Monday, November 23, 2009

The Very Overrated Illustrator


Once, there was a children's book illustrator. He was hungry for fame, adulation, respect, and money.





On Monday, he made some cute collage illustrations for his friend's rhyming book for kids. It was very successful. But he was still hungry.





On Tuesday, he wrote a cute picture book all by himself--it had holes in the pages! It was wildly successful. But he was still hungry.





On Wednesday, he made 70 more cute children's books. They were mostly a lot like the first two. He sold 71 million copies! But he was still hungry.






On Thursday, he built a museum and named it after himself. It was spare and modern and important-looking, and contained personal artifacts, reverent biographical information, and hushed, darkened rooms showing some of the pictures from his books to people who were tall enough to see them. But he was still hungry...


***

How can a person possibly dislike Eric Carle enough to work up a whole overlong rant about him? And why should a person bother? These are two questions quite possibly worth answering; I shall now attempt to answer only the first.

As a young preschool teacher, I quite liked Eric Carle. I read The Very Hungry Caterpillar regularly to my 2- and 3-year-olds. The repetition was soothing, and drew them in, they liked to poke their chubby little fingers into the holes in the pages, they liked the picture of the beautiful butterfly at the end. In the late 80's there was some earnest concern among early-childhood educators about the non-healthfulness of the food the caterpillar gorges on, and whether it was appropriate to use the word "fat", but I pooh-poohed this--I liked the book, I approve of occasional binging on sweets, and that caterpillar was indeed fat.

But the more Carle published, and the more similar the books were to each other, the more annoying I found him. The books were bright and colorful, to be sure. But the stories written by him were tiresome to read aloud, and formulaic to an absurd degree: some animal with one attribute meets a bunch of animals in succession, says the same thing to each of them, receives the same response, and then something different happens on the last page. Weirdly, Carle likes to talk about how he's never sold out: "I cannot do a book that says market research has found that three-year-old girls like the colour red or that boys like tractors." Perhaps not. But there are now 4 "X Bear X Bear, What do you Y"? books, and 12! "Very X (Animal)" books. Dare I suggest that the children of the world would probably be fine with only 7 or 8?

For a long time I mostly ignored him. I noticed that in the world of early education, he was becoming increasingly sanctified: My kids' preschool teachers focused curriculum units around him, having discovered the "educational" values cleverly hidden in the books (where else could we find fruit to count, AND the days of the week!?), and that his style is wonderfully (tellingly?) easy for preschoolers to imitate, both prose, and illustration--as demonstrated by these two examples of wonderful Eric-Carle-inspired art by children under age 6:





But none of this troubled me very much. There have been worse educational trends.




It was our family's trip to his newly built (2002) eponymous museum, on the campus of one of my Alma Matereses, Hampshire College, that tipped the scales for me.

I was actually eager to see the museum. I'm a devoted fan of children's book illustration--I think some of the best artists around are lowly illustrators:

Beni Montresor

Peggy Rathman

Peter Sis

I could show you hundreds of these. There's so much wonderful art in picture books, and it's so rich and varied. How wonderful to go to a museum that would showcase it! And a place we could take the kids! My boys were 3 and 7 at the time. We walked into the cavernous lobby and immediately felt ill-at-ease:


This is an environment for children?

The exhibit gallery was one of the least child-friendly places I've ever taken the kids. It was more dimly lit than the Egyptian wing of the MFA, as if exposure to light would cause the precious relics within to disintigrate. There was a long, detailed panel recounting Carle's biography, and glass cases displaying and explaining his "artistic process". The cases were far taller than my three-year old, and there was no step up for him--he had to be lifted to see anything, and when I did, we were immediately cautioned by the docent who had been nervously shadowing us that we were not to touch the glass. He couldn't really see the art without being lifted, either, which was displayed high on the wall behind reflective glass. The blurbs were serious, adult-directed "art speak". That docent kept an eagle eye on me and my (well-behaved) son, even followed us from room to room, until we--fairly quickly--gave up and left. I let him toddle around the bare stone vault of a lobby until my husband and my older son also couldn't take it any more.

Reading a picture book to a child is an intimate, cozy thing to do. Rather than a space to honor this experience, and to make the art accessible to children--its intended audience!, here was another temple to Art-with-a-Capital-A, an attempt to raise children's book illustration to the absurd level of importance claimed by other Artists-with-Capital-A's. A place designed to impress, awe, exclude. For kids!

Thus Eric Carle hit the Trifecta of Annoying:
1. much less talented than oodles of his peers,
2. wildly commercially successful, through marketing touting "educational value" nearly as pointless as Baby Einstein's, and
3. willing to sacrifice the comfort and engagement of his audience (children) in exchange for respect and reverence hardly deserved by the greatest artists.

A happy ending:


...On Friday, the illustrator was devastated by a negative blog post, and, full of shame, hid himself in a cocoon that looked like a big brown...

7 comments:

thelittlethings said...

Okay... My kids' Eric Carle books have now been ruined to me. *sigh* I'll still read them to the 3yo, though. I'm in full agreement on the artwork -- love the colors, but very simplistic; there are so many fabulous illustrators out there, with much more detail for kids to get drawn into (pun unintended *giggle*).

Sara Padrusch said...

Yep! I hated reading those aloud too. Some childrens stories which rely on repetition are wonderful. Ten Minutes Till Bedtime and Goodnight Gorilla by Peggy Rathmen keep us busy and enthralled. Goodnight moon is another great too.

Rebecca just read Twilight and loves it so now Eric Carle is actually looking attractive to me...

Amy. said...

I'm assuming you mean that Eric Carle's books seem sweet and harmless compared to Twilight, not that you think he is some kind of vampire that you're now suddenly attracted to...

Peggy Rathman is one of my favorites, too--the middle picture up there is hers.

Anonymous said...

But no! Did you read "Watch out! A Giant!" (the title is something like that, maybe "Look out! A giant!")
He clearly took a lot of drugs before writing and illustrating that one. Maybe he hadn't discovered his formula yet. It won't negate what you say about the repetitiveness but since it's weird and different it MIGHT provide some relief or puzzlement.
Liddy

Anonymous said...

Amy I'm so glad to have discovered your brilliant blogging! Hooray and thank you for starting this! (and for confirming my nagging but growing suspicion re: the V. O. I.) xo Helen

Anonymous said...

The only clear solution, Amy, is to stop reading or exposing yourself/children to books in any way. As for museums... what were you thinking! I recommend video games in the basement.

Anonymous said...

THANK YOU. You are 100% correct. I was just going to write my own rant about this non-talent hypocrite (to see if anyone hated him as much as I do) when I Googled "overrated Eric Carle" and found your post. You've said it perfectly. There is no reason for me to write my rant now; yours is flawless. Give me Mo Willems any day. Now THAT is some serious talent.

So thank you AGAIN for writing the truth--something that everyone would realize if they made their own judgments instead of just assuming that Carle is okay because he is popular.