Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened show at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
As a Millennial, I dread what future history books will say about my generation. That we were never able to purchase homes because we spent what money we had on avocado toast. That we loved Barack Obama despite his open disdain for us. And that, overgrown children that we are, the cultural product that best represents us is a 2009 film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, which was not only written by Dave Eggers and directed by Spike Jonze but also scored by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I never saw it.
Some in this cursed generation now have their own children, and those in Denver can bring them to “Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak,” a newly opened show at the Denver Art Museum that celebrates the chunky whimsy of the author and illustrator and offers to introduce Gen Alpha to the artist so beloved by their parents and grandparents. The show features drawings, paintings and mockups from Sendak’s lesser-known career as a stage designer and producer for theater productions like The Magic Flute and The Nutcracker, with significant loans from that bastion of works on paper, The Morgan Library, where Sendak himself (1928-2012) would sometimes study the work of William Blake (1757-1827).
The exhibition offers enough of Sendak’s in-process work that you can feel the influence of other artists he loved, among them Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810) and Carl Wilhelm Kolbe (1757/59-1835), and the work of this Polish emigre does feel much closer to these romantic German forebears than it does to the work of Dr. Seuss. In one of his lesser-known books, Dear Milli (1988), Sendak revived a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, excerpted from a letter Wilhelm wrote to a little girl in 1816.
But if you’re more into the hits, this show does indeed feature the final art for Where The Wild Things Are (1963), in watercolor, ink and graphite on paper. Particularly handsome is the last page depicting Max returning home from his adventures to eat his dinner. The room looks normal compared to everything he’s seen with the wild things, but does it really? The bed is of abnormal proportions and the crosshatched shadows, so important during the other adventures, are now woven through the entire scene. Its normality is only surface level, like Vincent van Gogh’s painting of his own bedroom.
His line often owes something to Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” which is honored in subject and design throughout In the Night Kitchen (1970). Its versatility, however, is often on display here. Also on display are the realistic ink drawings for Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must Be More to Life (1967), in which a pampered but discontent terrier packs a suitcase and hits the road. She joins Sendak’s other children, animals and monsters who use props or clothing to plumb deeper truths. “Obviously, I have one theme,” Sendak told Rolling Stone in 1976. Perhaps, but the art styles were varied, energetic and wildly creative.
“Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak” is on view at Denver Art Museum through February 17, 2025.