Behind the scenes of Denver Art Museum's Maurice Sendak 'Wild Things' exhibit
share
DENVER — Behind a labyrinth of bare, hidden halls closed to the public at the Denver Art Museum is a room filled with brushes, chemicals, lab equipment and shelves upon shelves of drawings.
This is the office of Sarah Melching, Denver’s chief art conservator, who spent the summer preparing for the upcoming exhibit of “Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak.” Melching, a specialist in paper conservation, helped prepare 170 drawings and paintings for the exhibit.
“I am systematically going through and stabilizing the pieces to preserve them,” she told Rocky Mountain PBS. “They will return to the [Maurice Sendak] Foundation better than how they arrived.”
Maurice Sendak, the beloved children’s book author and illustrator known for “Where the Wild Things Are,” died in 2012. At times, he turned the sanitized world of nursery rhymes on its head, exposing children to monsters and demons and the full breadth of a child’s psyche — sometimes sparking controversy and warnings to parents.
He won many accolades for his work, including the Caldecott Medal, the National Book Award in the picture book category and the National Medal of the Arts.
The exhibit, on loan from the Maurice Sendak Foundation in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and the Morgan Library in New York City, is the largest public display to date of Sendak’s work. Previous exhibits were recently held at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio and the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, both of which were smaller in size and scope.
“There is a lot of material in this show that has never been shown before,” said Christoph Heinrich, the director of the Denver Art Museum, who worked with the Maurice Sendak Foundation to produce the retrospective of Sendak’s work.
“Sendak kept everything, every piece of paper that he ever scribbled on,” he said. “Because all of these things were meant to be used, they were pasted with Scotch tape and headed to the printers. They were never seen as artworks — they were seen as part of the process of making a book.”
A morose childhood breeds an active imagination
Sendak, born in Brooklyn in 1928 to Polish Jews who came to the U.S. just before World War I, spent much of his early childhood sick with illnesses including scarlet fever, pneumonia, and whooping cough. He was expected to die, he told WHYY’s "Fresh Air" in 1986. He was also haunted by the decimation of his father’s entire family in the Holocaust.
Sendak’s writing and illustrations later in life would reflect his upbringing — that childhood is a place often filled with sadness, fear — and sometimes monsters.
“There is the happy memory, actually, of being indoors and watching — the window became my movie camera, my television set,” he told NPR. “I think it's no accident that windows, or children looking out of windows or going through windows or whatever, becomes an obsession in most of the books I've written.”
Sendak was enthralled with characters like Mickey Mouse, Robin Hood and King Kong and realized he wanted to become an illustrator after seeing Walt Disney’s film “Fantasia” at age 12.
He was discovered in 1948 while dressing windows for the F.A.O. Schwarz toy store in New York City. An editor from Harper’s & Brothers learned of Sendak’s work and commissioned him to illustrate his first children’s book, “The Wonderful Farm.”
Sendak spent the next decade illustrating children’s books, and in 1956, he wrote his own first book, “Kenny’s Window.” Throughout his 60-year career, he wrote about a dozen other books, including “Where the Wild Things Are,” which later became a live-action movie in 2009, and illustrated more than 100 books.
Though Sendak was known for his books for children, they are just as relevant to adults, said Heinrich.
“There are all the big topics of life in his books. It's about love. It's about longing. It's about finding friendship. It's about disappointment and how to deal with it. It's about the bullies that you have to fight. That is a message that is multi-generational and something truly relevant in our current times,” Heinrich said.
Bringing back the details
When Rocky Mountain PBS visited the conservation lab in mid-September, Melching was working on an illustration from “Higglety Pigglety Pop!,” a book about a dog, Jennie (Sendak’s actual childhood dog), who runs away from home in search of adventure and ends up becoming a star in a play.The drawing at the lab — one of Sendak’s favorites — hung in his office for decades and was one of the only drawings of his own that he displayed. Due to decades sitting exposed, the paper discolored and became a pinkish-cream-colored hue.
“The Foundation actually originally didn’t even want to loan it to us because they said it was in such bad shape,” Heinrich said.
To reduce the discoloration, Melching exposed the drawing to the sun for about an hour and a half, under careful monitoring, and also used stabilized hydrogen peroxide. She said the UV light from the sun absorbed the darkened, discolored areas, which over time, broke down the discoloration.
“It's actually a lot safer than a lot of other forms of bleaching that have been used in conservation previously,” Melching said. “Once you bring the paper back closer to its original color, the details really do pop. It’s amazing how much gets lost when there’s that much discoloration in the paper.”
After reducing the discoloration, the paper became distorted from the natural air-drying process. Melching underwent a process of humidification — spraying the paper — covered in spun polyester and Gore-Tex, a waterproof breathable fabric, with water to get the paper back to its original dimensions.
“Even though I’m spraying solid water, the Gore-Tex provides a barrier that converts the solid water into vapor. When paper is exposed to vapor, it expands slowly and uniformly,” she said.
Melching said her biggest challenge working on the exhibit was the fragility of the materials Sendak used.
“He did some work on tracing paper, and tracing paper is one of the more difficult substrates to work on,” she said. “It stretched my capacities as a conservator to really problem solve and come up with creative solutions in treating those pieces.”
Melching also repaired tears to illustrations, including from the book “A is for Alligator.” She uses a wheat starch paste made in the lab to mend tears.
Heinrich noted the work Melching did for the exhibit rejuvenated the works “as if [they were] just drawn a few moments ago.”
Children’s books and beyond
Beyond children’s book illustrations, Sendak was a skilled draftsman who designed sets, costumes and props for operas and ballets. He worked on the 1983 Pacific Northwest Ballet production of Tchaikovsky’s "The Nutcracker" and the 1978 production of Mozart’s "The Magic Flute."
The exhibit at the Denver Art Museum reflects Sendak’s prolific craftsmanship. It includes a giant animatronic goose that Sendak made for the 1984 New York City opera “The Goose of Cairo,” and costumes from Spike Jonze’s 2009 movie “Where the Wild Things Are,” which Sendak co-produced.
“You will see how with every project, he almost invented a new language,” said Heinrich. “He didn’t stick to one style.”
The exhibition features more than 400 objects and took two years to come together.
“It's probably one of the most objects we've ever had in a show,” said Heinrich. “To coordinate all of this, to bring it together, to get it on the walls [was] a huge logistical undertaking.”
Denver Art Museum’s “Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak” exhibition runs
Oct. 13, 2024-Feb. 17, 2025.