A Soaring Look at the Picture Book

Abstract

A Soaring Look at the Picture Book William Moebius (bio) The Picture Book Comes of Age: Looking at Childhood through the Art of Illustration, by Joseph H. Schwarcz and Chava Schwarcz. Chicago and London: American Library Association, 1991. Joseph Schwarcz would have had much more to say had he lived to complete the making of The Picture Book Comes of Age. It is a measure of his generous spirit that even now, four years after his death in 1988, the reader encountering his latest and last book must from time to time feel his passing acutely, and with each turn of the page mourn the loss to all of this teacher whose insight into the images in picture books and into the feelings and needs of children went so much further than most contemporary critics of the genre have managed. When Joseph Schwarcz died at age seventy-one in 1988, he had published Ways of the Illustrator: Visual Communication in Children's Literature (Chicago: ALA, 1982), as well as a host of articles in German, English, and Hebrew. He had taught for fifty years "as if he were born to it," as Betsy Hearne, who met him at the University of Chicago, asserts in a eulogy that serves as her foreword to this posthumous volume. Rescued from the pit through the dedication of Chava Schwarcz, his widow, and ALA editor Tina MacAyeal, The Picture Book Comes of Age is a work destined to exemplify for years to come the possibilities of picture book analysis, exceeded only by Jean Perrot's Du jeu, des enfants and des livres (Paris: Editions du Cercle de la Librairie, 1987). As originally planned, Schwarcz's book was intended to address first the representations of the physical world, particularly of body and gesture, then those of such psychological elements as identity formation, and, finally, those of the social sphere. Clearly, in many ways the book exceeds the promise of its original plan, while in a few, less important ways, it falls short. When the book soars, as it does especially in the treatment of the work of Anthony Browne, it goes well beyond the boundaries of psychological reference and [End Page 185] other "matter" toward a consideration of the aesthetic principles that make Browne's work so successful. Schwarcz's writing reaches its heights when it acknowledges and develops levels of interpretation and response rarely accorded picture book art, an art too often treated in vacuo and not as an integral part of the history of images. Schwarcz's knowledge of art history is reflected both in his excellent handling of design and compositional issues and in his alertness to pictorial allusion. He gains credibility and persuasiveness by emphasizing the immediacy of a particular picture book reading experience without denying the relevance of extensive study elsewhere. With such timely disclaimers as "the philosophical and psychological implications are too complex and far-reaching to be sorted out in the present context" (103), Schwarcz gives us the room and, implicitly, the encouragement we need to test our own observations and answers. Among the "areas" of representation he explores, Schwarcz writes with unparalleled sensitivity and acuity when he examines the psychological dimension of the story and its images. The second chapter, "A Close Look at a Picture Book," in which he follows a "diagram of emotional states" to visualize what goes on in the mind of Peter, the protagonist in Ezra Jack Keats's Whistle for Willie, is a masterpiece of picture book interpretation. The next four chapters (on "Stress and the Picture Book," "Love and Anxiety in the Supportive Family," "Grandparents and Grandchildren," and "Longing for Love, Contending for Love") sustain the quality of writing and insight, despite chapter titles that some may find awkward or sentimental. It may be that after reading his rich analyses of two works by Anthony Browne in chapter 6, we meet the accelerated treatment of a greater variety of texts in chapter 7 ("The Emergence of Identity") with regret. The slight disappointment we may feel with this chapter may also lie in the initial prominence accorded Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment, even as "different psychological persuasions" are mentioned but not named (84...