Sendak, wild about food

With the trailers suddenly running everywhere for the new, live-action adaptation of Maurice Sendak's durable children's classic Where the Wild Things Are, it seemed a fine moment to drop in at the Rosenbach Museum.

The Rosenbach, whose library and exhibits occupy two stately townhouses on Delancey Place at 20th Street, is home to the world's largest collection of "Sendakia," as it calls it, a trove of 10,000 sketches and original drafts and watercolors that made it into his books; or, more intriguingly in some cases, did not.

What drew our attention particularly was an intimate exhibition that opened last week called "Too Many Thoughts to Chew: A Sendak Stew," a visual feast of the perils (and adventures) of being sent to bed without supper, and skinny-dipping in a reservoir of creamy milk - and of how food and eating play such an outsized role in our understanding of the terrain of our young, pre-K lives.

Exhibitions, of course, are about editing, and this one is no different. Above sketches of scampish dogs tearing away with strings of sausages, and unfinished storyboards for In the Night Kitchen, the lettering quotes Sendak, now 81, on "the primal fantasy of putting things in the mouth, of chewing, or swallowing. . . . " It neglects, discreetly, to quote his further, earthy musing - on the childish fascination with food's exit strategy.

You learn here, looking at a vintage postcard, of the illustrator's Proustian inspiration for In the Night Kitchen: his unforgettable encounter with the striking Sunshine Bakers exhibition at the New York World's Fair in 1939, when he was 11 years old. His older sister and her boyfriend had left him (they'd actually split and abandoned him) mesmerized by the aroma of biscuit and cake, flour and milk, waving at the little bakers on the balcony (they were midgets) and their poster-sized crackers in front of the gleaming white building - all "salient features," as Patrick Rodgers, one of the exhibition's curators, writes of Sendak's storybook kitchen 30 years later.

Even the role of Mickey, the central character, as the bakery's emergency milkman has its roots in Sendak's sentimental memories of the lyrics in Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie: "Milkman's on his way, good night baby, let's call it a day."

There is a glimpse, as well, of the revisionism that often attends creative-commercial ventures, very much including the long-delayed, $80 million-plus Spike Jonze film version of Wild Things opening Oct. 16.