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Good books, old friends

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By Kara G. Kvasnicka

Tuesday, November 29, -0001

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In addition to her Madeline books, my niece Lauren has Madeline dolls (complete with wardrobe and accessories), puzzles, felt boards and videos — none of which were available when I was growing up just a few dark ages ago.

Curiously, nobody thought to give me any Madeline toys on my last birthday. (Lauren and her brother Ryan have given me Snoopy and Wishbone toys on previous occasions so there is always hope.) But my mother did come through with a beautiful and age-appropriate book about the man who invented this beloved heroine of children's literature.

Bemelmans: The Life & Art of Madeline's Creator (Viking, 1999, $40, 152 pages) is a retrospective of author and artist Ludwig Bemelmans' work by his grandson John Bemelmans Marciano.

This comprehensive collection of Bemelmans' paintings, murals, sketches, and book illustrations is a must-see for not just Madeline fans, but for art lovers in general.

In addition to its strong visual appeal, the book's excerpts from Bemelmans' novels, travel writings, letters and children's books give us a much fuller understanding of his talents as a writer.

The intriguing events of his life, his resilient spirit and ironic sense of humor, are more clearly rendered in a July 1998 Vanity Fair article by journalist Amy Fine Collins. However, Marciano's somewhat sanitized portrait does justice to Bemelmans' legendary zest for life and gives us an adequate sense of which events in Bemelmans' life influenced particular aspects of his works.

The art work alone is incentive for buying or checking this book out of the library. To me, looking at Bemelmans' illustrations is the equivalent to eating dessert in an elegant restaurant. They evoke both the sweetness of the dessert and the sophistication of the restaurant.

Your eyes would probably be content to feast upon this book's many examples of the humorous, light-infused watercolor paintings and pen and ink sketches Bemelmans devised for children's books and magazines. There are almost as many Madeline illustrations in this tribute as there are in any single Madeline book, in addition to equally delightful samples from his lesser known children's works.

However, Marciano gives us an extra helping of dessert by introducing us to the more richly textured results of Bemelmans' experiments with oil painting. These brilliant canvases, mostly of people and places in France, need no accompanying words to tell as many stories as Bemelmans' books.

We are able to trace Bemelmans' progress and growth as an artist through Marciano's mostly chronological presentation of his grandfather's work, starting with the caricatures of wealthy Americans he drew on the backs of menus as a bus boy at the Ritz-Carleton in the1910s, to the exhibition of his paintings at major museums in the 1950s. Unexpected treats include a photograph of his only existing murals that can be seen by the public at the Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan and his luminous but largely forgotten watercolor and oil paintings of New York City.

While his final products all look effortless, examples of several working drafts of various paintings and illustrations remind us that, in the words of my favorite musical composer Stephen Sondheim, "art isn't easy."

Neither is writing, but Bemelmans gamely took on that discipline as well. Almost too many and too lengthy excerpts from Bemelmans' letters, journals, magazine articles and autobiographical fiction are used by his grandson to show that Bemelmans was just as versatile a writer as he was an illustrator and painter.

My mind wandered a bit while reading many of the excerpts from Bemelmans' works for adults. They are every bit as witty and wise as the simple rhymes that comprised his text for children's books, but they are wordy and long-winded.

Marciano does an excellent job of describing his grandfather's works as well as the methods and processes behind those works. I look forward to sharing with my niece the section devoted exclusively to the making of a Madeline book.

The journey each book took from initial sketches and snippets of verse on scraps of paper, to test version in a popular magazine, to published manuscript is lovingly and painstakingly recounted.

The weak link in this volume is Marciano's tepid, overly polite portrayal of his grandfather's life. Marciano succeeds in showing how intertwined Bemelmans' life was with his art. We learn for instance that the Madeline stories were inspired by his observations of his daughter Barbara, his mother's memories of attending a boarding school headed by a nun and his love of Paris. Photographs of Bemelmans, his family and some of the places he lived, also give us insights into the sources for his words and pictures.

But I recommend the Vanity Fair article I mentioned earlier if you want a more detailed account of his bizarre and tragic childhood, the bad luck that plagued him through his risk-taking adult years, his expensive tastes and the charisma that allowed him to dwell comfortably in high circles of New York or Paris society in spite of his humble beginnings.

In his preliminary author's note, Marciano relates his mother's concern that his portrait of his grandfather is too serious. Naturally, he should have listened to her. Marciano's narrative would have been much more readable if it had included more stories about the kind of man Bemelmans was as well as the kind of artist he was.

On the other hand, future Bemelmans biographers will be hard pressed to match this book's lavish illustrations. You do not even have to be mad about Madeline to appreciate them.

Kvasnicka, a former East Village Magazine news editor, has been the magazine's contributing editor and research consultant since 1989. She has a master's degree in information and library studies from the University of Michigan and is the librarian at Genesee District Library's Beecher Library.

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