Maurice Sendak could have been celebrating. It was 1964 and, after years of working as a writer and illustrator, he had shot to superstardom with “Where the Wild Things Are.” The book, which narrates a child’s imaginative journey, had just won the Caldecott Medal and was on its way to selling more than 26 million copies worldwide.
Yet Sendak instead threw himself into writing “Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More To Life.” The story follows a dog, inspired by Sendak’s own beloved Jennie, who embarks on a quest to see whether there’s more to life, beyond her comfortable existence. Children like the book, but the driving question is not a kid’s question, Jonathan Weinberg, the curator and director of research at the Maurice Sendak Foundation, explained: “It’s the great celebrity question, like, ‘well, is this the meaning of life? Is that all there is?’”
That question could also be seen as driving “Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak,” a retrospective at the Denver Art Museum that runs through Feb. 17. The show, curated by Weinberg and the Denver Art Museum’s director, Christoph Heinrich, features around 450 objects, tracing Sendak’s lifetime of creative work, as he illustrated more than 100 books.
Stefania Van Dyke, the museum’s associate director of interpretive engagement, explained that the aim is to “help people understand that he’s more than ‘Where The Wild Things Are.’”
The show was based upon “Wild Things Are Happening: The Art of Maurice Sendak,” an exhibition of about 150 works that opened at the Columbus Museum of Art in October 2022, then toured to the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. The first major museum retrospective since Sendak died in 2012, it was in development for years.
Weinberg, who met Sendak when he was a child and essentially grew up as part of his extended family, explained in an email that he and Lynn Caponera, the foundation’s executive director and board president, who also grew up as part of Sendak’s extended family, “wanted to present Maurice’s work in the context of an art museum.” Weinberg had previously curated a show on L.G.B.T.Q. art, “Art After Stonewall, 1969-1989,” for the Columbus museum, and they had built a basis of trust with that institution and its then executive director, Nannette Maciejunes. The foundation and the Columbus museum decided to partner on the retrospective.
When Heinrich saw the show proposal, he said, “I caught fire right away.”
Audiences clearly share that passion. In Columbus, on opening day, “there was a line out the door,” recalled Nicole Rome, the Columbus museum’s director of collections and exhibitions, who helped organize the show. At the Skirball, many visitors showed off Sendak-themed tattoos.
The author and playwright Tony Kushner, a close friend of Sendak who collaborated with him on a children’s picture book and an English language opera based on the 1938 Czech opera “Brundibar,” remembered Sendak had a similar gravitational pull in life. “You know, the thing that Graham Greene said, that the books you read as a child will matter to you far more than anything you’re going to read as an adult, no matter how great, because they are so central to the forming of your being? Maurice was like a divinity to people.”
Stepping inside the Denver gallery, visitors will encounter a black-and-white photo of the artist as a young man in his studio. Nearby are a wall-sized drawing of the main Wild Thing monster and a drawing of children with books beneath the handwritten phrase “a book is to look at.”
It’s a sketch for Sendak’s first major book, “A Hole Is To Dig,” and an invitation: a show is to see.
From there, the exhibition unfolds over 11 “chapters.” The first outlines Sendak’s roots and his relationship with his characters whom — Van Dyke explained on a tour, gesturing at a wall of paintings and drawings — Sendak saw as caricatures of himself.
These self-portraits — some traditional, some in the guise of his characters — include an early oil painting, a piece of art for his book “Pierre,” and a small sketch Sendak made in his later years of himself as an old man dressed as Max from “Wild Things.”
Chapter 1 also introduces the artist’s parents, siblings and partner, Eugene Glynn. In Sendak’s oil paintings of his nephew, Glynn and an Art Students League classmate, visitors can see him playing with style and format — something that struck Heinrich.
“He reinvented himself with every project, like Madonna,” Heinrich said. “So he came up with a new language, a new visual language, a new approach to figuration with every project that he did.”
That experimentation continues nearby, in what Sendak called “fantasy sketches.” He conceived these drawings as a creative exercise: He would put on a piece of music and start sketching, challenging himself to fill the page by the time the music ended.
Caponera had stayed in the room beneath Sendak’s studio, and she remembered, “he would work late into the night and have Mozart on, you would hear him tapping. And so, you’d fall asleep to this wonderful lullaby, and you’d wake up and come up in the morning and see what he did that night.”
Such moments of discovery abound here, in Sendak’s art for “A Hole Is To Dig,” written by his frequent collaborator Ruth Krauss (where visitors can discover gems like “a face is something to have on the front of your head”) and in a section highlighting other books the pair created, where Sendak clearly riffed, doing one book in Victorian style, another veering toward Pop Art, another mimicking Chagall.
Soon, the show crescendos — on one wall, a mural of animals on parade; from a video screen, songs from “Really Rosie,” a musical he created with Carole King; and, finally, large letters declaring “LET THE WILD RUMPUS START!,” the words that trigger a wild celebration with Max and the Wild Things he meets on his imagined journey.
That book, which has now been translated into more than 46 languages, is celebrated here, with the original paintings displayed together for the first time in a major art museum. Visitors can follow the story via wall text while admiring Sendak’s luminous colors and subtle cross hatching.
Not everyone loved “Where the Wild Things Are” when it was published. It was banned in some places, and a psychoanalyst wrote in Ladies’ Home Journal that the book might be too frightening for very young children. But that hasn’t stopped the story from garnering fans worldwide, and taking on a life of its own in pop culture.
Beyond the rumpus room, the Wild Things reverberate, in a photograph of a Wild Thing in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, in a production still from an ensuing opera, and in two towering Wild Things — all fur and feathers and ferocity — their eyes aglow, horns casting shadows overhead.
A reading room follows, with seating, Sendak books, “windows” framing photographed views of the artist’s woodsy Connecticut backyard and a listening station, featuring Sendak himself reading a story.
The show then explores “In The Night Kitchen,” a later book that addresses the question: What exactly happens at night, when you’re sleep? Arthur Yorinks, Sendak’s close friend and frequent collaborator, remembered walking with him when he was writing it. The moon was rising above the Empire State Building, Yorinks recalled, “and he pointed up, and he said, ‘look!’ and it was the exact scene in ‘Night Kitchen’ with the enormous milk bottle and the moon.”
Soon, the show takes a sharp turn, taking viewers through a tunnel and into a room dominated by a 14-foot-tall goose. The bird — from whose rear end two tenors emerged during a Sendak-designed production of the unfinished Mozart opera “L’oca del Cairo” (“The Goose of Cairo”) — anchors the chapter on Sendak’s second act, as an opera and theater designer, when he also worked on “The Magic Flute,” “The Cunning Little Vixen” and “The Nutcracker.”
The section closes with Sendak’s and Kushner’s production of “Brundibar.” While it has beautiful music and a positive message, the opera has a tragic history: The Hans Krasa-Adolf Hoffmeister work was performed by children in a Holocaust concentration camp, and many did not survive.
Kushner recalled that, after their work on the show had been announced, when he and Sendak, who was Jewish, were out together in New York, a woman approached, and asked if he was Maurice Sendak. “He said yes. And she said, ‘My name is Ela Weissberger, and I was the cat.’”
She explained that she had played the cat in “Brundibar,” in the Terezín concentration camp. “And Maurice, who was very emotional, just burst into tears, and she burst into tears, and they were hugging each other,” Kushner said. “And it was such a special moment.”
Emotion still pulses through Sendak’s books, as palpable as ever. Yorinks said he believed that’s what speaks so deeply to people.
“When you see a piece of art come out of somebody really grabbing their own insides, the Yiddish word, kishkes, we respond.” Sendak, he said, was going to a place that was very real, and confronting himself “and the whole spectrum of what it is to be alive in all its variety. And he never shied away from that, which is why his books can be considered fierce, and even fierce in a joyful way.”
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