. Nicholson’s games of light and illusion, Rousseau’s desire to cheer, Modersohn-Becker’s holy purpose, Chagall’s painted offerings articulate a love that viewers feel. What Art should do is a divisive discussion. What it does, in these cases, is felt by many.

Notes

Introduction 1 2

3

4 5 6 7 8

9

Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 17. George du Maurier, Trilby (Leipzig: Bernhard, 1894), 44. Julius M. Price has two volumes with some practical details of the “artistic” life in the 1870s and 1880s: My Bohemian Days in Paris (London: S. Low, 1912), and My Bohemian Days in London (Philadelphia, David McKay, 1914), which discusses St. John’s Woods as an artistic locale. Casual references to the Academy or the Salon can be found in such works as Making of a Marchioness (Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1901) 83; 84; Aunt Diana (Rosa Nouchette Carey, 1888) 314; and A Toy Tragedy (Mrs. Henry de la Pasture, 1894) 196. Rosa Nouchette Carey, Esther (New York: A.L. Burt, 1884), 40. Robert L. Herbert, The Art Criticism of John Ruskin (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1969), xiv. The Royal Academy. Review. Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper (May 12, 1844), 3. Rosa Nouchette Carey, Esther, 265. Contemporary reports can be found in The Times (November 27, 1878); Pall Mall Gazette (November 27, 1878); The Penny Illustrated Paper (December 7, 1878) has an amusing cartoon (365). Unfortunately, the courtroom discussions veered off into topics such as how much paintings are worth and testimony about the need to “fi nish” a painting, which were relevant to Ruskin’s protested remarks, but did not clearly define what an acceptable painting might be. Because Ruskin was a famous champion of J.M.W. Turner, some of whose most famous paintings had obscure atmospheric effects, the hard-to-make-out qualities of the night scene in Nocturne in Black and Gold could not be the issue, for example, although some public commentary implied that it was. Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution P, 1992), 291. 161

162 • Notes 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18

19

20

21

22 23 24

25

26 27 28

Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint, 229. Ibid. Charles Harrison, Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 24. Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 3; 4. Gillian Perry, “Primitivism and the Modern,” in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Harrison, Francis Frascina, and Gill Perry (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993), 3. Juliet Dusinberre, Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Books and Radical Experiments in Art (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 6–18. Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Abrams, 1997). Robert L. Herbert, Art Criticism of John Ruskin, xi. John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, illustrated edition, edited by Bernard Dunstan (New York: Watson Guptill, 1997), 18; 19. Robert L. Herbert, Art Criticism of John Ruskin, xiv, while referencing Monet’s debt to The Elements of Drawing, also discusses Ruskin’s more abstract, less naturalistic, veneration of color use. Gillian Perry, “Primitivism and the Modern,” 16–21, discusses the “visual language” of Émile Bernard and Gauguin in their pursuit of the Modern through association with “primitive” places. Qtd. in Barbara Larson, The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon (University Park: U Pennsylvania State P, 2005), 81. Henri Rousseau wrote a comedy about some “primitive” country people visiting Paris and being perplexed by the foreign village exhibits, “A Visit to the 1889 Fair,” which is excerpted in Dora Vallier, Henri Rousseau (New York: Abrams, n.d.), 148–153. Barbara Larson, The Dark Side of Nature, 80–83. Cactus Man and similar noirs of Odilon Redon were probably an influence on John R. Neill’s illustrations of Baum’s Mangaboos. Gillian Perry, “Primitivism and the Modern,” 3–5, outlines a number of approaches to the issue, including that of Michel Foucault. Christopher Butler, Early Modernism, 93. M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford UP, 1953), 87. Jones’ essay is part of the chapter on establishing lyric poetry as the poetic norm. Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese stories, for examples, were written in the 1890s and early twentieth century, but they are part of a much larger phenomenon. Barbara Larson, The Dark Side of Nature, 164. Ibid. Larson, The Dark Side of Nature, 113. Balloon travel of a long distance and fantastic nature occurred in such works as Voyage dans la lune avant 1900 ( Ville D’Avray, 1892) Paris: Jouvet & Cie (and other children’s works by the Uptons and Mark Twain), but Around the World in Eighty

Notes • 163

29

30 31

32

33

34 35

36 37 38 39

40

41

Days (1872) does not actually use a balloon. Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon (1860s), however, does. Butler, Modernism, 24. Butler notes that in an exhibition such as the Salon des Refusés, there were many more pictures that had been rejected by the Salon for failure to achieve technical expertise that was highly sought after by the painter than there were pictures that espoused new ways of seeing, such as those by Cézanne or Manet. Larson, The Dark Side of Nature, 85–106. Jean Webster, Dear Enemy [1914] (Toronto, Bantam, 1982), 66–79. Annie Fellows Johnston’s The Little Colonel’s Knight Comes Riding (Boston: L.C. Page, 1907) uses bad heredity as part of Lloyd’s education in avoiding unworthy suitors. Claudia Nelson’s Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850–1929 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003) discusses the literary and social context. Robert Rosenblum, Maryanne Stevens, and Ann Dumas, 1900: Art at the Crossroads (New York: Abrams, 2000), 186; 193–195; Gillian Perry discusses Paula Modersohn-Becker’s pictures of childhood disability against the background of similar expressionist works, Paula Modersohn-Becker: Her Life and Work (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 48; 86 n. 11. Robert Rosenblum, “Art in 1900: Twilight or Dawn?” in 1900: Art at the Crossroads, ed. Robert Rosenblum, Maryanne Stevens, and Ann Dumas (New York: Abrams, 2000), 36. Barbara Larson also discusses the various Roman Catholic (and other religious) attempts to synthesize dogma with evolution, for example, “Denys Cochin’s Catholic document L’évolution et la vie (1886), claimed that Darwin did not exclude the principle of final causes or the idea of a creator,” Dark Side of Nature, 185. Ann Dumas, 1900: Art at the Crossroads, ed. Robert Rosenblum, Maryanne Stevens, and Ann Dumas (New York: Abrams, 2000), 300. Virginia E. Swain, Grotesque Figures: Baudelaire, Rousseau, and the Aesthetics of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2004), 2–4. Swain’s monograph contains a chapter defining the grotesque (9–25). Virginia E. Swain quotes Mikhail Bahktin for this definition (Grotesque Figures, 3). The reference is to Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1945). Virginia E. Swain quotes the influential theorist of the grotesque, Wolfgang Kayser, for this response (Grotesque Figures, 3). Virginia E. Swain, Grotesque Figures, 7. Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (Methuen Critical Idiom Series, 1972), Chapter 3, page 6. http://davidlavery.net/grotesque/major _artists_theoriests/thomson/thomson3.html . John Ruskin, Modern Painters. Vol. 3, part 4, chapter 8 (New York: Wiley, 1889), 92–107. The chapter also refers back to Stones of Venice, Vol. 3, “Grotesque Renaissance.” John Ruskin, Modern Painters Vol. 4, part 5, appendix 1 “Modern Grotesque” (New York: Wiley, 1889), 387. Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and

164 • Notes

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51

Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 53, suggests that Picasso’s caricature, Obliging Woman (1905), can be explained by his immersion in literary circles at the turn of the century. It is, I think, a kind of confirmation of Ruskin’s theory that the caricaturist has a different kind of talent. (53) Ibid. E. Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle [1907] (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1994), 191. Deiter Petzold also notes this example (see below). Deiter Petzold, “Grotesque” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, Vol. 2, ed. Jack Zipes (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 182. Struwwelpeter was published by Heinrich Hoffmann in 1845; Max und Moritz was published by Wilhelm Busch in 1865. Stephen Prickett, Victorian Fantasy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 47. Margaret Higonnet, “Modernism and Childhood Violence and Renovation,” The Comparatist 33 (May 2009), 90. Margaret Higonnet, “Modernism and Childhood Violence and Renovation,” 93. Marc Chagall, “Some Impressions Regarding French Painting: Address at Mount Holyoke College, August 1943/March 1946,” in Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, ed. Benjamin Harshav, trans. Barbara and Benjamin Harshav (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 68. Mircea Eliade, “Marc Chagall and the Love of the Cosmos,” in Homage to Marc Chagall, G. di San Lazzaro, ed. (New York: Tudor, 1995), 13. Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 38.

Chapter One 1

2

3

See Norma S. Davis, A Lark Ascends: Florence Kate Upton, Artist and Illustrator (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1992), 105–106, for the fullest statement of this complaint, also reflected in Greta Little, “Bertha Upton and Florence K. Upton,” in Dictionary of National Biography 141, British Children’s Writers, 1880–1914, ed. Laura Zaidman (Detroit: Gale, 1994), 284–292. See Edith Lyttelton, Florence Upton, Painter (London: Longmans,1926), 11. “The shops all made Golliwogg dolls and unfortunately, as Florence had neglected to patent him, she let drop a considerable fortune. One German manufacturer, who made little Golliwoggs with seal hair, is said to have netted thousands of pounds.” Upton became a societaire of the New Salon in Paris, but her portraits and Dutch landscapes are realistic works. She was not an avant-garde painter, and, moreover, the Golliwogg came before she was exposed to either the Art Students League or studios in Paris. She used the Golliwogg money to get there. Norma Davis, A Lark Ascends, 36–49, discusses Upton’s atten-

Notes • 165

4

5

6

7

8

dance at Colarossi’s Academy, starting in Autumn 1901. The art student experience is discussed in Chapter Four of the present volume. Upton and Paula Modersohn-Becker were apparently not at Colarossi’s at the same time, although they both lived in Montparnasse. The original toys are displayed at the Bethnal Green Museum. They were auctioned with some original artwork from the series in World War I to pay for an ambulance, which had the Golliwogg and Florence Upton’s name on the side. Florence Upton realized that this was an unusually close collaboration. Later employing the same medium used by Conan Doyle, Upton continued to receive posthumous messages from her mother long after the series had ended. As in the case of Yeats, Upton’s automatic writing was very useful to her. A recent symposium talk by Robin Bernstein (College Station, April 2012), who traces the “scripts” of historical black doll play, which include intentional mistreatment, in Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011): 201–243, has led me to re-examine this statement (from my 2000 article on which this chapter is based). A longer explanation of Florence Upton’s childhood recollection appears in Norma Davis’s A Lark Ascends (10). I think that the transatlantic nature of the Golliwogg had obscured the reasoning behind this game to me. I now think, however, that the game involved may have been suggested by the English game “Aunt Sally,” and thus have been “scripted” as Bernstein suggests. The throwing game is described in Every Little Boy’s Book: A Complete Cyclopaedia of Indoor and Outdoor Games with and without Toys (London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1864), 118, and the target is described as usually being carved with negroid features. In an article by Wirt Sikes called “Welsh Fairs” in Scriber’s Monthly Volume 21.3 (January 1881), page 439, the game ( the illustrated target appears to be a “mammy” sort of doll although the text describes it having red hair) is noted as a game “lately introduced into America.” For my purposes (and without time to pursue this further now), the possible association of the doll with an established pastime that could have been taught by parents or other societal instructors makes it more clear to me that Florence was being intentionally subversive when she chose this image for her hero. Bernstein’s chapter ‘The Black-and-Whiteness of Raggedy Ann” (146– 193) adds to this discussion by a description of the genesis of the Raggedy Ann doll, which she traces to Gruelle’s use of the Golliwogg and characters by L. Frank Baum, all of whom had had commercial success. Bertha Upton and Florence K. Upton, The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwogg”(London: Longmans, Green, 1895), 45. The re-definition of the doll is possibly allied not only to the costume and hair, but also the fellow feeling between Avant-garde artists and outcast performers at the time, see Chapter Three.

166 • Notes 9 10

Bertha Upton and Florence K. Upton, The Golliwogg’s Polar Adventures (London: Longmans, Green, 1900), 3. Bertha Upton and Florence K. Upton, The Golliwogg in War! (London: Longmans, Green, 1899). Sarah Jane shoots a wooden soldier and immediately comes to her senses about the realities of war: That instant, Sarah hears a cry, She sees a soldier fall, And “Have I killed him dead!” she shrieks Then bolts across the wall And rushing o’er the level plain, Fast fall the scalding tears;– Remorseful little Sarah Jane, Her breast is choked by fears!

11

12

13

The toy soldier’s better-than-human construction allows him to be promptly repaired. The children of England were very enthusiastic about the Boer War. A reviewer recommended the Upton book as an antidote to “war fever,” although it is unclear whether he did so because Golliwogg in War! depicted Sarah Jane’s remorse or because she (in response to the Golliwogg’s determination to find an enemy to satisfy his martial urge) decides that toy soldiers, themselves, will do: “We always did detest/Those pigeon-chested, puffed-up men/In scarlet blouses drest . . . Methinks examples such as these/Had best demolished be,/To make room for a nobler sort,/From all such follies free.” Among his most notable admirers were Sir Kenneth Clark and Thomas Osborne, founder of the Osborne Collection, Toronto Public Library. Kenneth Clark said, “I identified myself with him completely, and have never quite ceased to do so.” Another Part of the Wood: A Self-Portrait (London: John Murray, 1974), 7. Among many others, Heinrich Hoffmann and Wilhelm Busch, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens and John Tenniel, George Cruikshank and J.J. Grandville, Gustave Doré‚ Édouard Ille, and Robert Browning had all been more or less amusing and more or less grotesque before this. A number of the illustrators had, like Florence Upton, also worked for humor periodicals. See Introduction. The mixed legacy of the American illustrator/satirist E. W. Kemble also falls under this classification. And twentieth-century American illustrator Edward Gorey has continued the grotesque tradition by re-illustrating texts by Lear and Hilaire Belloc, as well as his own work. Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination 1880–1900, trans. Derek Colton (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1981), 10; 11. “By throwing themselves [the decadents] heart and soul into this desperate quest for the new, the rare,

Notes • 167

14

15

16 17

18 19 20 21

the strange, the refined, the quintessential in everything, or for the exceptional—terms that recur constantly in the writing of the time— they were to come eventually to feel that they had pushed literature to its furthest limits, that they had dethroned life and put art in its place, thereby, for a while at least, rendering it bearable.” A related motif Pierrot also identifies with the fantastic stories of the decadents is that of anthropomorphized plant life (also important in Art Nouveau): “a vegetable kingdom that has ceased to be stationary, passive, and fragile, and has become . . . animated . . . and aggressive.” The Uptons’ use of this motif in The Vege-Men’s Revenge (1897) may have influenced the terrible vegetables in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908). See Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Wisstein (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963), 39. Baudelaire particularly remarked on the quality of movement in Cruikshank, saying “the whole of this diminutive company rushes pell-mell through its thousand capers with indescribable high spirits, but without worrying too much if all their limbs are in their proper places”: this remark could as easily describe Golliwogg and Co. G.K. Chesterton said that “energy and joy are the father and mother of the grotesque.” Baudelaire discusses Cruikshank in “De l’essence de rire” (1855) and “Quelques caricaturists étrangers”(1857); Chesterton discusses the grotesque in his critical work Robert Browning (London: Macmillan, 1903). Bertha Upton and Florence K. Upton, The Golliwogg’s Christmas (London: Longsmans, Green, 1907), 38. For example, Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914 (New York: Macmillan, 1966) or Cecil Eby, The Road to Armageddon: The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature, 1870–1914 (Durham: Duke UP, 1988). Works mentioned in the text include those by Lemuel Johnson, Francis Frascina, Gillian Perry, Jean Pierrot, and Corrado Pavolini, among others. Sometimes this belief is allied with those of Friedrich Nietzsche. Frederick Delius’s orchestral Florida Suite (1886/1887) can be cited as a musical example. Lemuel A. Johnson, The Devil, the Gargoyle, and the Buffoon: The Negro as Metaphor in Western Literature (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1969), x. Little, “Bertha Upton and Florence K. Upton,” 287. The Golliwogg, of course, does not look any more like an African human than Raggedy Ann looks like a Caucasian one. In both cases, the dolls’ looks partly have to do with their construction out of sewing materials— button eyes and so on. Both are arresting and appealing as doll characters but would be frightening as living humans. But there is no external referent to make Raggedy Ann seem to be a mocking face, whereas the mask-like golliwogg face summons up the whole minstrel tradition to anyone familiar with it. Davis attributes much of the notorious reputation acquired by the

168 • Notes

22 23

24

25

Golliwogg to the myriad spin-offs from the series, particularly Enid Blyton’s Golly and other products and advertising uses to which a golliwog figure was put. What Davis calls the “Golliwog-with-one-g” is often racist, had nothing to do with the Uptons (who did not have the licensing rights or any control over how their character was used) and, of course, is often simply elided into the Golliwogg (with two g’s) by children and adults who did not meet the Golliwogg before he became a household name. Eric Bligh, Tooting Corner (London: Secker and Warburg, 1946), 164–174, also strongly differentiates between the beloved character of his youth and the crowd of unauthorized golliwogs. It should be noted, however, that five of the Golliwogg books actually do include stereotypical non-white characters. That the Golliwogg should be treated differently by its creator is another oddity. Moreover, the artists and the general population—if my assessment of what Upton is doing is correct—obviously differed in their affectionate solidarity with the iconoclastic concept, or there would be no need to try to explain this. The name would not have become synonymous with racial insult. Lyttelton, Florence Upton, Painter, 12. Upton’s character is not easy to read. She and her mother do really shocking things, but no one seems to have reconciled the amount of conscious mischief the mother/daughter team was perpetrating with Florence’s otherwise fragile and serious personality. I would note, however, that their non-Golliwogg picture book The Vege-Man’s Revenge (1897) involves a youthful heroine who is buried alive and then (after she sprouts) chopped up and eaten by vengeful vegetables. That this plot is extremely peculiar in a children’s story seems to me to be self-evident. No one could do such a book without noticing what she was doing. After lampooning Roosevelt and his “hunter-man” activities in the opening pages of Golliwogg in the African Jungle (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), Upton remarks in a letter to Longmans, “We ought to send Roosevelt a copy of the Jungle Book when he comes. But they say he has no sense of humor.” Davis, A Lark Ascends, 95. This is the closest one can come, apparently, to the idea that Upton and her mother were consciously outrageous. Little children would be much less amused by a lampooning of the American president, presumably, than their parents would be. Lyttelton, Florence Upton, Painter, 14. David Rudd, Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children’s Literature (London: Macmillan, 2000), 147–154, describes a survey Rudd conducted with children to determine their reaction to Golliwogs (in connection with the later work of Blyton). René Peters in Roger Nichols, Debussy Remembered (London: Faber. 1992), 139, says that Debussy was very fond of reading children’s books. The Wagner reference is first cited in the reminiscences of the first public performer of the “Cakewalk,” Harold Bauer. Nichols, Debussy Remembered, 157, who was informed on this point by the composer. The connection is also cited

Notes • 169

26 27

28 29 30

31 32 33

34 35

36

37

in Léon Vallas, Claude Debussy: His Life and Works (1933), trans. Maire and Grace O’Brien (New York: Dover, 1973), 183. Bertha Upton and Florence K. Upton, Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwogg”(London: Longmans Green, 1895), 9. As any reader of St. Nicholas Magazine can see, the 1880s and 1890s brought flag etiquette, military reviews, public salutes, and so on to the fore in American society. Americans were very aware of the build-up of the navy, the perceived need for weaponry to guard ports, and similar concerns that probably originated with the German occupation of Paris in the 1870s but that led to the Spanish-American War. The Youth’s Companion had mounted a campaign to put a flag in every schoolroom (and was active in establishing the “Pledge of Allegiance” as a ritual). P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins, illus. by Mary Shepard (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1934), 6. Bertha Upton and Florence K. Upton, The Golliwogg’s Christmas (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), 62. Gian-Paolo Biasin has an extensive list in Montale, Debussy, and Modernism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989), 19. He also cites Jean Starobinski, Portrait de l’artiste en saltimbanque (Geneva: Skira, 1970). Joseph-Émile Muller, Klee: Figures and Masks (New York: Tudor, 1961), n.p. Ibid. For example, Corrado Pavolini remarks, “there is a splendid figure of Guillaume (1916) elegant in a black felt hat, his cravat neatly tied and his chalky face like a cheap carnival papier-maché‚ mask under the false colours of electric light,” Modigliani (New York: New American Library, 1966), 12. For example, Fränzi with Doll (1910) by Erich Heckel, or Seated Nude Girl with Flowers (1907) by Paula Modersohn-Becker. (See illustration Chapter Four). Jean Guichard-Meili states, “the treatment of the face and arms, the hardened line, the masque of a primitive idol, which is on the point of transforming the face of the model, anticipate the so-called ‘negro’ figures of 1907 and the famous Demoiselles d’Avignon, which are the introit to cubism,” Picasso: From Barcelona to the Pink Period (New York: Tudor, 1967), n.p. Discussed in Richard Leslie, Pablo Picasso: A Modern Master (New York: Smithmark, 1996), 23–27; and also in connection with Nude on Red Background in Josep Paulau I. Fabre, Picasso: The Early Years 1881–1907, trans. Kenneth Lyons (Barcelona: La Poligrafa, 1996), 469–472. Lois Kuznets observes that Hitty, a later doll, enjoys dollhood’s advantages, in her case, lack of conscience. Lois Kuznets, When Toys Come Alive (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994), 27. Rachel Field, Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, illus. Dorothy P. Lathrop (New York: Macmillan, 1929). Bernstein’s discussion of imperviousness in relation to rag construction is differently focused. See Racial Innocence 153–157.

170 • Notes 38

39 40 41 42

43 44 45

Francis Frascina, “Realism and Ideology: An Introduction to Semiotics and Cubism,” in Charles Harrison, Francis Frascina, and Gill Perry, Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993), 59–62; 122; 123. Ibid., 122. Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978). Bertha Upton and Florence Upton, Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwogg,”55. To varying degrees, the idea of the “primitive” possessing power to overthrow bourgeois or decadent civilization is associated with Nietzsche. The “Brücke” group noted here “took their group name from Thus Spake Zarathustra. The metaphor of the bridge (die Brücke) is used by Zarathustra in the book to represent man’s journey from absorption in a decadent culture to a state of freedom and ‘overcoming.’” Charles Harrison, Francis Frascina, and Gill Perry, Primitivism, 66. Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991), 47. Gill Perry, “Primitivism and the ‘Modern,’” in Charles Harrison, Francis Frascina and Gill Perry, Primitivism, 56. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, 188.

Chapter Two 1 2 3 4 5

Werner Schmalenbach, Henry Rousseau: Dreams of the Jungle, trans. Jenny Marsh (Munich: Prestel, 2000), 23. Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1992), 124. Ibid., 125. Elisa Evett, “The Late Nineteenth-Century European Critical Response to Japanese Art: Primitivist Leanings.” Art History 6.1 (March 1983): 104. The idea that vision was out of the subject’s hands (by age or nationality, for example) was sometimes discussed in purely physical terms within the era. Sometimes it was a matter of regional atmosphere—van Gogh’s discussions of the light in Provence, for example, might fall under this category. As Danto notes, “Vincent went to Arles because he was looking for a reality whose visual representations would be like Japanese prints” Beyond the Brillo Box, 128. Evett explains that within the art world, there was serious speculation about whether the light in Japan was different or whether perhaps it was some other physical phenomenon that caused the differences between the artistic traditions of the East and West. Perhaps Japanese people physically saw differently from Westerners. As Frances S. Connelly notes in The Sleep of Reason, Michel Revon wrote in 1896 that “the human eye does not perceive colors the same way in all cultures . . . the eye of the Japanese perceives the abstract with infinitely

Notes • 171

6 7

8

9

10 11

less accuracy and the concrete with infi nitely more acuteness than ours” The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics 1725–1907 (University Park: Pennsylvania UP, 1995), 15. Perhaps children’s eyes see differently, too. Perhaps the “vision splendid” is something that could be charted and explained in a scientific way. Qtd. in Cornelia Stabenow, Henri Rousseau: 1844–1910 (Cologne: Taschen, 2001), 25. See, for example, André Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin. 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 2: 48–65; Werner Schmalenbach, Henri Rousseau: Dreams of the Jungle (Munich: Prestel, 2000), 70–72; Frances Morris, “Jungles in Paris,” in Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris, ed. Frances Morris and Christopher Green (New York: Abrams, 2006), 24–27. Christopher Green gives a thoughtful commentary on the Picasso/Rousseau relationship that gives additional nuance to the discussion. In Picasso: Art and Vertigo, he says, “I want to argue . . . that Picasso, along with others in his milieu, saw in Rousseau both the great and the small, both the extraordinary and the ordinary, both the most and the least conventional, both something stable (architecture) and something vertiginously unstable: that he found in Rousseau both the categorical (form) and an escape from all categories,” (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005), 82. Carolyn Lanchner and William Rubin, “Henri Rousseau and Modernism,” in Henri Rousseau: Essays by Roger Shattuck, Henri Béhar, Michel Hoog, Carolyn Lanchner and William Rubin (New York: Little, Brown, 1985), 35. See, for example, Vincent van Gogh,“It is my belief that it is actually one’s duty to paint the rich and magnificent aspects of nature. We are in need of gaiety and happiness, of hope and love,” Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1958). 3 vols. (Boston: Bulfinch, 2000), 444. “So if you want to do as the artists do, go look at the red and white poppies with their bluish leaves, their buds soaring on gracefully bent stems. The hours of trouble and strife will know how to find us without our going to look for them,” Ibid., 456. Henri Rousseau: “Nothing makes me so happy as to observe Nature and to paint what I see,” Stabenow, Henri Rousseau, 16; “the grand and beautiful nature that every sincere artist ought to venerate. . . . I find myself quite happy when I am in nature,” Yann Le Pichon, The World of Henri Rousseau (New York: Viking, 1982), 134. In a widely quoted remark about the paintings in his room, “Tu comprends, quand je me reveille, je peux faire risette à mes tableaux,” Maurice Raynal, Soirées de Paris 20 (January 15, 1914): 27. Dora Vallier notes that Rousseau had drawings from nature pinned up all around his studio. Henri Rousseau (New York: Abrams, ca. 1960/1961), 71. Le Pichon, The World of Henri Rousseau, 187. See Le Pichon, The World of Henri Rousseau and the Jungles in Paris exhibition catalog, Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris, ed. Frances Morris and Christopher Green, for thorough discussions.

172 • Notes 12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29 30

Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo: The Story of Zoological Gardens in the West, trans. Oliver Welsh (London: Reaktion, 2002), 61–64. Ibid., Chapter 5. Ibid., 105. Kenneth Kidd, “Disney of Orlando’s Animal Kingdom,” in Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism, ed. Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004), 275. Leslie Paris, Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp (New York: New York UP, 2008). Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo, 152–155. Ibid., 151. Rousseau to Commedia reporter: “I don’t know if you are like me, but when I enter these hothouses and see these strange plants from exotic countries, I feel as if I have stepped into a dream,” Le Pichon, World of Henri Rousseau, 134. The source, noted in Nancy Ireson’s Interpreting Henri Rousseau, is Arsène Alexandre, “La Vie et l’oeuvre d’ Henri Rousseau: Peintre et ancient employé de l’octroi,” Commedia (March 10, 1910): 3. Nancy Ireson, Interpreting Henri Rousseau (London: Tate, 2005). Lynn M. Byrd, “Somewhere Outside the Forest: Ecological Ambivalence in the Neverland, Little White Bird to Hook,” in Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism, ed. Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004), 51. Donna White and C. Anita Tarr, “The Paradox of Peter Pan,” in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan In and Out of Time (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2006), x. Matthi Forrer, Hokusai: Prints and Drawings (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1991), 15. Ibid., 34. Kohima Usui qtd. in Matthi Forrer, Hiroshige: Prints and Drawings, trans. Peter Mason, with essays by Suzuki Jūzō and Henry D. Smith II (London: Royal Academy of Art and Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1997), 34. See Le Pinchon, The World of Henri Rousseau, and Morris and Green, Jungles in Paris for photographs that inspired various paintings. Gillian Avery, “The Cult of Peter Pan,” Word and Image 2.2 (April–June 1986): 179. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Child’s Play” [1878]. http://readbookonline.net/ readbookOnLine/8387/. Juliet Dusinberre’s Alice to the Lighthouse (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987) gives an extended discussion of the essay and its influence. Marion Durand and Diana Wormuth, “One Hundred Years of Illustrations in French Children’s Books,” Yale French Studies 43(1969): 88. Ibid. Ibid.

Notes • 173 31

32

33 34

35

36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50

Charles Bernheimer, T. Jefferson Kline, and Naomi Schor, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002), xi. Barbara Larson, The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2005), 135. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 4. See Carolyn Sigler, ed., Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books (Lexington, Kentucky: UP of Kentucky, 1997) for selections from what the book calls almost 200 works inspired by Alice or otherwise belonging to a time that inspired Alice, as well. The fantasy dream world (xvii) is a characteristic of such books. See Marilynn S. Olson, “Roots of Oz,” in L. Frank Baum’s World of Oz, ed. Suzanne Rahn (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2003): 21–39, for a discussion of the dream visions in The Vege-Men’s Revenge and Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. Roger Shattuck gives an account of the controversy, including Salmon’s resentment of Gertrude Stein’s remarks, in “The Rousseau Banquet,” Arts 30 (October 1955): 23–26. André Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin, vol 2,54. van Gogh, Complete Letters, 205. Nancy Ireson, “French Landscapes,” in Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris, ed. Frances Morris and Christopher Green (New York: Abrams, 2006), 126. Ibid. Lanchner and Rubin, “Henri Rousseau and Modernism,” 42. Adrian Searle, “Stumble in the Jungle,” rev. Jungles in Paris exhibition, Guardian, November 1, 2005. Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer, The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, 3e (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2003): 205–208. Ibid., 205. For an example, see Marilynn S. Olson, “‘Things like that did not seem to matter much’: Ethel Parton’s Melissa Ann,” Lion and the Unicorn 21.1 (January 1997), 20–39. In Wilhelm Uhde, Recollections of Henri Rousseau (1911), intro. Nancy Ireson (London: Pallas Athene, 2005), 63. Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin, vol. 2,50. Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: U Chicago P, 2008), 258. Robert Louis Stevenson, Pan’s Pipes (Cambridge, Mass: Riverside, 1910), 13. Robert Rosenblum, Maryanne Stevens, and Ann Dumas, 1900: Art at the Crossroads (New York: Abrams, 2000), 49, 130. Ibid.

174 • Notes 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60

61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination 1880–1900, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981), 201. Evett, “The Late Nineteenth-Century European Critical Response to Japanese Art,” 93. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 71. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 77 Christopher Green, Picasso, Architecture and Vertigo (New Haven:Yale UP, 2005), 94. Maurice Sendak, Caldecott & Co. (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), 149. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 226. Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin, vol. 2,51. Although it can certainly be discussed in terms of the improved reception of the paintings after the turn of the century, as many essays by Morris, Green, and others do in the Jungles in Paris exhibition book (see Francis Morris and Christopher Green above). John Murray discusses ethical and safety issues of Kipling’s laws [with different emphasis] in “The Law of The Jungle Books,” Children’s Literature 20 (1992): 1–14. Margaret Wise Brown, The House of a Hundred Windows, cat and architecture illus. Robert de Veyrac (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945). Sandra Beckett, “Parodic Play with Paintings in Picture Books,” Children’s Literature 29 (2001): 185–188. Anthony Browne, Voices in the Park [1998] (New York: DK, 2001). The National Gallery of Art sponsors a Rousseau jungles interactive website for children: www.nga.gov/kids/zone/jungle.htm. Dav Pilkey, When Cats Dream (New York: Orchard, 1992). Anthony Browne, Willy the Dreamer (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 1998). Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). Tomi Ungerer, Moon Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). Suzanne Rahn, “Cat-Quest: A Symbolic Animal in Margaret Wise Brown,” Children’s Literature 22 (1994): 149–161. Maurice Sendak, Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). William Moebius, “An Introduction to Picturebook Codes,” Word & Image 2.2 (April–June 1996); Tony Kushner, The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present (New York: Harry Abrams, 2003): 88; 113. Kushner refers only to The Magic Flute.

Notes • 175 73 74

Tony Kushner, The Art of Maurice Sendak, 97. Selma Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak (New York: Abrams, 1980), 104.

Chapter Three 1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9

10

11 12

Sanford Schwartz, William Nicholson (New Haven: Yale UP for the Paul Mellon Centre, 2004), 94–96. Marah Gubar, Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010). Kenneth Kidd, Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2004), 53–59. The William stories were first published in Home starting in 1919. Richmal Crompton, Just William (1922) (Basingstoke and Oxford: Macmillan, 1983), 141; 183. Marguerite Steen, popular novelist and Nicholson’s companion in the last years of his life, wrote a biography of Nicholson. William Nicholson (London: Collins, 1943), 97. G.K. Chesterton, “The Pantomime,” in The Common Man (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1950), 57; 58. Max Beerbohm, “Pantomime for Children,” in Last Theatres: 1904–1910. (London: Taplinger, 1970), 119. H.H. Munro, “The Story-Teller,” The Short Stories of Saki (New York: Modern Library, 1958), 391–395. Hilary McKay’s character runs a mental survey of her childhood reading (old-fashioned storybooks, travel books, and fantasy) and her little sister’s (Little Red Riding Hood, and bits of Morte D’Arthur) to determine why they react differently to being stranded on a deserted road. Caddy Ever After (New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2006), 120. On Beardsley and Beerbohm influenced by Kate Greenaway, see “A Quick Wit and a Light Hand: Design Movements and Children’s Books 1880–1910,” based on an exhibition prepared by Dana Tenny and Jill Shefrin. (Toronto: Toronto Public Library, 1993), 2; also John Felstiner’s The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm’s Parody and Caricature (New York: Knopf, 1972), 38. John Ruskin, “Fairy Land,” Lecture 4 (1883), The Art of England (Orpington, George Allen, 1883), 117–160. Juliana Ewing’s storyteller in Mrs. Overtheway’s Remembrances (“Reka Dom” was written in 1867) comments upon the change in childhood reading to Ida: “The book I chose would look very dull in your eyes, I dare say, my dear Ida; you who live in an age of bright, smart storybooks, with clear type, coloured pictures, and gorgeous outsides. You don’t know what small, mean, inartistic “cuts” enlivened your grandmother’s nursery library, that is, when the books were illustrated at all. You have no idea how very little amusement was blended with the

176 • Notes

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14

15

16 17 18

instruction, and how much instruction with the amusement in our playbooks then, and how few there were of them, and how precious those few were. You can hardly imagine what a treasure I seemed to have found in a volume which contained several engravings the size of the page, besides many small woodcuts scattered through the letterpress. I lost sight alike of fatigue and disappointment, as I pored over the pictures, and read bits here and there.” The volume was Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton’s Complete Angler. Mrs. Overtheway’s Remembrances and Other Stories (London and Toronto: Dent, n.d.), 103; 104. Michael Scott Joseph, “William Nicholson,” in Dictionary of National Biography 141, British Children’s Writers, 1880–1914 (Detroit: Gale, 1994), 224. The Winter Owl, for example, contains unpublished sketches of “The Queen of Hearts.” Robert Graves and William Nicholson, ed., The Winter Owl (London: Cecil Palmer, 1923). Sanford Schwartz, William Nicholson, 34. Schwartz’ critical biography mentions this as part of the traditional “speculation” but notes the affinity to Manet in the text. Edward Craig’s preface to William Nicholson’s An Alphabet: An Introduction to the Reprint from the Original Woodblocks (Manor Farm, Andoversford, Gloucestershire: Whittington P, 1978) goes further: “the dozen or so Manets that had been put on show at the Salon were the main attraction; Manet’s maniere noir fascinated him. At the Louvre, because he was a student from Julian’s, he was allowed to make a copy of Velasquez’s Infanta, so he got close enough to analyse the artist’s actual brush strokes.” Anne Coffin Hanson, Manet and the Modern Tradition (New Haven, Yale UP, 1977), 72. James H. Rubin’s Manet’s Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994), 190, notes [Manet] neutralized the powerfully ideological opposition between high and low genres (ideological in this case because it indicates status and worth) by resting the values of the former in the most basic enactment of perception and representation.;“Pleasure itself, with no particular moral claim, could be accepted as the purpose of living and the subject of art. And pleasure could be found in the everyday enjoyment of life.” Rubin points to a critical study of the 1860s, Charles Blanc’s Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, as a pioneer of this critical stance, in connection with the work of Kalf: “art is just as present at the bottom of that copper kettle gilded by light, or on the edge of that silver goblet, as in the midst of those serious compositions for which history and philosophy have given the subject.” (qtd. in Rubin, 161) Henri Lallemand, Manet: A Visionary Impressionist (New York: New Line, 2006), 73. See, for example, Steen, William Nicholson, 47–49. Ibid., 50.

Notes • 177 19

20

21

22

23 24

See Colin Campbell’s The Beggarstaff Posters (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1990), 16, which reproduces the extant posters and sketches with commentary, and his “Nicholson’s Graphic Work,” in The Art of William Nicholson, ed. Colin Campbell, Merlin James, Patricia Reed, and Sanford Schwartz (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2004), 42–52. See also Schwartz, William Nicholson, 11; 12. Hajo Düchting in Edouard Manet: Images of Parisian Life (Munich: Prestel, 1995), 23, notes that Manet’s innovation in using “colorless” black made his paintings have a “contrast-rich graphic quality of expression.” Max Beerbohm later wrote about the use of traditionally conceived “high” culture for such purposes in “Advertisements” (Sunday, September 18, 1942), “Sir John Millais had painted a great picture of a little boy with golden curls and a green velveteen suit, and upturned eyes, blowing bubbles; and this picture had been acquired by the vendor of the soap and widely reproduced on the soap’s behalf. My elders, in those pre-historic days, wondered that Sir John should have authorized this use of his great gifts. And they were shocked, too, that the beautiful young Mrs. Langtry had for the soap’s sake allowed engravings of a photograph of herself to be sown broadcast in the Press, . . .” , Mainly on the Air (New York: Knopf, 1958), 51. Colin Campbell, The Beggarstaff Posters (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1990), 32–35, explains the English vs. French adoption of advertising posters. Frederick Walker’s black and white theatre poster for the dramatization of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, 1871, is an early and very famous example of an English artist doing this kind of commercial work. The laborious process of creating a poster by wood engraving, and his high hope that there might be a future in it, is described in his letters, edited by John George Marks, The Life and Letters of Frederick Walker, A.R.A. (London: Macmillan, 1896): 232. See also Schwartz, William Nicholson, 34-35; William Nicholson, William Nicholson: Das Graphische Werk 1895–1905 (Darmstadt: Justus von Liebig, 1998), 44, and Gordon Ray, The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790–1914 (New York: Oxford UP, 1976), 178. Joseph Crawhall, Chorographia, or a Survey of Newcastle Upon Tyne by William Grey and Joseph Crawhall (Newcastle Upon Tyne, England: Andrew Reid, 1884). Crawhall’s career is noted in James Hamilton Wood Engraving and the Woodcut in England c. 1890–1990 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1994), 36; 37. Max Beerbohm, “A Cloud of Pinafores,” in Works and More [1896–1899; 1899] (London: Bodley Head, 1952), 237. Iona Opie and Peter Opie, A Nursery Companion (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980), 10–15. Colin Campbell, “Nicholson’s Graphic Work” in The Art of William Nicholson, 32, notes some of the letters as having chapbook sources.

178 • Notes 25

26

27 28 29

30

31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

An Alphabet (London, Heinemann, 1897) Rpt. San Francisco, Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1975; An Almanac of Twelve Sports (New York, R.H. Russell, 1900). Original collectors’ boxed Nicholson prints are held by the Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut. Many sources cite the Nicholsons’ theater going in the 1890s, even before Nicholson designed for the stage. Alan Bowness, in his introduction to Andrew Nicholson, ed., William Nicholson, Painter: Paintings, Woodcuts, Writings, Photographs (London: Giles de la Mare, 1996), 10, says simply: “All his life Nicholson loved literature and the theatre. He had many writer friends; his last companion, Marguerite Steen, was a very successful popular novelist and playwright. As a young man, he had been friendly with Edward Gordon Craig, the son of the actress Ellen Terry. In the 1900s he was close to J.M. Barrie, and was the designer of the first production of Peter Pan in 1904.” Campbell, Beggarstaff Posters, 14, notes the Henry Irving connection. Joseph, “William Nicholson,” 220. Hanson, Manet and the Modern Tradition, 59. See Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1996), 16. See also “The Theatre and the Opera” and “The Street as Public Theatre” chapters in Theodore Reff’s Manet and Modern Paris (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.: Eastern P, 1983). Mary Cowling, ed., Paintings from the Reign of Victoria: The Royal Holloway Collection, London, intro. By Tim Barringer (Alexandria, VA: A.S.I., 2008). See Elena Ragusa, Velázquez with preface by Miguel Angel Asturias (New York: Rizzoli, 2006), 106. Ibid. See Xavier Bray’s article, “Velázquez in Britain,” in Velázquez, ed. Dawson W. Carr with Xavier Bray, John H. Elliott, Larry Keith, and Javier Portús (London: National Gallery, 2007), 92–111. Sanford Schwartz, William Nicholson, 59. Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 16. Sanford Schwartz, William Nicholson, 77. Andrew Nicholson, William Nicholson, Painter, 61. Tracy Callis, “Faster and Smoother than Joe Louis.” http://cyberboxingzone.com/boxing/Article-PeterJackson.htm. Rudyard Kipling, Stalky & Co (1899), with notes by Isabel Quigly (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), 73. July, Archery. William Nicholson and W.H. Henley. London Types (New York: R.H. Russell, 1898). Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage, intro. Millicent Rose (New York: Dover, 1970).

Notes • 179 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Steen’s biography, Chapter 14, describes some of Nicholson’s relationships with tramps, including W.H. Davies, the tramp-poet for whom he made illustrations. Manet’s Absinthe Drinker was a portrait. Times, November 24, 1898,“Words and Pictures,” rev. of London Types. William Nicholson, The Square Book of Animals, rhymes by Arthur Waugh (London: Heinemann, 1899). Andrew Nicholson, William Nicholson, Painter, 73. William Nicholson, Square Book, 1. Andrew Nicholson, William Nicholson, Painter, 73. See Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke UP, 1993), 150. The University of Texas, Harry Ransom Center, copy cited below contains a verse, in what appears to be Henley’s handwriting, over his autograph: Envoy The Artist muses at his ease Contented that his work is done And smiling-smiling!—as he sees His crowd collecting, one by one. Alas! His travail’s but begun! None, none can keep the years in line, And what to Ninety-eight is fun May raise the gorge of Ninety-Nine! W.E.H. with flourish at bottom

51

The broadside, such as the popular rhyme-sheets Penelope Fitzgerald describes in her reminiscences about the Poetry Bookshop, had a similar influence on child life. The Poetry Bookshop (1912; restarted again after the war in 1919) was a location where Eleanor Farjeon and Walter de la Mare read, as well as both the cradle of Modernist poetry in England and the haven for Georgian verse. Harold Munro, the proprietor, provided, according to Fitzgerald, two generations of early twentieth-century English children (and their parents) with the means to decorate the walls with poetry embellished by distinguished illustrators. Sylvia Townsend Warner noted, “we tacked them on our walls above our beds” (The Afterlife, 116) Munro, according to Fitzgerald, wanted a true combination of art and poetry on the sheets. In practice, however, the popular and loved sheets were mostly “decorated” and the poetry often truncated to fit the format. Penelope Fitzgerald, “The Poetry Bookshop,” in The Afterlife: Essays and Criticism, ed. Terence Dooley with Christopher Carduff and Mandy Kirkby (New York: Counterpoint, 2003), 104–117. Further discussion of the individual sheets can be found in her collected letters, So I Have Thought of You (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), 330–369. Steen noted that Nicholson had a box of poem sheets with the work of his

180 • Notes

52

53

54 55 56

57

58 59

friends and favorite poets. In Barbara Bader’s American Picturebooks: From Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within, she notes nursery rhyme broadsides on the first Holiday House publication list in 1935. An American attempt to bring fine design to the nursery, the sheets were abandoned for lack of a way to market them successfully (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 212; 213. “Dumas-mania” is the name given to the enormous worldwide popularity of the literary works of Alexandre Dumas. The phenomenon was a strong French contribution to nineteenth-century children’s literature (the novels had an adult/child audience). Nicholson included two Dumas figures in his Characters of Romance engravings. Schwartz notes a particular application of Dumas-mania in connection with proportionality and Jacques Callot. Schwartz, William Nicholson, 45; 46. He also notes that it might have “quickened his [Nicholson’s] affection” that Dumas was well-known to be of partly African ancestry (245). Dumas’ body, which apparently had been denied its rightful place in the Panthéon on racist grounds, was interred there with national honors in 2002. In Xavier Bray’s “Velázquez and Britain,” in Velázquez, ed. Dawson Carr with Xavier Bray, John H. Elliott, Larry Keith, and Javier Portús (London: National Gallery, 2006), 108. The work that “almost every British artist of the period” had read about Velázquez (108) was Robert Stevenson’s The Art of Velasquez (1895). Sanford Schwartz points to the author’s possible acquaintance with Nicholson, because Henley was Robert Louis Stevenson’s mentor, and Robert Stevenson was a cousin and painter of RLS, William Nicholson, 34. James MacNeill Whistler (whom Nicholson also admired) was similarly inspired by Velázquez and owned 9 prints of Velázquez paintings. Bray, “Velázquez and Britain,” n. 88; 110. Widely noted. See, for example, Sanford Schwartz, William Nicholson, 33. Qtd. in Patricia Reed’s “Some Aspects of William Nicholson’s Portraiture,” in The Art of William Nicholson, 38. In particular, see Merlin James, “Words about Painting,” in The Art of William Nicholson, 23–27; Sanford Schwartz, William Nicholson, 40–44; 243. 309–311; Victor Glasstone’s Victorian and Edwardian Theatres: An Architectural and Social Survey (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975), 70, notes The great theatrical event of 1881 was the opening of the Savoy Theatre with Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. D’Oyly Carte knew exactly what he wanted from Phipps, the designer. For the first time anywhere in the world, a public building was lit entirely with “the electric light,” supplied by Messrs Siemens Brothers and made possible by “the incandescent lamps of Mr. J.W. Swan of Newcastle-on-Tyne,” which was “experimentally applied to the interior of this theatre”; gas was still there in case of emergency. Anon.,“Wonderful Candle,” St. Nicholas Magazine 6.5 (March 1979): 311. Patricia Reed, “Some Aspects of William Nicholson’s Portraiture,” 39.

Notes • 181 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68

69

70 71 72 73 74

Merlin James, “Words About Painting,” 23. Colin Campbell, Beggarstaff Posters, 12; Sanford Schwartz, William Nicholson, 41; 42. Sanford Schwartz, William Nicholson, 176; Max Beerbohm’s Letters to Reggie Turner, ed. with intro by Rupert Hart-Davis (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965), [November 26, 1907], 174–176. The 1871 play’s plot concerns a main character, a German householder, who has secretly murdered a Jewish traveler from Krakow who, carrying a great deal of money on a journey in a terrible snowstorm, accepted his hospitality. Fifteen years later, he is haunted by his crime and worried that a mesmerizer entertaining in a nearby village will—by hypnosis—be able to make him reveal his guilty secret. At climactic moments, a space behind a transparent curtain at the back of the set is illumined in such a way that the audience can suddenly see the sledge of the murdered man and concurrently hear the bells on the horses pulling his sledge. These drive the murderer to madness and death, either as visual and auditory images present in the man’s mind—or the presence of a ghost. Although the story could be told without the visual illusion, the ambiguity in the situation would not be there without it (and it would not be so likely to remain in a child’s mind). “Mr. H.B. Irving in The Bells” [October 2, 1909] in Last Theatres 1904– 1910 (New York: Taplinger, 1970), 490–492. Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit [1922], illus. William Nicholson (New York: Doubleday, 1991). Michael Joseph, “William Nicholson,” 225. Sanford Schwartz, William Nicholson, 44. Marguerite Steen, William Nicholson, 15. Discussed in Jonathan Crary’s article, “The Camera Obscura and its Subject,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 1998), 245–252. Succinct discussions are found in Merlin James, “Words about Painting,” 23–26; and Sanford Schwartz, “The Speck in the Distance, or Rethinking William Nicholson” both in Colin Campbell, Merlin James, Patricia Reed, and Sanford Schwartz, The Art of William Nicholson (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005), 12–19. Eleanor Farjeon’s autobiography, A Nursery in the Nineties (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980), 216. Rudyard Kipling, The Brushwood Boy (London: Macmillan, 1914), 11; 12. G.K. Chesterton,“The Pantomime” in The Common Man (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1950), 58. G.K. Chesterton, “Walter de la Mare” in The Common Man (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1950), 207; 208. There is a photo of the “Nobleman,” in William Nicholson, Painter, ed. Andrew Nicholson, which further complicates the illusion because the statue is larger than one would expect such a figure to be.

182 • Notes 75

76

77 78 79

80

81 82 83

84

85 86 87 88 89

Sanford Schwartz’s critical biography devotes Chapter 9, “The Mirror,” to a discussion of self-portraiture in Nicholson’s work. Schwartz’s conclusary remarks about the Nobleman’s “City” makes a related point: “where big and little, real and unreal, near and far have all been interwoven.” (158) Clever Bill exists in more than one format, the formats differing in whether they are printed on one side of a page only (which affects word placement in one case), in the quality and brightness of the colors, and in the inclusion of decorated endpapers. It was first printed in 1926. The most available edition is (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1977). Schwartz, William Nicholson, 18. Max Beerbohm, “A Defence of Cosmetics” [1894] in The Works of Max Beerbohm (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1922), 116–118. Natalie op de Beeck, “Suspended Animation: Picture Book Storytelling, Twentieth-Century Childhood, and William Nicholson’s Clever Bill,” The Lion and the Unicorn 30.1 (2006): 69. The Knoblock collection at Rice University, Houston, Texas, has letters from Nicholson to Edward Knoblock. The letter (of December 18), includes a picture of a train “crawling” by and a similar dog “pointing” at the bottom of a vari-colored text, which reinforces the joke idea. Sanford Schwartz, William Nicholson, 123. Natalie op de Beeck, “Suspended Animation,” 68. See also op de Beeck for different conclusions about the packing episode. Compare Thomas Bewick, Select Fables of Aesop [1808] (London: Longmans, 1876) for the oval arrangement. http://digital.lib.msu.edu/collections/index.cfm?TitleID=262. Not all the borders are alike, but “Tortoise and Two Crows” or “Passenger and the Pilot” show the similarity with Nicholson’s drawings. Michael Joseph [conversation] has suggested that the changing direction in Bill’s journey (and the packing episode also applies) alludes to the reversal present in printing from engraving blocks. Hilary Thompson has discussed the Bewick vignettes and borders in “Enclosure and Childhood in the Wood Engravings of Thomas and John Bewick,” Children’s Literature 24 (1996): 1–22. William Nicholson, The Pirate Twins (New York: Coward McCann, 1929) or (London: Faber and Faber, 1929). A fine reprint is available: (London: Andrew Jones Art, 2005). Barbara Bader, American Picturebooks from Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 61. Maurice Sendak, Caldecott & Co. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1988), 166. Steen, William Nicholson, 23. Among others, Schwartz, William Nicholson, 65. See Bruce Beiderwell and Anita Hemphill McCormick, “The Making and Unmaking of a Children’s Classic,” in Culturing the Child 1690– 1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers, ed. Donelle Ruwe (Lanham,

Notes • 183

90

91

92 93

94 95

96

MD: Scarecrow, 2005), 165–177; G.K. Chesterton noted the vanishing of historical adventure stories with disapproval in “Books for Boys,” The Common Man (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1950), 228–232. Merlin James, “Words about Painting,” 29. The note comes from a discussion of Nicholson’s preference for breaking into things, to show the difference between the surface and inner substance—although both, of course, are really “surface,” emphasized by his technique. The cake in The Pirate Twins resembles the bread and melon in the painted still lifes James mentions. Moorish connection in Schwartz, William Nicholson, 243–249. Nicholson’s family and Robert Graves (married to Nicholson’s daughter Nancy at one time) believed the story that African ancestry was present in the family, possibly due to a slave ship grounding on the Isle of Skye and leading to interracial families in that area. Schwartz notes that stories about this were probably circulating as early as the 1890s and may have been alluded to in Beerbohm’s portraits of Nicholson. Nicholson’s daughter Elizabeth Bank’s perception of her father as the pirates in The Pirate Twins is partly based upon this assumption. Interviewed for Elaine Moss, “Clever Bill: William Nicholson, Children & Picture Books,” Signal 80 (May 1996): 103. Moss, “Clever Bill: William Nicholson, Children & Picture Books,” 102. See Dawson W. Carr, “Painting and Reality: The Art and Life of Velázquez,” in Velázquez, ed. Dawson W. Carr with Xavier Bray, John H. Elliott, Larry Keith, and Javier Portús (London: National Gallery, 2006), 48–50. G.K. Chesterton, “Books for Boys,” in The Common Man (New York: Sheen and Ward, 1950), 232. Rudyard Kipling (author/editor), King Albert’s Book: A Tribute to the Belgian King and People from Representative Men and Women throughout the World in conjunction with The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Sketch, The Glasgow Herald and Hodden and Stoughton.(London: Knights’ Manufacturing Company, Ltd., , 1914). Noted in Schwartz 177; 178. Merlin Ingli James, “Going Along with the Light,” rev. William Nicholson, Painter, ed. Andrew Nicholson, Times Literary Supplement (May 17, 1996): 18; 19.

Chapter Four 1

See Gillian Perry, Paula Modersohn-Becker: Her Life and Work (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 44–53; Gillian Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and “Feminine” Art. 1900 to the Late 1920s (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995), Chapter 3; Sian Reynolds, “Running Away to Paris: Expatriate Women Artists of the 1900 Generation, from Scotland and Points South,” Women’s History Review 9.2 (June 2000): 327–344; J. Diane Radycki, “The Life of Lady Art Students: Changing Art Education at the Turn of the Century,” Art Journal 42.1 (Spring 1982):

184 • Notes

2

3

4 5

6

9–13; John Crombie, Chez Charlotte and Fin-de-siècle Montparnasse (Paris: Kickshaws, 2003); John Crombie, The Cradle of Montparnasse (Paris: Kickshaws, 1998); Barbara Beuys, Paula Modersohn-Becker oder: Wenn die Kunst das Leben ist (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2007) contains a map showing Paula’s Montparnasse locations in the endpapers to the volume. Overcoming All Obstacles: The Women of the Academie Julian, ed. by Gabriel P. Weisberg and Jane R. Becker (New York: Dehesh Museum and Rutgers UP, 1999) is an exhibition/study of the first women art students admitted to life-drawing classes. Recent editions of the letters are Günter Busch and Liselotte von Reinken. Paula Modersohn-Becker: The Letters and Journals, ed. and trans. by Arthur S. Wensinger and Carole Clew Hoey (New York: Taplinger, 1983). This edition (in English) is used hereafter. The newer edition (in German) is Paula Modersohn-Becker in Briefen und Tagebüchern, hg.v. Günter Busch und Liselotte von Reinken, revidierte und erweiterte Ausgabe bearbeitet von Wolfgang Werner im Auftrag der Paula Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung (Frankfurt a. M: Fischer, 2007). Rilke’s “Requiem” can be found in Eric Torgersen, Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1998), Appendix 261; 267. Torgersen gives a reading and contextualization of the Requiem; Robert Hass, “Rilke’s Great Requiem,” The Threepenny Review 11 (Autumn 1982): 4; 5, also offers a reading. Adrienne Rich, “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff,” in The Dream of a Common Language, 1974–1977 (New York: Norton, 1978), 42–44. See Anne Buschhoff and Wulf Herzogenrath, ed., Paula Modersohn-Becker und die Kunst in Paris um 1900—Von Cézanne bis Picasso [catalog for exhibition October 13, 2007–February 24, 2008 in the Kuntshalle, Bremen, Germany] (München: Hirmer, 2007). Also Anne Buschhoff and Henrike Holsing, ed. Short Guide to the Exhibition. The Modersohn-Becker Foundation holds her graduation certificate. The name of the school is identified in Marina Bohlmann-Modersohn, Paula Modersohn-Becker: Eine Biographie mit Briefen (Munich: Verlag Random House, 2007), 26. Barbara Beuys, Paula Modersohn-Becker oder: Wenn die Kunst das Leben ist, 56–70; as well as in the 2007 Wolfgang Werner revision of the Letters. The Janson Lehrerinnen-seminar was headed, during the years that Modersohn-Becker studied there, by Mathilde Lammers (1837–1905),who resigned in 1895, the year Paula graduated. See Christine Holz Rabe, “Mathilde Lammers.” http://www.bremer-frauenmuseum.de/ frauenhandbuch/Lammers.html. Lammers was an early German feminist, and one of the “representative women” at the Chicago conference cited below. Her book, Mathilde Lammers, Die Frau. Ihre Stellung und Aufgabe in Haus und Welt (Leipzig: Veit, 1877) contains views on motherhood, education, and professions for young women. James Albisetti, Schooling German Girls and Women: Secondary and Higher Education in

Notes • 185

7 8

9 10 11 12 13. 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21

the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988), 145, cites her early defense of foreign travel as part of a girl’s education in the pamphlets she wrote in the 1870s. Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 39. Two sources in English discussing Worpeswede’s ideals and influence are Averil King, Paula Modersohn-Becker (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2009), 22–33, and Gillian Perry’s Paula Modersohn-Becker, 13–36; 89–106, among many others. Christa Kamenetsky, Children’s Literature in Hitler’s Germany: The Cultural Policy of National Socialism (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1984), Chapter 1, discusses some related issues of nationalism associated with folk roots and folk peasantry. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All or None [1883– 1892], trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1966), 206. Maurice Maeterlinck, Wisdom and Destiny, trans. Alfred Sutro (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1913). Ibid., 8; 9. Ibid., 16; 17. Ibid., x. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York, Vintage, 1986), 37, Letter 4, July 16, 1903, written from Worpswede. Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 286. The marriage is discussed in Bohlmann-Modersohn, Paula ModersohnBecker: Eine Biographie mit Briefen, 229, and Torgersen, Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker, 179. For the portrait, see Alexander Sturgis, Rupert Christiansen, Lois Oliver, and Michael Wilson, Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century (Yale: Yale UP, 2006). Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 23; 24. Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne [1880], trans. Hanna Astrup Larsen (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1919), 240; 241. Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 182. Gerhart Hauptmann, The Sunken Bell: A Fairy Play of 5 Acts [1896], trans. Charles Henry Meltzer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1899). Paula and Otto Modersohn knew Gerhart Hauptmann’s brother and family well due to their Worpswede connection. They stayed with Carl Hauptmann and his wife on their wedding journey, for example. She wrote about “Sunken Bell” moods, following her attendance at the play in the 1890s. She also once attended a costume party as Rawtendelein, the water-sprite/ Nature spirit for whom the hero leaves his wife. Nicole Fluhr, “Freud as New Woman Writer: Maternal Ambivalence in Studies in Hysteria,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 53.3 (2010): 283–307. Lisabeth Hock, “The Melancholy (Pro) Creation of Franziska zu Reventlow and Gabriele Reuter,” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture 23 (2007): 102–125 discusses the

186 • Notes

22

23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

work of German women writers with similar themes in the contemporary period. Claudia Nelson and Ann Sumner Holmes, ed., Maternal Instincts: Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875–1925 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 2; 3; Wendy Slatkin’s, “Maternity and Sexuality in the 1890s,” Women’s Art Journal 1.1 (Spring/Summer 1980): 13–19; Stewart Buettner, “Images of Modern Motherhood in the Art of Morisot, Cassatt, Modersohn-Becker, Kollwitz,” Woman’s Art Journal 7.2 (Autumn 1986/Winter 1987): 14–21; and Gillian Perry’s Paula Modersohn-Becker, 62, discuss maternal fine art images in Modersohn-Becker’s era. Ann Taylor Allen in Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991) contrasts the development of feminism in Germany as opposed to other countries during the nineteenth century, including its overlap with Froebelianism and American educators such as Elizabeth Peabody. “Motherhood” in Germany also was used in a variety of political ways. It could be perceived as empowering because the rationale for increased women’s rights was based upon the performance of maternal duties and services on which the welfare of the society rested. E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London: Routledge, 1992), 20–21. Chapter Five in this volume (Chagall) extends the discussion of breastfeeding and Rousseau. The classic texts for use in schools are discussed in Jennifer Askey, “The National Family: Allegory and Femininity in a Festspiel from 1880,” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture 24 (2008): 49–70; L.R. Klemm, Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1891–1892. Vol 1, Chapter VI, Training of teachers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894), 162. John T. Prince’s Methods of Instruction and Organization of the Schools of Germany for the Use of American Teachers and Normal Schools (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1897), 108, describes a class of 14-year-old students telling the story of Hermann and Dorothea). Claudia Nelson, Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals, 1850– 1910 (Athens: U Georgia P, 1995), 18. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Eva Channing, Leonard and Gertrude (London: Applegate, 1781). See introduction to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hermann and Dorothea, trans. J. Cartwright (London: David Nutt, 1862), 5; 6. Goethe, Hermann and Dorothea, 44. Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mother Carey’s Chickens (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1911), 260. Goethe, Hermann and Dorothea, 93; 94. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Letters of Pestalozzi on the Education of Infancy: Addressed to Mothers (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1830), Letter 1, 4.

Notes • 187 33 See, for example, Mitzi Myers, “Impeccable Governesses, Rational Dames, and Moral Mothers: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Female Tradition in Georgian Children’s Books,” Children’s Literature 14 (1986): 31–59. 34 Mathilde Lammers, Die Frau. Ihre Stellung und Aufgabe in Haus und Welt (Leipzig: Verlag von Beit, 1877), 108. 35 Ellen Key, Century of the Child (New York: Putnam’s, 1909), 63–105. Anne Buschhoff in “‘Bei intimster Beobachtung die größte Einfachheit anstreben’—Kinderbilder und frühe Darstellungen von Mutter und Kind,” in Paula Modersohn Becker und die Kunst in Paris um 1900—Von Cézanne bis Picasso, Anne Buschhoff and Wulf Herzogenrath, ed. (München: Hirmer, 2007), 105, feels that Modersohn-Becker would have read Key’s book when it was translated into German in 1902 and reviewed favorably by Rainer Maria Rilke. 36 Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 238. 37 Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mother Carey’s Chickens, 26. 38 Ibid., 282. 39 Ibid., 227. 40 Elizabeth Peabody, Education in the Home, the Kindergarten, and the Primary School. Lectures in the Training Schools for Kindergarten Teachers, intro. E. Adelaide Manning (London: Swann Sonnenschein, Lowrey, 1887), point 1. 41 Lammers, Die Frau. Ihre Stellung und Aufgabe in Haus und Welt, 31;107. 42 Ibid., 104. 43 Ulf Boëthius, “‘Us is near bein’ wild things ourselves’: Procreation and Sexuality in The Secret Garden,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 22.4 (Winter 1997): 188–195. 44 Kate Douglas Wiggin, My Garden of Memory: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 359. 45 Daphne M. Kutzer, “A Wilderness Inside: Domestic Space in the Work of Beatrix Potter,” Lion and Unicorn 21.2 (April 1997): 204–213. 46 Sharon Smulders, “The Good Mother: Language, Gender, and Power in Ann and Jane Taylor’s Poetry for Children,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 27.1 (Spring 2002): 4–15. 47 Elizabeth Peabody, Education in the Home, the Kindergarten, and the Primary School. Lectures in the Training Schools for Kindergarten Teachers, Lecture III, 56. 48 Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 415. 49 Ibid., 112. 50 Ibid., 119; 120. 51 Ibid., 216. 52 Ibid., 249. 53 Ibid., 284. 54 Ibid., 310. 55 Ibid., 346.

188 • Notes 56 Nicole Fluhr, “Freud as New Woman Writer: Maternal Ambivalence in Studies in Hysteria,” points to the many mothers or wives who did not share this happy acceptance of the cultural ideal or perceived it as a woman question rather than a creative artist question. 57 Émile Zola, Fruitfulness [Fécondité 1899], trans. and ed. Ernest Alfred Vizetelly (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1900), 199. Zola’s novel is a didactic story written in response to his alarm at the falling birthrate in France. 58 Ibid., 194. 59 Averil King, Paula Modersohn-Becker, 172. 60 Qtd. in Elinor Ann Accampo, “The Gendered Nature of Contraception in France: Neo-Malthusianism, 1900–1920,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 34.2 (Autumn 2003): 248. 61 Averil King, Paula Modersohn-Becker, 173. 62 The Parisian avant-garde influence in motherhood is discussed in Wendy Slatkin, “Maternity and Sexuality in the 1890s,” 13; 14, in connection with avant-garde circles in the 1890s, including Gauguin, one of ModersohnBecker’s influences. Averil King discusses “Gauguin and His Influence” in Chapter 12 of Paula Modersohn-Becker (2009). Anne Buschoff, “‘Bei intimster Beobachtung die gröɮte Einfachheit anstreben’—Kinderbilder und frühe Darstellungen von Mutter und Kind,” 105, relates the symbolically fruitful child to the influence of Ellen Key. See also Henrike Holsing,“‘die groɮe Wirkung nobler Einfachheit’—Der Akt,” in Paula Modersohn Becker und die Kunst in Paris um 1900—Von Cézanne bis Picasso, ed. Anne Buschhoff and Wulf Herzogenrath (München: Hirmer, 2007): 144–171. 63 Anne Röver-Kann, “‘Nachmittags zeichne ich Akt. Jede halbe Stunde eine andere Stellung. Das macht mir viel Freude’: Akt. Zeichnen und Malen— Wege zum eigenen Bild I,” in Paula Modersohn Becker und die Kunst in Paris um 1900—Von Cézanne bis Picasso, ed. Anne Buschhoff and Wulf Herzogenrath (München: Hirmer, 2007), 129. 64 Ellen Key, Century of the Child, Chapters 2 and 3. Key proposed government payments to mothers to avoid the financial stress on either parent. 65 Anne Röver-Kann, “Nachmittags zeichne ich Akt,” 124. 66 Jan Amos Comenius, Orbis Sensualium Pictus, trans. Charles Hoole [12e] (London: S. Leacroft, 1777), Preface b2. 67 Ibid., Preface b5. 68 Ibid. 69 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile [1762], The Émile of Jean-Jacques Rousseau at Columbia, trans. Grace Roosevelt. http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/pedagogies/rousseau/index.html. Book 3, Sections 476; 478 on drawing, 476. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 478. “Secrets of Nature” passage important here. 73 Froebel is a Christian mystic, but his form of Christianity greatly resembles some of Modersohn-Becker’s spiritual statements. That is, he does not

Notes • 189

74

75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86

87 88 89 90

believe in the “fall” of mankind (thus closer to Rousseau), and sees man as developing rather than in the throes of original sin. See, for example, The Education of Man, trans. W.N. Hailmann (New York: Appleton, 1887), 120. Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 76 [ April 1900]; Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, How Gertrude Teaches her Children [1801], trans. Lucy Holland and Francis Turner, ed., Ebenezer Cooke (London and Syracuse: Swann Sonnenschein; C.W. Bardeen, 1894), 1. Joseph Payne, A Visit to German Schools (London: Henry S. King, 1876), 137; 138. Note Kate Douglas Wiggin’s humorous chapter on a visit to Yverdun in “Penelope in Switzerland,” Penelope’s Postcripts (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1915), 1–36. Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 182. Ibid., 274. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Letters of Pestalozzi on the Education of Infancy; How Gertrude Teaches, 25. Sarah B. Cooper, vol. 1 of The World’s Congress of Representative Women, , ed. May Wright Sewall (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1894), 90. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, How Gertrude Teaches, 72. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 82. Gillian Perry, Paula Modersohn-Becker, 117. Qtd. in Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora Archibald Smith, Froebel’s Occupations. Vol. 2, The Republic of Childhood (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1896), 62. Friedrich Froebel, The Education of Man, trans. W.N. Hailmann (New York: Appleton, 1887), 76. John Payne, A Visit to German Schools, 36; Friedrich Froebel, Education of Man, 288–303. Norman Brosterman’s Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Abrams, 1997) gives a thorough description of the Froebel gifts and occupations method with color photographs by Kiyoshi Togashi; Brosterman’s study, which gives supporting statistics on the international adoption of the kindergarten, contends that it led to abstraction in art and innovation in architecture. (Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, personally credited the Froebel blocks and grids for his early understanding of design.) I claim a wider and different influence here and am using an emphasis that makes it difficult to synthesize the Brosterman material, but it should certainly be consulted and compared. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, How Gertrude, 118. Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora Archibald Smith, Froebel’s Occupations, 71. Ibid., 132. Horace Mann, Mr. Mann’s Seventh Annual Report: Education in Europe. Massachusetts Board of Education, 1844.

190 • Notes 91 John Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts (New York: Norton, 2007), 27. Matteson also notes that Alcott attempted to employ women as assistants in his Boston school to “more closely approach the model of the family proposed by Pestalozzi” (35). 92 Amos Bronson Alcott, “Pestalozzi’s Principles and Methods of Instruction,” American Journal of Education 4 (March/April 1829): 97–107. Noted in Sarah Elbert, A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and Little Women (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1984), 22. 93 Six student lesson plans by Modersohn-Becker have been preserved at the Modersohn-Becker Foundation, Bremen, Germany. Elizabeth Peabody’s Record of Mr. Alcott’s School, Exemplifying the Principles and Methods of Moral Culture. 3e revised (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874) describes Alcott’s classroom methods. The third revised edition has a preface containing a statement from Louisa May Alcott, as well as Peabody’s own rather embarrassed explanation that she had become a Froebelian since the time at which she had recorded and praised Alcott’s methods (Alcott had taught her how to appreciate Froebel). 94 Sarah Elbert, A Hunger for Home, 22. 95 Ann T. Allen, “Children between Public and Private Worlds: The Kindergarten and Public Policy in Germany, 1840–Present,” in Kindergartens and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea, ed. Roberta Wollens (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000), 17. Allen discusses the necessity of educating German children before parents could insist that they provide family income. 96 Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000), 77–90 discusses some of the utilitarian applications of drawing as the landscape of “sense” (as opposed to “sensibility”). 97 Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora Archibald Smith, Froebel’s Occupations, 85. 98 Ibid., 65. Prussia made drawing a required course in the schools in 1872, as noted by Ulrike Müller, with the collaboration of Ingrid Radewaldt and Sandra Kemker, in Bauhaus Women: Art, Handicraft, Design (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), 8. 99 Alison Byerly, “Effortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature,” Criticism 41(Summer 1999), 349–64. See also Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw, for an extensive discussion. 100 Felix Driver, “Distance and Disturbance: Travel, Exploration and Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 14 (2004): 78–92. 101 Ibid., 82. For Agassiz, see “In the Laboratory with Agassiz” by Samuel H. Scudder. Every Saturday n.s., vol 1 (4 April 1874): 369. 102 Felix Driver, “Distance and Disturbance,” 88.

Notes • 191 103 Camilla Murgia, “The Rouillet Process and Drawing Education in MidNineteenth-Century France,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 2.1 (Winter 2003):10. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. 106 June E. Eyestone, “The Influence of Swedish Sloyd and its Interpreters on American Art Education,” Studies in Art Education 34.1 (Autumn 1992): 28–38. Another “folkloric” drawing method was the popular A Method for Creative Design by Adolfo Best-Maugard (New York, Knopf, 1926). 107 Eyestone, “The Influence of Swedish Sloyd,” 38. 108 Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Abrams, 1997) discusses Froebelian abstraction in connection with abstract art; Marilynn S. Olson, “Little Workers of the Kindergarten,” Lion and Unicorn 26.3 (September 2002) discusses a possible connection to Taylorism. 109 Gillian Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and “Feminine” Art. 1900 to the Late 1920s (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995), 15–19. 110 Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 58; 59; 167. 111 Ibid., 24. 112 Mathilde Lammers, Die Frau, 191; 192. 113 Ann Bermingham’s Learning to Draw provides very complete information on the growing popularity of landscape drawing in England through several centuries. Pages 85 and 86 discuss an example of the tendency of men trained for topographic or military drawing who went on to become landscape artists, including some marginal sketches by Lieutenant James Christie from 1897 showing figure drawings copied from an amateur guide: “military men were not exclusively taken up with topography and cartography, and . . . once bitten by the drawing bug some went on, with the help of commercial manuals, to teach themselves other kinds of drawing. It is significant that so many of the important figures in eighteenth-century landscape drawing such as the Sandbys, Alexander Cozens, and William Gilpin, as well as a number of amateurs, had military training, connections, or backgrounds.” 114 Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora Archibald Smith, Froebel’s Occupations, 65. 115 Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne (1880), trans. Hanna Astrup Larsen (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1919), 19. 116 John Crombie, The Cradle of Montparnasse (Paris: Kickshaws, 1998), 23. 117 Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 170. Rebecca Duckwitz at the Modersohn-Becker Stiftung says that the original phrases used for “little men” and “little women” in this passage cannot be references to either children or the Alcott books. They are closer to something like “little old men” in folktales. Duckwitz thinks that the use of the terms

192 • Notes

118 119 120

121

122

may indicate shyness on Modersohn-Becker’s part at this overwhelming new situation. Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 158. Ibid., 171. John Crombie, The Cradle of Montparnasse, 48. Also John Crombie, Chez Charlotte and Fin-de-siècle Montparnasse (Paris: Kickshaws, 2003), 52. Anne Buschhoff and Henrike Holsing, ed., Short Guide, 34; 35, mentions the Italian models as less expensive than French ones and identifies Modersohn-Becker’s use of this “model market” in reference to her model for Half-Length Nude, an Italian Woman with Plate in Her Raised Hand (Autumn 1906), one of her masterworks. John Crombie, Cradle, 52, notes that in 1905, St. Luke’s (the American Episcopal chapel on Rue de la Grande Chaumière that adjoined the academies in a mission capacity) had its fi rst Epiphany party for the child models. One hundred and five attended, which gives some indication of numbers in that year. Marie Bashkirtseff painted a picture called In the Studio in 1881 that shows a boy modeling for a group of female painters at Julian’s art academy in Paris, as noted by Barbara Dayer Gallati in “Posing Problems: Sargent’s Model Children,” in Great Expectations: John Singer Sargent Painting Children, ed. Barbara Dayer Gallati with contributions by Erica E. Hirshler and Richard Ormond (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2004), 210. She notes that Overcoming All Obstacles: The Women of the Académie Julian , ed. Gabriel P. Weisberg and Jane R. Becker (New York: Dahesh Museum, 1999) discusses the picture on pages 18 and 19. The biographical sketches of the early women students included in that work contain some references to the children who were eager to offer such services in areas containing art schools. Gallati’s “Posing Problems” includes a section (207–214) on professional child models used by Sargent, many of them Italian. In the case of portrait artists such as John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, the difference between portraits of society children and those of professional or semi-professional models is a matter of critical importance. Mary Cassatt’s later mother and child portraits, for example, like Modersohn-Becker’s, were achieved with professional sitters. The fullest discussion of the influence of the mummy portraits is in Rainer Stamm, ed., Paula Modersohn-Becker und die ägyptischen Mumienportraits: eine homage zum 100. Todes tag der Künstlerin, a catalog for the exhibition in the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum October 13 1906–February 24, 2008 and Museum Ludwig in Cologne, March 15 until June 15, 2008 (Munich: Hirmer, 2007). The effect of the exhibition of mummy portraits, which she saw in Paris, can be compared to the effect of the African masks on Picasso; both helped the artists achieve a different way of conveying human faces. The prominent eyes of the mummy portraits, however, are distinctive.

Notes • 193 123 J. Diane Radycki, “The Life of Lady Art Students: Changing Art Education at the Turn of the Century,” 9; 13. Radycki notes that women were allowed to compete for the École Beaux-Arts Academy prizes starting in 1903, due to lengthy pressure from the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs; however, the Lady Art Students won the right to attend classes and compete for the Prix de Rome at the very time when painting was becoming less representational and the academies less influential. 124 Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 526. 125 Eric Torgersen, Dear Friend, 191, brings evidence that she took the advice; Anne Röver-Kann, “Nachmittags zeichne ich Akt,” 129, discusses the change. 126 Friedrich Froebel, The Education of Man, 331–32. 127 Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 140. 128 Ibid., 168. 129 Ibid., 177. 130 Ibid., 180. 131 Ibid., 181. 132 Ibid., 309. 133 Ibid., 414. 134 Ibid., 418. 135 Averil King, Paula Modersohn-Becker, 140 n. 5. 136 Sara Friedrichsmeyer, “Paula Modersohn-Becker and the Fictions of Artistic Self-Representation,” German Studies Review 14.3 (October 1991): 489–510; notes her use of photographs for the nude portraits, and her desire to have her “soul laid bare” is discussed in Gill Perry’s Paula Modersohn Becker, 54. Froebel notes of artworks (Education of Man), “these works . . . are not meant to be art-masks, but are always representations of the most individual, the most personal inner life of the artist . . . as the spirit of man is thus related to the work produced by him, so is the spirit of God, so is God, related to nature and to all created things” (153; 154) 137 Because of the early popularity of her life in (censored) journals and letters, Modersohn-Becker was known to many people in much the same way as was the Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff, who had died in the 1870s at the age of 24. Gillian Perry’s Paula Modersohn-Becker, 10; 12; 39, discusses her influence on Paula. The explanatory notes to the Letters (147) credit Bashkirtseff with originating the phrase “kindred soul,” used by Paula (who directly discusses her reading of Bashkirtseff’s journal in a number of letters). Children’s literature scholars who know the unflattering references to “Bashy” in Jean Webster’s Dear Enemy (1915) should note that she was considered an inspiration by many women at the turn of the century. For example, Wiggin recorded her thoughts on visiting Bashkirtseff’s grave. Kate Douglas Wiggin, My Garden of Memory, 205–207. 138 Froebel, Friedrich. Froebel’s Letters on the Kindergarten, ed. Emilie Michaelis and H. Keatley Moore (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1891), 133.

194 • Notes 139 140 141 142 143 144

145 146 147 148 149

150 151 152 153 154 155

156 157

Susan Cooper, World’s Congress, 633. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 27. Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 186. Friedrich von Schiller, Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man (1759– 1805), Letter 4, 8. Elizabeth Peabody, Education in the Home, the Kindergarten, and the Primary School, 18. Robert Rosenblum, Maryanne Stevens, and Ann Dumas, 1900: Art at the Crossroads (New York: Abrams, 2000), 348–355, provides two such studies as part of a survey of triptychs, a popular turn-of-the-century revival. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 40. Robert Rosenblum, Maryanne Stevens, and Ann Dumas, 1900: Art at the Crossroads, 38. See, for example, Gillian Perry, Paula Modersohn-Becker, 48. See, for example, Anne Buschhoff, “Bei intimster Beobachtung die gröɮte Einfachheit anstreben,” 107; 108. Christa Murken-Altrogge, ed. Paula Modersohn-Becker: Kinderbildnisse [1977]. (Munich: Piper, 1981), and Gillian Perry’s Paula Modersohn-Becker are older volumes covering the child portraits. Anne Buschhoff’s “’Bei intimster Beobachtung die gröɮte Einfachheit anstreben’–Kinderbilder und frühe Darstellungen von Mutter und Kind,” 104–123, and Henrike Holsing’s “‘die groɮe Wirkung nobler Einfachheit’—Der Akt,” 144–171, in Paula Modersohn-Becker und die Kunst in Paris um 1900—Von Cézanne bis Picasso contain fine-quality reproductions of many child portraits. Averil King, Paula Modersohn-Becker, 2009, has a selection. The catalog to the exhibit Paula Modersohn-Becker in Bremen, contains a further well-produced selection, including the nude discussed in the text (55). See Günter Busch, Rebecca Duckwitz, Milena Schicketanz, and Wolfgang Werner of the Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung, Bremen, Paula Modersohn-Becker—Die Gemäldeaus den drei Bremer Sammlungen (Bremen: Hauschild, 2008. Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 110. Ibid., 109. Kate Douglas Wiggin, Marm Lisa (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1896), 48. Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 116. Kate Douglas Wiggin, The Story of Patsy (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897), 49. One such portrait is in Günter Busch, Rebecca Duckwitz, Milena Schicketanz, and Wolfgang Werner of the Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung, Bremen, Paula Modersohn-Becker—Die Gemälde aus den drei Bremer Sammlungen, 55. Gillian Perry, Paula Modersohn-Becker, quoting from Das Schwarze Korps, August 21, 1935, 63 [“lacking in a ‘sensitive maternal quality.”]. Günter Busch and Lisalotte von Reinken, Letters, 398.

Notes • 195 158 Eric Torgersen, Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula ModersohnBecker, 216. Chapter Five 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13

Blaise Cendrars, “Le Livre d’enfant en URSS” in Livres d’enfants russes et soviétiques (1917–1945), dictionnaire des illustrateurs, ed. Françoise Lévèque and Sege Plantureaux (Paris: Agence Culturelle de Paris, 1997), iv–v. The La Fontaine fables were not published until after World War II. Yakov Tugendhold, Rpt. of “The First Book on Marc Chagall,” in Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, ed. Benjamin Harshav, trans. Barbara Harshav and Benjamin Harshav (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 185. Mircea Eliade, “Marc Chagall and the Love of the Cosmos,” in Homage to Marc Chagall, ed. G. di San Lazzaro (New York: Tudor, 1995), 13. G. di San Lazzaro, ed. Homage to Marc Chagall (New York: Tudor, 1995), 10. Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004), 25. Aleksandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art, trans. Katherine Foshko Tsan (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007), 4. Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and His Times, 8 Ibid., 33. Ibid., 28–30. Ibid., 74–166. Harshav discusses the various versions of the autobiography and reprints a translation of the “original,” which is called “My Own World” (1925). The project may have been thought of as a text/picture work as early as 1914. The original text was written in Russian (around 1921) and failed to be translated into German for publication by Cassirer in Berlin because of the unusual style. Cassirer published some of the illustrations by themselves, instead (1922/1923). In 1925 the text was translated from the Russian (now lost) into Yiddish, in which form it was serially published in New York. The French version, Ma Vie (Called My Life in its English translation), was translated by Bella Chagall and published in 1931. The Yiddish version is the one closest to Chagall, who worked with the translators, and who spoke Yiddish as his first language. My Life is an expanded version of My Own World. Harshav claims that “in detail and precision . . . the earlier version . . . is closest to Chagall’s original autobiography”[84]. Bella Chagall, Burning Lights [1946], illus. Marc Chagall, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Schocken, 1962), 9; 10. Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and His Times, 1; 70; 71. Jackie Wullschlager, Chagall: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 2008), 39–42.

196 • Notes 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23

24

25

26

27 28

Benjamin Harshav, ed., Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, 161. Van Gogh’s paintings from Holland (before he came to France) are in dark colors, see, for example, The Potato Eaters. Ibid., 48; 82. Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and His Times, 86. Some of the titles of the early Parisian works were invented by Blaise Cendrars, at that time a great friend of Chagall’s. Daniel E. Schneider, “A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Painting of Marc Chagall,” College Art Journal 6.2 (Winter 1946): 123. Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and His Times, 100. See, for example, James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981); Roxanne Harde, “‘Better Friends,’ Marshall Saunders Writing Humane Education and Envisioning Animal Rights,” Jeunesse 1.2 (Winter 2009): 85–108; Gene Myers, The Significance of Children and Animals: Social Development and Our Connections to Other Species (West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2007); Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago: U Chicago P, 2011). Mitzi Myers, “Portrait of the Female Artist as a Young Robin: Maria Edgeworth’s Telltale Tailpiece,” The Lion and the Unicorn 20.2 (1996): 238. Sarah Trimmer, “Fabulous Histories, Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting Their Treatment of Animals” [1786] selection in From Instruction to Delight: An Anthology of Children’s Literature to 1850, 2e, ed. Patricia Demers (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), 229–230. Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot and Burlington, Ashgate, 2006) includes a discussion of the talking robins. Francis Hutcheson, Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Moral Good (1726–1738), qtd. in Aaron Garrett, “Francis Hutcheson and the Origin of Animal Rights,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.2 (2007): 255; See also D.D. Raphael, ed. British Moralists 1650–1800, Vol. 1(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969), 303. Anna Letitia Barbauld, “A Mouse’s Petition,” in Poems [1773]. http:// www.rc.umd.edu/editions/contemps/barbauld/poems1773/mouses_ petition.html. See Aaron Garrett, “Francis Hutcheson and the Origin of Animal Rights,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.2 (2007): 243, for a range of pioneering efforts. Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals Are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History,” American Historical Review 98.2 (April 1993): 382–411. Bryan Holme, intro. Grandville’s Animals: The World’s Vaudeville (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1981), 6. Randolph Caldecott, illus., Some Fables of Aesop with Modern Instances Shewn in Designs by Randolph Caldecott, trans. Alfred Caldecott (London: Macmillan, 1883).

Notes • 197 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37 38 39 40

41 42

43

44 45 46

Roxanne Harde, “‘Better Friends,’ Marshall Saunders Writing Humane Education and Envisioning Animal Rights,” Jeunesse 1.2 (Winter 2009): 96. Ethel Parton, Tabitha Mary: A Little Girl of 1810 (New York: Viking, 1933), 51; 71. Mitzi Myers,“Portrait of a Female Artist as a Young Robin,” 239. lines 111–134 describe similar hunting results, with a more openly critical stance than Barbauld brings. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Lessons for Children in Four Parts (Paris: Truchy, 1853), Part 4, 203. Ibid., Part 4, 94. The painter Carmen Lomas Garza, whose paintings have been gathered in several children’s books, exhibits a similar matter of factness, although the illustration of her grandmother killing a chicken shows Carmen’s little brother dropping a snowcone in surprise: As the author remarks, “Yo sabía que mis abuelos criaban gallinas, pero no había sabido antes cómo era que las gallinas se convertían en sopa” (I knew my grandparents had always raised chickens, but I never knew how the chickens got to be soup), Family Pictures (San Francisco: Children’s Book P, 1990), 8. Mitzi Myers, “Portrait of a Female Artist as a Young Robin,” 203. Elbridge T. Gerry, “The Relations of the Society for the Privention of Cruelty to Child-Saving Work,” in Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction [1882] (Fort Worth, Indiana: Fort Worth UP, 1913). See Lela B. Costin, “Unraveling the Mary Ellen Legend: Origins of the ‘Cruelty’ Movement, The Social Service Review 65.2 (June 1991): 203–223. Sander L. Gilman, “Kafka Wept,” Modernism/Modernity 1.1 (1994): 17–37. Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and His Times, 83; 493. Didier Schulmann in Chagall and Modernism, ed. Jean-Michael Foray (New York: Abrams, 2003), 180; also in Chagall: Connu et Inconnu, the French version of the same exhibition catalog, 241. Bella Chagall, Burning Lights, 22. H.H. Munro, “Sredni Vashtar,” (first collected 1911) The Short Stories of Saki (New York: Modern Library, 1958), 151–155, solves the shed problem by having the animal in the shed kill the heartless adult for the child. Selma Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak (New York: Abrams, 1980), 248; George R. Bodmer, “Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak’s Early Illustration,” in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 11.4 (Winter 1986/1987), 180–183. Doris Orgel, Sarah’s Room, illus. Maurice Sendak (New York: HarperTrophy, 1963). Ruth Krauss, Charlotte and the White Horse, illus. Maurice Sendak (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955). In addition to other sources listed here, see also Jackie Wullschlager, Chagall, A Life, 31; 32; Marie-Hélène Dampérat, Sylvie Forestier, and Éric de Chassey,

198 • Notes

47

48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69

L’ABCdaire de Chagall (Paris: Flammarion, 1985). The La Fontaine Fables are discussed by Bérénice Geoffroy-Schneiter in “Les Fables de La Fontaine: ou le Chef-D’oeuvre Inconnu,” Beaux Arts Magazine hors-série: Chagall de A à Z: 72–75. Didier Schulmann has edited a paperback edition. Perry Nodelman’s The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (New York: Longman, 1991) and subsequent editions of this popular text contain discussions of binary thematic structure. In the third edition: The Pleasures of Children’s Literature by Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003), the discussion is found on pages 197–203.. Perry Nodelman, The Hidden Adult : Defining Children’s Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008), 61; 62. Carmen Lomas Garza’s Family Pictures paintings use fences in a similar way, to encompass the world of Mexican-Americans in South Texas during her childhood. Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 208. Sholom Aleichem, From the Fair: the Autobiography of Sholom Aleichem, trans., ed., intro by Curt Leviant (New York: Viking, 1985), xiii–xiv. Marc Chagall, “First Autobiography,” in Marc Chagall and His Times, ed. and trans. Benjamin Harshav (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004), 90. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield [1850] (New York: Signet, 1980), 162. Marc Chagall, My Life, trans. Elisabeth Abbott (New York: Orion, 1960), 21. Marc Chagall, “First Autobiography,” 115. Ibid., 125. Ibid. Marc Chagall, My Life, 23. Marc Chagall, “First Autobiography,” 88. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 106. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, 158. William Moebius, “Introduction to Picturebook Codes,” Word & Image 2.2 (Apr–June 1986): 146. Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, ed. Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston (New York: Norton, 2007), 31. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens excerpted from Barrie’s The Little White Bird spends much more time on the nursery window. (New York: Weathervane, 1975), 67–76. Selma Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak, 33. Maurice Sendak, Very Far Away [1957] (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 28. Benjamin Harshav, ed., Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, 83. Ibid., 84; on light coming in through windows, see Andrew Kagan, Chagall (New York: Abbeville, 1989), 105.

Notes • 199 70

71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81

82

83

84 85 86 87 88 89

Diana Wynne Jones’ Enchanted Glass (2010) contains windows that focus the power of the divine and magical. Jones, as a kind of late Modernist, utilized virtually all the motifs identified in the Introduction and Chapter Two of this volume. Aleksandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk, 27. Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and His Times, 263; 264. The writer’s name was G. Grillin (Jan 28, 1919). Benjamin Harshav, ed., Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, 134. Ibid. Ibid., 61; 62. Ibid., 62. After Bella’s death, Chagall was—after a disconsolate mourning period—re-engaged with life through a relationship with Virginia Haggard; “wife” is not quite accurate, although the couple had a son, David, together. Ibid. Joanna L. Brichetto, “The Wandering Image: Converting the Wandering Jew,” Thesis, Vanderbilt University, 2006: 52–56. Martin Gardner, From the Wandering Jew to William F. Buckley, Jr.: On Science, Literature, and Religion (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000), 20. Joanna L. Brichetto, “The Wandering Image,” 5. George K. Anderson, “The Wandering Jew Returns to England,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 45.3 (July 1946): 237–250, describes some of the history. Francis James Child, ed., English and Scottish Ballads VIII, 77, includes some historical material with a ballad, which was collected from a copy in the collection of Samuel Pepys. In the ballad, the Wandering Jew admonishes blasphemers and gives any alms he receives to the poor because he has faith that Jesus will care for him. The brief script to “The Legend of the Wandering Jew,” which used eight of the Doré illustrations, was kindly forwarded by Dr. Richard Crangle, Research officer, Magic Lantern Society, Exeter, UK. It is marked “Magic Lantern Slide Readings Library, from an original in the Barnes Collection.” Jan Goldstein,“The Wandering Jew and the Problem of Psychiatric AntiSemitism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” Journal of Contemporary History 20.4 (October 1985), 534. Ibid., 524. Ibid., 535. Ibid. Ibid., 542. Amy Ransom, “Guillaume Apollinaire,” Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, ed. Jack Zipes (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 17. See Sholom Aleichem, “Dreyfus in Kasrilevke,” in The Best of Sholom Aleichem, ed. Irving Howe and Ruth R. Wisse, trans. Julius and Frances Butwin (New York, Walker, 1979), 157–162, for an account of the Dreyfus Affair in the shetl.

200 • Notes 90

91 92

93 94

95 96 97 98 99

100

101 102 103 104 105 106

107 108 109

Guillaume Apollinaire, “The Wandering Jew,” The Wandering Jew and Other Stories [1910], trans. Rémy Inglis Hall, illus. Antony Little (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967), 13. Wotan and the Flying Dutchman (as well as the Ancient Mariner) are two more eternal wanderers of the nineteenth century. Ibid., 8. Jan Goldstein,“The Wandering Jew and the Problem of Psychiatric AntiSemitism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” 526, discusses contemporary myths and speculations about the Jewish birthrate in comparison with that of other cultural groups in Europe. A.J. Church, The Crusaders: A Story of the War for the Holy Sepulchre (New York: Macmillan, 1905), 1–7. Diana Wynne Jones’ Ahasueras in The Homeward Bounders (which also includes the Flying Dutchman) is a Romantic rebel against the gamers who rule the universe (New York: Greenwillow, 1981). Benjamin Horshav, Marc Chagall and His Times, 62. Benjamin Horshav, ed., Marc Chagall on Art and Culture,76. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 118. Dav Pilkey, When Cats Dream (New York: Orchard, 1996); see Teya Rosenberg, “The Inspirations and Resonances of Art and Art History in Pish Posh, Said Hieronymus Bosch and When Cats Dream.” http://www.langandlit.ualberta.ca/archives/vol12papers/inspirations.htm. Virginia Hamilton, The People Could Fly, illus. Leo Dillon and Diane Dillon (New York: Knopf, 1993) has a cover illustration of the people flying away from slavery. Faith Ringgold, Tar Beach (New York: Crown, 1991). Ibid., n.p. Marc Chagall, My Life, 61; 62. Jackie Wullschlager, Chagall: A Biography, 72. Ibid., 72; 73. Teya Rosenberg, “Susan Guevara’s Art(ful) Transformations for the Chato Books.” Paper presented at the Children’s Literature Association annual meeting, Manhattan Beach, CA, 2006, 2. Mircea Eliade, “Marc Chagall and the Love of the Cosmos,” in Homage to Marc Chagall, 13. Benjamin Horshav, ed., Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, 134. Tony Kushner, The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present (New York: Abrams, 2003), 10.

Conclusion 1

Robert Rosenblum, Maryanne Stevens, and Ann Dumas, 1900: Art at the Crossroads (New York: Abrams, 2000)

Notes • 201 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11

12

13

14 15 16

17

Margaret Higonnet, “Modernism and Childhood Violence and Renovation,” The Comparatist 33 (May 2009), 86–108. Aleksandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art, trans. Katherine Foshko Tsan (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007), 258; 260. See also Higonnet, 90; 91. Jonathan Fineberg, The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), 30. Jonathan Fineberg, Innocent Eye, 21. Paul Klee, Hand Puppets (Ostfi ldeen, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2006). The Klee puppets in this book (he created about 50) are those remaining after a firebomb destroyed some of the earliest. They were toys made for his son, originally for the German version of Punch and Judy but spreading much wider. Bauhaus furniture for children also included a conversion arrangement to facilitate Punch and Judy shows. Jonathan Fineberg, Innocent Eye, 82–119. David Sadler, “Innocent Hearts: The Child Authors of the 1920s,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 17.4 (Winter 1992), 24–30. David Sadler, “Innocent Hearts,” 26. Judith Plotz makes a related point about the cult of Marjorie Fleming in the Romantic era, “The Pet of Letters: Marjorie Fleming’s Juvenilia,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 17.4 (Winter 1992): 4–9. Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus 1919–1933 (Berlin: Benedikt Tashchen, 1998), 10. Nicole Colin, “Bauhaus Philosophy—Cultural Critique and Social Utopia,” Bauhaus, ed. Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend (Cologne: Könemann, 1999), 22–25; Magdalena Droste, 17. Judith V. Lechner, “Lionni, Leo” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature II (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 450. Each of Lionni’s books was characterized by wholeness of form and design that fit the subject matter. The first was the abstract picture book Little Blue and Little Yellow (1959). Anja Baumhoff, “Women at the Bauhaus—A Myth of Emancipation,” in Bauhaus, ed. Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend (Cologne: Könmann, 1999), 96–107; Ulrike Müller, Bauhaus Women, trans. Emer Lettowand and Sarah Kane (Paris: Flammarion, 2009). Ulrike Müller, Bauhaus Women, 112–117. Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Abrams, 1997). Jonathan Fineberg, The Innocent Eye, 19; 20; 26. Reinhold Heller discusses the use of prepubescent female children as metaphors for artistic change, among other things, in his discussion of Lina Franziska Fehrmann (Fränzi) in connection with Brücke paintings in 1910–11. See “Brücke in Dresden and Berlin, 1905–1913” in Brücke: the Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905–1913, edited by Reinhold Heller for the Neue Galerie, New York (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 13–57. Fineberg’s book concentrates on Mikhail Larionov, Gabriele Münter and Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Jean Dubuffet, and the Cobra artists, but he notes many more (14).

202 • Notes 18

19

20

Margaret Higonnet, “Modernism and Childhood Violence and Renovation” in The Comparatist 33 (May 2009): 86–108. Nathalie op de Beeck, “‘The First Picture Book for Modern Children’: Mary Liddell’s Little Machinery and the Fairy Tale of Modernity,” Children’s Literature 32 (2004): 41–83; Nathalie op de Beeck, Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity (Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2010). Barbara Bader, American Picturebooks from Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 225. Bader also briefly noted Little Machinery, 25. Anne Scott MacLeod, American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Athens, Georgia: U Georgia P, 1994), 30–48. The Nancy Drew mystery stories, starring the teenaged Nancy Drew as an infallible detective and owner of a yellow roadster, were perhaps the most famous of the hundreds of American series books produced in the 1930s and for decades after, books notable as selling cheaply and without library endorsement to a child audience. They were produced by the Edward Stratemeyer syndicate using the pseudonym Carolyn Keene.

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Index Note: page numbers ending in f refer to figures while n refers to notes A Was an Archer. 63, 64, 66 Abrams, M.H. 162n24 Academy (referring to standards of Royal Academy or Académie des Beaux-Arts) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 16, 18, 36, 37, 39, 53, 60, 65, 90, 104, 113, 116, 120, 157, 161n3, 193n123, 211 Accampo, Elinor Ann. 188n60 Actors (See also Theatre and Plays). 24, 39, 64, 66, 72, 178n26 Adorno, Theodor. 52, 54 Advertising. 21f, 61, 72, 82f, 156, 168n21, 177n20 Aelfric (Bata). 66 Agassiz, Louis. 111, 190n101 Albisetti, James. 184n6 Alcott, Bronson. 110, 190n91, 190n92, 190n93 Alcott, Louisa May. 17, 57, 98, 104, 110, 121, 123, 190n93, 191n117 Aleichem, Sholom. 130, 141, 199n89 Alexandre, Arsène. 172n19 Alice books. See Lewis Carroll Allen, Ann Taylor. 110, 186n22, 190n95 American flag. (See iconoclastic under childlike) 27, 169n27 Ancient artifacts. 9, 10, 38 Ancient Mariner (See Doré) 148, 200n90 Andersen, Hans Christian. 93, 147 Anderson, George K. 147, 199n81 Animals As pedagogical objects. 105, 106 In Bella Chagall. 137, 138 In children’s books. 54, 55, 76, 134, 135, 138, 143, 150, 151, 152, 153 In Japanese prints. 36 In Marc Chagall. 17, 127, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 143, 158

In Modersohn-Becker. 101, 158 In Nicholson. 61, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 76, 81 In Orbis Pictus. 105, 106 In [Henri] Rousseau. 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53 Kindness to animals. 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 196n20, 196n22 Kindness to animals as anti-Semitism 136 Scientific study and zoos. 38, 39, 40, 52, 65, 67, 111, 134 Anne of Green Gables.(See L. M. Montgomery) Apollinaire, Guillaume. 149, 200n90 Art Book/Book of Dialogue. 50, 68, 73 Art Nouveau. 12, 83, 115, 167n14 Art school/academies 16, 57, 61, 74, 75, 89, 90, 112, 113, 114, 115, 140, 142, 145, 165n3, 192n121, 193n123 Arthur, T.S. 95 Ashford, Daisy. 156 Askey, Jennifer. 186n25 Autobiography /Childhood Memories. 77–78, 100, 129, 130, 131, 132, 137, 138, 139, 142, 145, 146, 195n10, 198n51 Avant-garde 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26, 33, 36, 37, 57, 60, 61, 64, 67, 70, 74, 89, 94, 98, 103, 104, 112, 116, 119, 120, 125, 126, 145, 149, 155, 157, 158, 164, 165n8, 188n62 Avery, Gillian. 40 Awful warning nursery books. 14 Bad Boy tradition. 58, 85, 175n3 Bader, Barbara. 82, 83, 157, 180, 202n19

219

220 • Index Bahktin, Mikhail.[also lived in Vitebsk] 163n36 Balloon craze. 10, 21, 162–63n28 Banks, Elizabeth. 87, 183n91 Banquet Rousseau. 43, 44, 173n35 Baratay, Eric and Elisabeth HardouinFugier. 38, 39 Barbauld, Anna Letitia (Mrs.). 95, 122, 133, 134, 135, 197n32 Barrie, James. (See Peter Pan) Bashkirtseff, Marie. 192n121, 193n137 Baudelaire, Charles. 12, 13, 163n35, 167n15 Bauhaus. 83, 155, 156, 201n6 Baum, L. Frank. 10, 12, 23, 28, 43, 52, 53, 162n21, 165n7, 167n14, 173n34 Baumhoff, Anja. 156, 201n13 Beardsley, Aubrey. 59, 61, 175n10 Becker, Jane R. 184n1, 192n121 Beckett, Sandra. 54 Beerbohm, Max. 15, 58, 59, 60, 63, 72, 75, 78, 80, 175n10, 177n20, 181n62, 183n91 Beerbohm-Tree, Herbert. 65, 66 Beggars (See also the Poor, Outcasts, Tramps) 64, 118, 122, 146 Beggarstaff posters. 64, 118, 122 Beiderwell, Bruce. 182n89 Belloc, Hilaire. 59, 60, 166n12 The Bells. 75, 181n62, 181n63 Benjamin, Walter. 15, 53 Bermingham, Ann. 110, 113, 190n96, 190n99, 191n113 Bernard, Émile. 162n19 Bernheimer, Charles. 41 Bernstein, Robin. 165n6, 165n7, 169n37 Best-Maugard, Adolfo. 191n106 Bêtes Sauvages. 40, 52, 172n25 Bethoud, Samuel. 9 Beuys, Barbara. 184n1, 184n6 Bewick, Thomas. 63, 182n83 Biasin, Gian-Paolo. 169n30 Black characters/figures. (See also nonEuropean, Golliwogg, Pirate Twins) 19, 20, 21f, 23f, 24, 25, 26, 27f, 32, 48, 49f, 69, 70, 83, 85, 85f, 86, 124, 165n6, 165n7, 167n18, 169n35, 183,n91 Blanc, Charles. 176n15 Blow, Susan. 108, 109 Blue Rider (Blaue Reiter) 18, 155 Blyton, Enid. 109, 168n21, 168n24 Bodmer, George. 138 Boëthius, Ulf. 100 Bohemian 1, 2, 3, 20, 57, 130, 161n2

Bohlmann-Modersohn, Marina. 184n6, 185n16 Bowen, Elizabeth. 54 Bowness, Alan. 178n26 Bray, Xavier. 178n33, 180n53 Breastfeeding. 94, 101, 102, 103, 134, 186n24 Brichetto, Joanna. 146, 147 Broadsides. 179–180n51 Brosterman, Norman. 6, 157, 189n86, 191n108 Brown, Margaret Wise. 54, 55, 157 Browne, Anthony. 54, 55 Browning, Robert. 13, 51, 166n12, 167n15 Brücke group. 30, 32, 157, 169n34, 170n42, 201n16 Buettner, Stewart. 186n22 Bumble-Ardy (See also Sendak). 55, 136, 144 Burnett, Frances Hodgson. 3, 10, 11, 12, 40, 42, 51, 99, 100, 104, 161n3 Busch, Günter and Liselotte von Reinken. (German editors of the Modersohn-Becker letters quoted in this volume; the translations used in the text are from the translated English edition by Wensinger and Hoey.) 184n2 Busch, Wilhelm (See also Max and Moritz), 14, 164n45, 166n12 Buschhoff, Anne. 184n5, 187n35, 188n62, 194n148, 194n149 Butler, Charles. 5, 8, 10, 163n29 Byerly, Alison. 190n99 Byrd, Lynn. 39 Caldecott, Alfred. 14, 134 Caldecott, Randolph. 14, 15, 53, 54, 59, 61, 73, 134 Callis, Tracy.(Peter Jackson) 178n38 Camera obscura. 77, 78, 181n68 Campbell, Colin. 74, 75, 177n19, 177n20, 177n24, 178n26, 181n69 Carey, Rosa Nouchette. 3, 4, 161n3 Caricature (See related “grotesque”) 15, 22, 60, 72, 136, 164n41, 175n10 Carr, Dawson. 183n93 Carroll, Lewis (and Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass). 14, 22, 43, 52, 53, 58, 67, 80, 166n12, 173n34 Cassatt, Mary. 104, 186n22, 192n121 Cendrars, Blaise. 128, 195n1, 196n17 Cézanne, Paul. 106, 116, 163n29, 184n5

Index • 221 Chagall, Bella. 128, 129, 138, 144, 195n10, 199n76 Chagall, Marc. 11, 12, 17, 18, chapter five 127–153, 132f, 140f, 145f, 152f, 155, 156, 158, 159, 195n10, 196n17, 198n69, 199n76 Channing, Eva. 186n27 Chapbooks. 63, 66, 67, 148, 177n24, 207 “Crawhall” Chesterton, G. K. 13, 58, 78, 87, 167n15, 183n89 Child, Francis James. 147, 199n81 Child models (professional or semiprofessional) 1, 100, 101, 103, 104, 115, 122, 157, 192n121 Childlike 2, 10, 16, 24, 30, 35,44, 64 As iconoclastic or anti-Academic 15, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 35, 36, 155, 168n21 As fresh perception. 6, 35, 36, 109 As associated with consolatory Nature 37, 39, 54 As imaginatively or spiritually Visionary 17, 41, 42, 43, 44, 127 As uncontrolled or spontaneous 156, 157, 158 Children’s art. 18, 156, 157, 201n17 Church, A. J. 149 Cimabue. 153 Clark, Sir Kenneth. 60, 166n11 Clifford, Lucy Lane. 29 Clough, Arthur H. 95 Cobra artists. 201n17 Colarossi (name of founder and private art academy). 16, 113, 115, 116, 165n3 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. (See Ancient Mariner) Colin, Nicole. 156, 201n11 Collins, Raphael. 115 Colonization. 8, 54, 85. Commedia dell’arte (See also harlequin and grotesque) 14, 24, 29 Comenius, Jan Amos. 72, 105, 106 Connelly, Frances S. 170n5 Cooke, Ebenezer. 189n74 Cooper, Sarah B. 107 Costin, Lela B. 197n37 Courbet, Gustave. 67, 148 Courtois, Gustave. 115 Cowling, Mary. (Royal Holloway Collection). 66, 178n30 Cozens, Alexander. 191n113 Craig, Edward. 176n14, 178n26 Crary, Jonathan. 181n68

Crawhall, Joseph. 63, 177n22 Crombie, John. 115, 184n1, 192n120, 192n121 Crompton, Richmal. 58 Crossover audience. (See also Popular Culture). 18, 61, 67, 70–71 Cruikshank, George. 13, 15, 166n12, 167n15 Dada. 155 Dampérat, Marie-Hélène. 197n46 Danto, Arthur C. 35, 170n5 Darwin, Charles. (evolution) 7, 9, 11, 12, 32, 38, 41, 50, 51, 53, 54, 91, 121, 134, 148, 158, 163n33 Daudet, Léon. 41, 50 Davies, W.H. 179n43 Davis, Norma S. 164n1, 164n3, 165n6, 167–68n21, 168n23 de Chassey, Éric. 197n46 de la Mare, Walter. 59, 70, 80, 179n51, 181n73 de la Motte Fouqué, F. (Undine) 93 de la Pasture, Mrs. Henry. (Toy Tragedy) 3, 161n3 Death (as concept). 11, 12, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 56, 92, 93, 102, 133, 144, 148, 153 Death of animals. (See Animals in Chagall, Rousseau) Debussy, Claude. 19, 26, 50, 168n25 Decadent/decadence. 6, 11, 12, 23, 24, 33, 37, 39, 41, 50, 56, 91, 123, 125, 149, 166n13, 167n14, 170n42 [Home] Décor. 61, 62, 72, 73, 83, 156, 179n51, 201n6 Delius, Frederick. 115, 167n18 Determinism. 11, 41 di San Lazzaro, G. 195n4 Dickens, Charles. 65, 98, 99, 141, 142, 166n12 Dillon, Leo and Diane. 151, 200n100 Dolls and doll-likeness. Cover (Peggy), 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21f, 22f, 23f, 24, 25, 26, 27f, 28, 29f, 30, 31, 32, 33, 58, 80, 81, 82f, 83, 93, 155, 158, 164n2, 165n6, 165n7, 165n8, 167n21, 169n34, 169n37 Domestic space (See also décor). 60, 63, 83, 84, 122 Domesticity. 84, 90, 93, 95, 98, 100, 104. Doré, Gustave. 14, 71, 148, 166n12, 199n82 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. 165n5 Doyle, Richard. 15

222 • Index Drawing lessons (See also Life-Drawing; Size, accuracy of; Size, distortions). 6, 90, 104–117, 119, 144, 157, 188n69, 190n96, 190n98, 191n106, 191n113 Dreams. 39, 40, 41, 43, 47, 48, 50, 51, 55, 118, 123, 138, 145, 150, 151, 156, 158, 172n19, 173n34 Dreyfus Affair. 150, 199n89 Driver, Felix. 111 Droste, Magdalena. 156, 201n10, 201n11 du Maurier, George. 1, 2 Dubuffet, Jean. 201n17 Düchting, Hajo. 177n19 Duckwitz, Rebecca. 191n117, 194n149, 194n155 Dumas, Alexandre. 73, 84, 180n52 on Dumas-mania Dumas, Ann. 12, 50, 122, 155, 194n144 Dunsany, Lord. 50 Durand, Marion and Diana Wormuth. 41 Dürer, Albrecht. 93 Dusinberre, Juliet. 6, 172n27

Fitzgerald, Penelope. 179n51 Fleming, Marjorie. 156, 201n9 Floating/flying people in pictures. 127, 138, 145f, 146, 150, 151, 200n100 Fluhr, Nicole. 93, 185n21, 188n56 Fontenay, Élizabeth de. 137 Forestier, Sylvie. 197n46 Forrer, Matthi. 39. 172n24 Foucault, Michel. 77, 162n22 Fränzi (Lina Franziska Fehrmann). 157, 169n34, 201n16 Frascina, Francis. 31, 170n42 Freedom. 1, 17, 30, 64, 108, 117, 118, 120, 134, 140, 144, 145, 156, 170n42 Fried, Michael. 178n29 Freud, Sigmund. 8, 43, 102, 130, 131, 155, 156, 188n56 Friedrichsmeyer, Sarah. 119, 193n136 Froebel, Friedrich. 6, 66, 90, 91, 94, 96, 98, 106, 109, 110, 117, 119, 122, 156, 157, 186n22, 188n73, 189n86, 190n93, 191n108, 193n136 Futterer, Charlotte. 115, 184n1, 192n120

Eby, Cecil. 167n17 Edgeworth, Maria. 95, 122 Ekman, Fam. 54 Elbert, Sarah. 110, 190n92 Eliade, Mircea. 17, 128, 153 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 109 Émile. (See also J-J Rousseau) 5, 6, 94, 97, 106, 134 Every Little Boy’s Book. 165n6 Evett, Elisa.36, 51, 170n5 Ewing, Juliana. 11, 43, 175n12 Expositions. 10, 11, 72, 155 Eyestone, June. 112, 191n106

Gallati, Barbara Dayer. 192n121 Gardner, Martin. 148 Garrett, Aaron. 133, 196n25 Garza, Carmen Lomas. 197n34, 198n49 Gauguin, Paul. 7, 17, 36, 94, 104, 115, 116, 162n19, 188n62 Genre studies (often pictures of humble life). 65, 66, 72, 113, 122 Geoffroy-Schneiter, Bérénice. 198n46 Gerry, Elbridge T. 136 Gilman, Sander L. 136 Gilpin, William. 191n113 Glasstone, Victor. 180n57 Giotto, 153 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 95, 96, 97, 148, 186n25, 186n28 Goldstein, Jan. 148 Golliwogg character. 15, Chapter One 19–33, 21f, 23f, 27f, 52, 58, 73, 158, 164n2, 164n3, 165n4, 165n6, 165n7, 165n8, 166n10, 166n11, 167n15, 167–8n21, 168n23 Gorey, Edward. 166n12 Grahame, Kenneth. 41, 44, 51, 80, 88 Grandville, J. J. 15, 134, 166n12 Graves, Robert. 59, 176n13, 183n91 Green, Christopher. 52, 171n7, 171n11, 172n25, 174n60 Greenaway, Kate. 59, 73, 175n10, 214 “Ruskin” Grillin, G. 144–5, 199n72

Fabre, Josep Paulau I. 169n36 Fairytales, folklore, myths.(See also Wandering Jew, Ancient Mariner, Wotan). 15, 48, 50, 60, 78, 101, 146, 149, 175, 185n20, 202n18 Farjeon, Eleanor.77, 78, 181n70 Fauves (See also Picasso). 26, 31 Fayum mummy portraits. 116, 192n122 Feierabend, Peter. 201n11 Felstiner, John. 175n10 Fences. 140f, 141, 145, 198n49 Fiedler, Jeannine. 201n11 Fiedler, Leslie. 31 Field, Rachel. (Hitty) 169n37 Fildes, Sir Luke. 66 Fineberg, Jonathan. 155–57, 201n16, 201n17

Index • 223 Grotesque. 13, 14, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 29, 30, 32, 33, 52, 53, 58, 67, 142, 158, 163n35, 163n40, 167n15 In illustration. 14, 15, 53, 166n12 Gubar, Marah. 58 Guevara, Susan. 151–53 Guichard-Meili, Jean. 169n35 Haggard, Virginia. 146, 199n76 Hailmann, W. N. 111, 113, 189n73 Hamilton, James. 63, 177n22 Hamilton, Virginia. 151, 200n100 Hanson, Anne Coffin. 60, 65, 176n15 Harde, Roxanne. 133, 135, 196n20 Hardouin-Fugier, Elisabeth. (See Baratay) Harlequin (see also commedia dell’arte and pantomime). 14, 29, 30, 57, 169n30 Harrison, Charles. 5, 170n42 Harshav, Benjamin. 128, 129, 137, 146, 195n10 Hass, Robert. 184n3 Hauptmann, Carl. 185n20 Hauptmann, Gerhart. (The Sunken Bell) 93, 106, 185n20 Hauptmann, Martha. 118, 185n20 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène. 57 Hearn, Lafcadio. 162n25 Heckel, Erich. 30, 169n34 Heidi (Johanna Spyri). 143 Heinemann (publisher and founder). 62, 64, 68, 72, 82f, 83, 178n25 Heller, Reinhold. 201n16 Henley, W.H. 70, 71, 84, 179n50, 180n53 Herbert, Robert. 3, 6, 162n18 Herschel, William. 111. Herzogenrath, Wolfgang (and Anne Buschhoff). 184n5 Higonnet, Margaret. 15, 155, 157, 202n18 Hill-Stead Museum. (Farmington, CT). 178n25 Hiroshige. 39 Hirszenberg, Samuel. 148, 149 Historical subject matter in paintings. 3, 4, 18, 36, 60, 113, 115, 176n15 Höch, Hannah. 155 Hock, Lisabeth. 185n21 Hockney, David. 77 Hoetger, Bernard. 116, 193n125 Hoey, Carole Clew. (with Arthur S. Wensinger) English translators/editors of the Modersohn-Becker letters quoted in this volume)(Taplinger, 1983). 184n2

Hoffmann, E. T. A. (See also Nutcracker). 29 Hoffmann, Heinrich (See also Struwwelpeter). 14, 52, 53, 58, 164n45, 166n12 Hokusai. 39, 53 Holiday House (publisher). 180n51 Holl, Frank. 66 Holme, Bryan. 134 Holmes, Ann Sumner. 94, 186n22 Holsing, Henrike. 184n5, 188n62, 192n120 Horse Attacked by a Jaguar (See also Henri Rousseau). 45, 46f, 47, 52 Howe, Irving. 199n89 Humor/funny. 14, 15, 16, 22, 24, 53, 56, 58, 59, 60, 70, 81, 84, 85, 115, 119, 130, 134, 142, 150, 152, 158, 166n12, 168, 189n75 Hurd, Clement. 157 Hutcheson, Francis. 133, 196n23 Ibsen, Henrik. 2, 93, 104, 106, 119 Ille, Eduard. 15, 22f, 166n12 Illusionism/ illusion in art. 3, 5, 9, 36, 50, 57, 74, 75, 77, 78, 87, 159, 181n74 In theatre 58, 75, 76, 78, 181n62 In thinking. 50, 58, 78 Innocent eye. 6, 109, 156 (title) Ireson, Nancy. 45, 172n19 Irving, Henry. (See also The Bells) 178n26 Jackson, Peter. (See Callis) 69, 70 Jacobsen, Jens Peter (Niels Lyhne). 93, 106, 113 James, Merlin Ingli. 74, 75, 84, 88, 177n19, 180n56, 181n69, 183n90 James, Sir William. 8 Janson Lehrerinnen-seminar. 90, 106, 110, 184n6, 190n93 Janssen, Victor Emil. 92, 93, 185n16 Japanese influence in Europe. 9, 35, 36, 39, 41, 51, 70, 78, 116, 162n25, 170n5 Jerrold, Blanchard. 178n42 Johnson, Lemuel. 25, 26, 167n17 Johnston, Annie Fellows (Little Colonel books). 163n31 Jones, Diana Wynne. 87, 199n70, 200n94 Joseph, Michael. 59, 64, 65, 76, 176n13, 182n83 Julian’s (Académie Julian). 16, 57, 61, 176n14, 192n121 Jungle Books (See Kipling). 54

224 • Index Kafka, Franz. 136 Kagan, Andrew. 198n69 Kamenetsky, Christa. 185n8 Kandinsky, Wassily. 18, 155, 201n17 Kaplan, E. Ann. 94 Kayser, Wolfgang. 24, 33, 163n37, 167n15 Kemble, E. W. 24, 166. Kemker, Sandra. 190n98, 201n13 Key, Ellen. 98, 121, 187n35, 188n62, 188n64 Kidd, Kenneth. 38, 175n3 Kindergarten. (See also Froebel, Wiggin, Smith, Peabody). 6, 98, 99, 106–110, 120, 123, 124, 189n86, 190n95, 191n108 King, Averil. 103, 104, 119, 185n8, 188n62, 194n149 King Albert’s Book (Kipling). 88, 18 n95 Kipling, Rudyard. 53, 54, 59, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 78, 88, 174n61, 183n95 Klee, Paul. Cover, 14, 30, 155, 156, 201n6, 201n17 Klemm, L. R. 186n25 Klimt, Gustave. 50 Kline, T. Jefferson. 173n31 Knoblock Collection (Rice University) 182n80 Kohima Usui. 172n24 Krauss, Ruth. 138, 143 Kurtze Beschreibung under Eizehlung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahasuerus. (See chapbook, Wandering Jew). 147 Kushner, Tony. 55, 153, 174n72 Kutzer, Daphne. 100 Kuznets, Lois. 169n37 La Fontaine, Jean de. 127, 138, 195n1, 198n46 Lallemand, Henri. 60 Lammers, Mathilde. 97, 98, 99, 107, 112, 113, 184n6 Lanchner, Carolyn and William Rubin. (hallmarks of modernism) 37, 41, 43, 45, 47, 158. Lanes, Selma. 138, 143 Larionov, Mikhail. 201n17 Larson, Barbara. 8, 9, 10, 11, 41, 162n21, 163n33 Le Petit Journal. 42f Le Petit Prince. 42 Le Pichon, Yann. 171n9, 171n11, 172n19 Lear, Edward. 14, 38, 73, 166n12 Lechner, Judith V. 201n12 Lerer, Seth. 50

Leslie, Richard. 169n36 Leviant, Curt. 141, 198n51 Lewis, Leopold. (See The Bells) Lewis, Matthew (Monk). 147, 148 Liddell, Mary (Little Machinery). 157, 202n18 Life-drawing 1, 26, 27, 90, 113, 115, 116, 119, 122, 184n1 Light (See also Shadows). 6, 7, 16, 17, 45, 47, 53, 54, 55, 59, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 88, 102, 109, 120, 129, 130, 146, 151, 153, 159, 163n33, 169n33, 170n5, 176n15, 180n57, 198n69 Linnaeus, Carl (or Linné). 134 Linnets and Valerians. (Gouge) 51 Lissitzky, Ed. 157 Little Grey Men. (B.B.) 51 Little, Greta. 25, 164n1 Lost or changing worlds. 36, 57, 72, 128–130 Louvre. 116, 130, 176n14 Lloyd, Jill. 32 Lyttelton, Edith. 25, 164n2 MacDonald, George. 43 Machen, Arthur. 50 Mackensen, Fritz. 90, 94, 124 MacLeod, Anne Scott. 158, 202n20 Maeterlinck, Maurice. 91, 92, 143 Magic Lantern. 52, 148, 199n82 Mallarmé, Stéphane. 50, 73 Manet, Édouard. 5, 16, 50, 59, 60, 65, 66, 67, 73, 74, 79, 81, 163n29, 176n14, 176n15, 177n19, 179n43 Mann, Horace. 109 Marc, Franz. 18 Marks, John George. 177n20 Mary Poppins. 27 Masaccio. 153 Masks (See also dolls, harlequins, minstrels) 29, 30, 192n122, 193n136 Matteson, John. 110, 190n91 Max and Moritz (See also Wilhelm Busch). 14 McCormick, Anita Hemphill. 182n89 McKay, Hilary. 59, 175n9 Merrill, Linda. 4, 5 Metaphors Animal oppression as 132 Biological evolution as 11 Bridge as 170n42 Childhood as 6, 155 Grotesque as 15, 151 Negro as (See 167n19)

Index • 225 Paintings as 4, 18 Pan as 50 Prepubescent girls as 201n16 Shadows as 75 Wandering Jew as 148 Windows as 143, 144 Millet, Jean-François. 44, 94 Milne, A. A. (See also Winnie-the-Pooh). 71, 88 Minstrel (See also mask). 20, 25, 29, 167n21 Miró, Jean. 201n17 Mirrors. 78, 79, 182n75 Modernist/modernism 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 35, 36, 37, 41, 50, 59, 60, 63, 67, 74, 83, 88, 112, 116, 130, 155, 157, 163n29, 179n51, 199n70 Modersohn, Otto. 89, 90, 92, 98, 102, 114, 185n20 Modersohn-Becker, Paula. 6, 7, 12, 16, 17, 30, Chapter 4 89–126, 103f, 121f, 124f, 127, 130, 139, 156, 158, 159, 163n32, 165n3, 169n34, 184n1, 184n6, 185n16, 185n20, 187n35, 188n62, 188n73, 190n93, 191n117, 192n120, 192n121, 192n122, 193n136, 193n137, 194n149, 194n156 Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung (Foundation). 121, 184n2, 184n6, 191n117, 194n149, 194n155 Modigliani, Amadeo. 30, 116, 150, 169n33 Moebius, William. 55, 142, 143 Molesworth, Mrs. 43 Montgomery, L. M. 41, 143 Montparnasse neighborhood. 15, 17, 113, 115, 165n3, 184n1, 192n120, 192n121 Morris, Frances. 171n7, 171n11, 174n60 Morris, William. 63, 83, 156 Moss, Elaine. 183n91 Mothers and Motherhood. 7, 11, 12, 17, 19, 20, 45, 77, 78, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90–103, 103f, 104, 113, 122, 123, 125, 128, 129, 134, 136, 137, 140, 142, 143, 165n5, 168n23, 184n6, 186n22, 188n62, 188n64, 192n121 Mucha, Alphonse. 115 Muller, Joseph-Émile. 30, 169n31 Müller, Ulrike. 190n98, 201n13 Multicultural /international perspective. 7, 8, 9, 10, 23, 113, 114, 115, 130, 151, 158, 185n6, 189n86

Munch, Edvard. 11, 50, 52, 75, 76, 115, 119, 120, 121, 122, 129, 130 Munro, H. H. (See Saki) Munro, Harold. 179n51 Münter, Gabriele, 201n17 Murgia, Camilla. 111 Murken-Altrogge, Christa. 194n149 Murray, John. 174n61 Myers, Gene. 133, 196n20 Myers, Mitzi. 97, 133, 135, 187n33 Naked/nude (See also Life drawing). 3, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 104, 119, 120, 124, 125, 169n36, 192n120, 193n136, 194n149 Nancy Drew (Carolyn Keene). 158 National Socialists. 125, 147 Nature As artificial Nature. 37, 38, 39, 40. As fear of Nature. 11, 37, 41, 43, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56 As love of consolatory Nature. 9, 37, 38, 39, 44, 45, 51, 52, 54, 55, 171n9 As naturalistic accuracy. 4, 6, 129 As objects for study. 106, 109, 119, 120 As organic growth. 96, 105, 107, 108, 115, 117, 118, 119, 121, 124f. As outdoors. 7, 76, 143 As Power or Life Force. 12, 56, 91, 92, 93, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 128, 131, 133, 153, 158, 185n20, 193n136 Modernism as anti-Nature. 37, 41, 158 (See also Objects: childhood) Taming Nature. 16, 24, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51 Nelson, Claudia. 94, 95, 163n31, 186n22, 186n26 Nesbit, E. 9, 14, 40, 57, 60, 71, 76. New ways of seeing. 5, 8, 9, 11, 13, 31, 35, 36, 42, 77, 82, 121, 157, 163 As grotesque. 12, 13, 30, 31, 32, 52, 167n15 Nichols, Roger. 168n25 Nicholson, Andrew. 67, 72, 178n26, 181n74, 183n96 Nicholson, Sir William. 3, 16, Chapter 3 57–88, 62f, 79f, 82f, 85f, 127, 130, 156, 157, 158, 159, 175n5, 176n13, 176n14, 176n17, 177n19, 177n21, 177n24, 178n25, 178n26, 179n43, 179n51, 180n52, 180n53, 181n74, 182n75, 182n80, 182n83, 183n90, 183n91 Almanac of Twelve Sports. 64, 67, 68, 69, 70, 178n25

226 • Index An Alphabet. 62f-67, 83, 88, 195, 176n14 Clever Bill. 63, 78, 80, 81, 82f, 83, 84, 86, 88, 182n76, 183n91 London Types. 61, 67, 70, 71, 84, 179n44 Pirate Twins. 63, 74, 82, 83, 84, 85f, 86, 87, 88, 182n84, 183n90, 183n91 Nietzsche, Friedrich. 12, 33, 91, 106, 116, 120, 167n17, 170n42 Nijinsky, Vaslav. 50 Nodelman, Perry. 139, 198n47 Nodelman, Perry and Mavis Reimer. 48, 198n47 Non-European as inspiration. (See also black characters) 8, 9, 10, 26, 158, 180n52 Nutcracker. (See also E. T. A. Hoffmann) 29 Objects (See also Nature) Question of Objective reality. 2, 3 Nature and people painted as, or otherwise made into, objects: 4, 5, 30, 52, 66, 130 Childhood objects as models for escape or estrangement from Natural world. 12, 24 Objects as having ancient or spiritual power. 9, 12, 18, 33, 36 Nicholson’s reversal of objectification. 80, 86, 87, 88 Object lessons as means of knowing secrets of Nature. 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111–112, 119 Olson, Marilynn S. 173n34, 173n44, 191n108 op de Beeck, Nathalie. 80, 157, 182n82, 292n18 Opie, Iona and Peter. 64 Organic growth. (See Nature) Orgel, Doris. (Sarah’s Room) 138, 150 Orpheus. 49, 50 Osborne, Thomas. 166n11 Outcasts. (See also Poor, Tramps) 60, 65, 148, 150, 165n8 Over Vitebsk. 145f, 146, 151 Oz. (See L. Frank Baum, J. R. Neill) Palmer, Samuel. 55 Pantomime. 39, 57, 58, 75, 78 Paris, Leslie. 38 Parton, Ethel. 135, 173n44 Pavolini, Corado. 167n17, 169n33 Payne, Joseph. 107

Peabody, Elizabeth. (See also kindergarten) 99, 100, 109, 110, 120, 123, 186n22, 190n93 Pearson, Susan. 133, 196n20 Peasants. (See also the Poor). 10, 17, 44, 94, 95, 99, 123, 137 Pechstein, Max. 32 Pen, Yuri Moiseevich. 144, 145 Perry, Commodore O.H. 9 Perry, Gillian. 5, 8, 33, 108, 112, 162n19, 162n22, 163n32, 167n17, 170n42, 183n1, 185n8, 186n22, 193n136, 193n137, 194n149, 194n156 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich. 6, 90, 94, 95, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 117, 119, 156, 190n91, 190n92 Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie). 12, 39, 40, 51, 58, 59, 76, 83, 143, 178n26, 198n65 Peters, René. 168n25 Petzold, Dieter. 14, 164n43 Photography. 40, 52, 75, 111, 113, 119, 172n25, 177n20, 178n26, 193n136 Picasso, Pablo. 18, 29,30, 31, 43, 44, 122, 127, 150, 164n41, 169n35, 171n7, 192n122, 201n17 Pied Piper (Robert Browning). 51 Pierce, Tamora. 122 Pierrot, Jean. 23, 50, 166n13, 167n17 Pilkey, Dav. 55, 150–51 Pipers. 48, 49f, 50, 51, 52, 7. Pirates. (See Nicholson) Plays (See also Actors and Theatre) 2, 39, 40, 42, 65, 66, 75, 76, 93, 115, 178n26, 181n62, 185n20 Plotz, Judith. 201n9 Poe, Edgar Allan. 57, 73 Polly (John Gay). 83 The Poor (See also Outcasts, Tramps, Child Models, beggars). 7, 14, 16, 37, 62f, 66, 67, 71, 100, 101, 110, 115, 121f, 122, 123, 125, 127, 146, 157, 199n81 Pope, Alexander. 135, 197n32 Popular culture. 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 31, 35, 38, 40, 42, 47, 52, 53, 54, 56, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 68, 94, 95, 119, 130, 134, 147, 148, 156, 157, 158, 167n17, 176n15, 178n26, 179n51, 180n52, 186n22, 191n106, 191n113, 193n137, 194n144 Potter, Beatrix. 59, 100 Price, Julius M. 161n2 Prickett, Stephen. 15 Priestley, Joseph. 133

Index • 227 Primitive. 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 25, 26, 31, 32, 33, 63, 155, 162n19, 162n20, 169n35, 170n42 Prince, John T. 186n25 Printing innovations. (reproducibility/ reproduction) 38, 59, 61, 72, 83, 113, 182n83 Pryde, James. 61, 64 Punch. 1 Punch and Judy. (See also puppets) 14, 58, 201n6 Puppets. (See also Punch and Judy) 14, 29, 57, 75, 155, 156, 201n6 Rabe, Christine Holz. 184n6 Radewaldt, Ingrid. 190n98, 201n13 Radycki, J. Diane. 183n1, 193n123 Raggedy Ann(Johnny Gruelle). 12, 20, 165n7, 167n21 Ragusa, Elena. 178n31 Rahn, Suzanne. 55, 173 Ransom, Amy. 149 Ray, Gordon. 177n21 Raynal, Maurice. 171n9 Redon, Odilon. 7, 8, 9, 41, 162n21 Reed, Patricia. 75, 177n19, 180n55, 181n69 Reff, Theodore. 178n29 Reinken, Liselotte von. (See also Busch, Günter) (editors of the Modersohn-Becker letters quoted in this volume). 184n2 Rembrandt. (van Rijn) 137, 153 Reynolds, Sian. 183n1 Repetition. 45, 46, 48, 81, 173n44 Reproducibility. (See Printing innovations) Rhodes, Colin. 18, 163–64n41 Rich, Adrienne. 89, 184n4. Rilke, Clara Westhoff. 89, 92, 102, 107, 113, 116 Rilke, Rainer Maria. 17, 89, 92, 93, 98, 104, 108, 113, 118, 122, 184n3, 185n14, 185n16, 187n35 Ringgold, Faith. 151 Riordan, Rick. 51 Rodin, Auguste. 113, 116 Roosevelt, Theodore. 21, 28, 168n23 Rosenberg, Teya. 151, 153, 200n99, 200n106 Rosenblum, Robert. 11, 50, 122, 155, 194n144 Rousseau, Henri. 7, 16, 17, 18, Chapter 2 35–56, 46f, 49f, 113, 125, 129, 149, 150, 156, 158, 159, 162n20, 171n7,

171n9, 172n19, 172n25, 173n35, 174n65 Roussseau, Jean-Jacques. (See also Émile) 5, 6, 12, 13, 55, 94, 95, 97, 105, 106, 108, 120, 134, 156 Roussel, Nelly. 103 Röver-Kann, Anne. 104, 193n125 Royak, E. M. 144 Royal Holloway Collection. (See Cowling) 66, 178n30 Rubin, James. 176n15 Rubin, Reuvin. 149 Rubin, William. (See Lanchner) 37, 41, 43, 45, 47, 158 Rudd, David. 168n24 Rue de la Grande Chaumière. 16, 113, 114f, 116, 192n121 Running Away to Paris (See also student life). 1, 15–17, 57, 61, 112–117, 176, 183–84n1, 192n121 Ruskin, John. 3, 4, 6, 11, 13, 18, 38, 59, 156, 161n8, 162n18, 163n40, 164n41 Russian Neo-primitives. 155 Sacrifice. 1, 17, 96, 98, 100, 102, 103, 131, 132, 133, 136–139, 158 Sadler, David. 156 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. (Le Petit Prince) 42 Saki (pseudonym of H. H. Munro) 50, 58, 197n42 Salmon, André. 44, 49, 50, 53, 171n7, 173n35 Saloman, Otto. (Sloyd) 112 Salon d’Autumne. 16, 116 Salon des Indépendants. 16 Salon des Refusés 3, 5, 163n29 Sandby, Paul and Thomas. 191n113 Sargent, John Singer. 74, 192n121 Saunders, Margaret Marshall. (Beautiful Joe). 135 Schicketanz, Milena. 194n149, 194n155 Schiebinger, Londa. 134 Schiller, Friedrich von. 95, 108, 120 Schmalenbach, Werner. 170n1, 171n7 Schneider, Daniel E. 131 Schor, Naomi. 173n31 Schulmann, Didier. 137, 198n46 Schwartz, Sanford. 58, 66, 67, 74, 75, 76, 80, 85, 176n14, 177n19, 180n52, 180n53, 180n54, 181n62, 181n69, 182n75, 183n91, 183n95 Schwitters, Kurt. 157 Searle, Adrian. 47

228 • Index Secret Garden (See also Frances Hodgson Burnett). 10, 11, 12, 51, 99, 100. Sendak, Maurice. 53, 54, 55, 56, 83, 127, 135, 138, 144, 150, 153 Windows in 138, 143, 144 Senecio. Cover, 14, 30, 156 Sewall, May Wright. 189n79 Sexuality and childhood. 7, 31, 32, 59, 51, 122, 158, 188n62, 201n16 Shadows. 9, 16, 47, 64, 66, 71, 74, 75, 76, 88, 109, 120 Shatskikh, Aleksandra. 195n6, 199n71, 201n3 Shattuck, Roger. 171n8, 173n35 Sheds. 132f, 137, 138, 197n42 Shefrin, Jill. 175n10 Shelley, Percy. 147–48 Siedhoff-Buscher, Alma. 156 Sigler, Carolyn. 173n34 Sikes, Wirt. 165n6 Size, accuracy of (educational drawing) (See drawing lessons). 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112. Size, mutability and distortion (avantgarde era)(See drawing lessons). 22, 45, 46, 47, 78, 80, 84, 151 Slatkin, Wendy. 104, 186n22, 188n62 Smith, E. Boyd. (Chicken World) 135 Smith, Nora Archibald. (See also Wiggin) 189n84 Smulders, Sharon. 100 Soto, Gary. 151, 153 Soutine, Chaim. 130, 136, 137 Spain/Spanish. (See also Velázquez and Picasso) 65, 66, 73, 74, 151, 169n27 Spirituality. 7, 9, 10, 12, 18, 87, 95, 97, 99, 120, 127, 128, 151, 153, 188n73 St. Nicholas Magazine.74, 83, 169n27 Stabenow, Cornelia. 171n6, 171n9 Stage design. 55, 83, 155, 156, 178n26, 174n72 Stamm, Rainer. 192n122 Starobinski, Jean. 169n30 Stasis. 47, 48, 55. Steen, Marguerite. 58, 61, 77, 83, 175, 176n17, 178n26, 179n43, 179n51 Stevens, Maryanne. 50, 122, 155, 194n144 Stevenson, Robert Alan. 74, 180n53 Stevenson, Robert Louis. 40, 41, 50, 76, 84, 172n27, 180n53 Stewart, Susan. 72 Strindberg, August. 115, 116 Struwwelpeter (See also Heinrich Hoffmann). 14, 52, 53, 58, 164n45, 166n12

Student life (See also Running away to Paris, life-drawing, drawing). 10, 17, 90, 113, 114, 115, 145, 164n3, 165n3, 176n14, 183n1, 184n1, 192n121, 193n123 Sturgis, Alexander, Rupert Christiansen, Lois Oliver, and Michael Wilson. 92, 185n16 Subjective childhood view (Rousseau discussion). 2, 5, 36, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 52, 145–46 Surtees, R. S. 70 Swain, Virginia E. 13, 163n35 Tarr, Anita. 39 Taeuber-Arp, Sophie. 155 Taylor, Ann. 94, 100 Tenniel, John. (See also Lewis Carroll) 15, 134, 166n12 Tenny, Dana and Jill Shefrin. 175n10 Theatre. (see also Actors and Plays) 65, 151, 177n20, 178n26, 178n29, 180n57, 181n62, 181n63 Thompson, Hilary. 182n83 Tolkien, J. R. R. 88 Tolstoy, Leo. 44 Tom Sawyer (See Mark Twain) Torgersen, Eric. 126, 184n3, 185n16, 193n125 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de. 61 Thomson, Philip. 13, 163n39 Tramps (See also Outcast, Poor). 179n43 Travers, P. L. (See Mary Poppins) Treasure Island (See R. L. Stevenson) Trilby. (du Maurier). 1, 2 Trimmer, Sarah. 133, 196n22 Tuchman, Barbara. 167n17 Tugendhold, Yakov Aleksandrovich. 127, 195n2 Turner, J. M. W. 161n8 Turner, James. 133, 196n20 Twain, Mark. 40, 76, 85, 130, 162n28 Uhde, William. 36 Ungerer, Tomi. 55 Upton, Florence. Cover (Peggy); 14, 15, 16, 21f, 23f, 27f, 164n3, 165n6, 165n8, 166n12 Upton, Florence and Bertha. 12, 15, Chapter One 19–33, 158, 162n28, 164n4, 165n4, 165n5, 166n10, 167n14, 168n21, 168n23 Vallas, Léon. 169n25 Vallier, Dora. 162n20, 171n9

Index • 229 Vallotton, Félix. 35 Van Allsburg, Chris. 76 van Gogh. 9, 17, 36, 37, 44, 45, 94, 130, 150, 170n5, 171n9, 196n14 Van Rijn. (See Rembrandt) Vege-Men’s Revenge. (See also Florence and Bertha Upton). 12, 43, 52, 167n14, 173n34 Velázquez, Diego. 66, 73, 74, 79, 87, 180n53 Velveteen Rabbit. 74, 76 Verne, Jules. (See illustrators in bibliography entry) 10, 41, 43, 163n20 Veyrac, Robert de. 174n62 Vitebsk. 17, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 140f, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145f, 146, 147, 151, 152, 155 Vogler, Heinrich. 117. Wagner, Richard. 26, 168n25 Walker, Frederick. 177n20 Wandering Jew.(See also fairy tale, Wotan, Ancient Mariner). 145, 146–151, 199n81, 199n82, 200n90, 200n92 Warner, Sylvia Townsend. 179n51 Wars, influence of. 10, 15, 21, 22, 23f, 57, 60, 69, 72, 73, 88, 127, 128, 129, 130, 137, 146, 147, 149, 153, 155, 165n4, 166n10, 167n17, 169n27, 179n51, 195n1 Waugh, Arthur. 71, 72. Webster, Jean. Dear Enemy 11, 163n31, 193n137 Weisberg, Gabriel.184n1, 192n121 Weisgard, Leonard. 157 Wensinger, Arthur S. (and Carole Clew Hoey). Translators/editors of the English version of the Modersohn-Becker letters quoted in this volume. 184n2. (Taplinger edition, 1983)

Werner, Wolfgang. (Latest editor, in German, of the Modersohn-Becker letters, Fischer, 2007). 184n2, 184n6, 194n149, 194n155 Westhoff, Clara. See Rilke, Clara Westhoff. Where the Wild Things Are (See also Sendak). 55, 56, 83 Whistler, James. 4, 5, 45, 62, 66, 67, 74, 180n53 White, Donna and Anita Tarr 39 White, E. B. (Charlotte’s Web). 135 Whitman, Walt. 44 Wilde, Oscar. 59, 60, 78 Wilder, Laura Ingalls. (Little House in the Big Woods) 135 William R. Scott. (publisher)157 Williams, Margery. (See Velveteen Rabbit) Wind in the Willows. (See Kenneth Grahame) Windows. 9, 54, 59, 75, 76, 77, 78, 83, 127, 138, 140f, 142, 143, 144, 150, 198n65, 198n69, 199n70 Wiggin, Kate Douglas. 1, 17, 96, 98, 99, 100, 109, 110, 123, 124, 141, 189n75, 193n137 Winnie the Pooh (See also Milne). 12, 21, 84 Wisse, Ruth R. 199n89 Wollstonecraft, Mary. 95, 97, 122 Wormuth, Diana. 41 Worpswede. 7, 89, 90, 91, 94, 100, 103, 106, 116, 117, 122, 125, 126, 185n14, 185n20 Wotan (See Apollinaire). 149, 200n90 Wright, Frank Lloyd. 157, 189n86 Wullschlager, Jackie. 151, 197n46 Wyeth, N. C. 76. Zola, Émile. 17, 100, 102, 188n57 Zoos. 10, 37, 38, 39, 40, 55