Читать книгу A Companion to Children's Literature - Группа авторов - Страница 57

Although the prominence of retrospective tendencies in works of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s may suggest that this was a period of creative stasis, this evaluation does not hold true on closer consideration. To begin with, several prestigious picturebook awards were established in this time period: the Australian Children’s Book of the Year Award (est. 1952), paying attention to Australian illustrators, the Kate Greenaway Medal (est. 1956) as the most important illustrator’s award in the United Kingdom, and the German Jugendliteraturpreis (est. 1956), with a separate category for the best picturebook of the year – first awarded to Louis Fatio and Roger Duvoisin’s The Happy Lion (1955). Another steppingstone in the international promotion of children’s books and picturebooks was the founding of IBBY (International Board of Books for Young People) in Zurich in 1953, which established the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1956 as the highest international recognition for an author and illustrator of children’s literature. Among the winners of the annual prize for illustrators (given since 1966) are Mitsumasa Anno, Alois Carigiet, Klaus Ensikat, Svend Otto, Květa Pacovská, Maurice Sendak, and Tomi Ungerer.

The conspicuous artistic and narrative development of the picturebook reverberated in international book fairs and activities devoted to the promotion of children’s book illustration. The Bologna Book Fair in Italy, established in 1963, is the biggest international trade exhibition for children’s literature. Every year the Bologna Ragazzi Award (divided into several categories) is given to the best illustrated picturebook. In 1967, the Biennial of Illustration Bratislava (BIB), Slovakia, was celebrated for the first time. Under the auspices of UNESCO and IBBY, this event presents the best in international children’s book illustration and gives artists from countries around the world the opportunity to present their work. During this meeting, a grand prize for unique illustration and the Golden Apple are awarded to outstanding artists. Both the Ragazzi Award and the BIB grand prize pay particular attention to gifted picturebook-makers from all over the world, including countries whose picturebook production is often unknown to an international book market.

At the same time, UNESCO commissioned renowned photographers to create photographic picturebooks for children that depict children’s everyday lives in different countries all over the world, thus promoting the ideals of tolerance and mutual understanding. The most prominent series, with photos by Anna Riwkin-Brick, started in 1956 with Eva möter Noriko-San (Eva Meets Noriko-San), with a text written by Astrid Lindgren. Originally published in Swedish, the 15-volume series was an eminent success, with translations into more than 20 languages and a print run of 25,000 copies in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States (Ehriander 2011). Similar series followed suit, for instance, the My Village series (23 vols, 1956–1972) by the couple Sonia and Tim Gidal and Enfants du monde (Children of the World, 20 vols, 1952–1975) by French photographer Dominique Darbois (Lemarchant 2015).

The period offered other inventive picturebooks as well. Miroslav Sasek’s popular city guides for children, written in a tongue-in-cheek manner and beginning with This Is Paris (1959; 18 titles until 1974), provided knowledge about people’s everyday lives as well as their architectural and cultural surroundings. In order to serve the increasing interest in international cultures and to foster the learning of foreign languages, Antonio Frasconi’s See and Say (1955) renewed the tradition of the multilingual primer as well as the technique of wood engraving. By the phonetic transcription of the words, this picturebook used a new linguistic methodology to facilitate the correct spelling of foreign words. Similarly, The Cat in the Hat (1957) by Dr. Seuss (aka Theodor Geisel) demonstrated that primary school readers could be entertaining, even if the story just consists of 223 words (Nel 2007).

While some picturebook-makers put emphasis on the renewal of traditional book genres, primarily emphasizing their educational value, others turned toward contemporary artistic styles or referred, like the postwar artists discussed above, to avant-garde currents, which they regarded as a stimulus for the child’s intrinsic creativity. An early trailblazer in that category was the picturebooks by Italian artist Bruno Munari, who continuously produced artworks that challenge the viewer due to their unusual combination of materials, artistic techniques, and stories, as in Nella nebbia di Milano (The Circus in the Mist, 1968; see Campagnaro 2017). Drawing on the old tradition of using picturebooks as playthings, Munari involved the child reader in the construction of the story. The creative activity of the young child is also captured in Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955), which is distinguished by the story’s dreamlike atmosphere as well as the reduced cartoon-like style (Nel 2012).

Along the same lines, Leo Lionni paved the way for the acceptance of abstract art in picturebooks. The characters in his picturebook Little Blue and Little Yellow (1957) consist merely of torn scraps of colored paper; however, Lionni successfully combined this abstract depiction with an emotional story, thus igniting the child’s imagination. The Swiss artist Warja Lavater went a step further, as she has retold popular fairy tales such as Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding Hood, 1965) by means of abstract forms, such as circles, triangles, rectangles, and rhombuses. Created as accordion books, which Lavater herself has defined as “folded stories,” these retellings demand the reader to co-construct the underlying story by attributing specific meanings to the abstract forms, which stand for characters and objects. While the picturebooks by Munari, Lionni, and Lavater had often been regarded as artworks on the threshold of artists’ books, other illustrators devoted their artwork to revive the often neglected genre of the baby book (often put on a level with board books and rag or cloth books).

Picturebook artists had previously paid little attention to early concept books, especially those for children from the age of 12 months up to three years of age. This attitude gradually changed in the 1960s, when an increasing number of illustrators showed a deep interest in picturebooks for the young ones (Kümmerling-Meibauer and Meibauer 2005). The most effective among these artists was the Dutch graphic designer Dick Bruna, whose concept books featuring the character Miffy (Dutch: Nijntje; 1963–2006) have been sold worldwide and are still in print today. The Italian couple Iela and Enzo Mari created wordless picturebooks, for instance, La mela e la farfalla (1960; trans. The Apple and the Moth, 1970), that combine the young child’s conceptual development with information about nature. One of the first books for very young children that effectively incorporated toy elements in order to propel the story is Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), which launched an extremely successful franchise. Playful character is also a unique feature of Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s The Jolly Postman or Other People’s Letters (1986): Envelopes glued to the pages contain letters that can be opened and read, thus enhancing the story (Martin 1989). While some picturebooks, such as the Swedes Barbro Lindgren and Eva Eriksson’s popular titles focusing on the baby Max (10 vols, 1981–1995), introduce young children into the concept of story, Pat Hutchins’s Rosie’s Walk (1968) is an innovative example of a book wherein there is contradiction between image and text, thus calling the young child’s attention to the multimodal character of the picturebook as well as initiating a preliminary understanding of irony (Kümmerling-Meibauer 1999).

One of the most discussed picturebooks is Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963), because of its intricate book design and sophisticated relation between text and visuals as well as conscious tribute to the child’s inner life. Sendak’s work paved the way for the increasing psychologization of child characters in picturebooks, taking children’s emotional and cognitive development seriously. Although some librarians and critics were initially uncomfortable with the book, Where the Wild Things Are became a favorite among children and pursued an incredible career in international academia. Innumerable articles testify to the never-ending interest in this picturebook. Considered by some picturebook researchers as the modern picturebook par excellence, Where the Wild Things Are was adapted as, inter alia, an opera version in 1980 and a live action movie in 2009 directed by Spike Jonze, bearing witness to the timeless appeal of the picturebook story.

While not as popular as Sendak’s picturebook, Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day (1962) represents another benchmark in the history of the picturebook: it is the first US-American picturebook that features an African American child as main character (Martin 2004, p. 51). It established the validity of picturebook stories that focus on the everyday life of children from different ethnic groups, pointing to children’s diverse social and cultural backgrounds.