Maurice Sendak

For 30-plus years, Maurice Sendak has been creating social commentaries and worlds of wonder. In Sendak stories, animals inhabit a little boy's bedroom, a small boy bakes enough cake to feed the world, an unlikely pair raise a homeless child, and a girl saves her sister from goblins. You probably will find a Sendak book in your child's bedroom, unless yours is as big a slob as mine are. They're there somewhere: Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and the fairly new We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy. These are definitely not the Berenstain Bears.

A new exhibit opening at the Rosenbach Museum & Library next Friday may make it easier for parents to explain war to children in a way that they can really relate to: the art of Maurice Sendak, the noted illustrator of children's books. Titled "Dear Mili: Drawings and Watercolors by Maurice Sendak," the exhibit is based on a story by the 19th-century writer Wilhelm Grimm about a young girl's survival in the woods for 30 years after she is sent there by her widowed mother so that she may escape an approaching war. The exhibit will be on display until April 28. The museum, at 2010 Delancey Place, is open Tuesdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission $1.50 for the exhibit.

CHILDREN'S AUTHOR Maurice Sendak began his life in Brooklyn and lived in Connecticut until his death Tuesday, but his heart — his work — lives on in Philadelphia at the Rosenbach Museum and Library . The museum has more than 10,000 pieces of Sendak's work, spanning his career from the '40s to the early 21st century, and will mount a memorial exhibition in June. Reacting to the beloved author's death, the museum opened its doors for free to the public yesterday and will again Wednesday from noon to 8 p.m. The gallery is exhibiting "From Pen to Publisher: The Life of Three Sendak Picture Books.

The best dance film ever made is probably Walt Disney's Fantasia. Not a translation of dance from one medium to another, it defined itself on its own terms. Though it uses no dancers and no choreography in the conventional sense of the words, the 1940 film is a genuine dance experience. Its plot, as it were, is like the plot of many contemporary dances: interpretation of music. But in Fantasia, the figures doing the interpretation are animated creatures that can do what live dancers can never do. Through their magical properties, Fantasia establishes a world of pure fantasy.

Early in World War II, an impressionable boy from Brooklyn - one Maurice Sendak - found himself trying to cope with a world gone mad. "Life stood on its head," he said the other day in a phone chat from his home in Connecticut. Sendak began to portray this topsy-turvy world on sketch pads. The pursuit ultimately led to now-celebrated stories such as "In the Night Kitchen" and "Where the Wild Things Are. " Visitors to two Philadelphia attractions, the Please Touch Museum and the Rosenbach Museum, soon will be able to enjoy Sendak's unique artistic vision in exhibitions drawn from his classic children's books.

Maurice Sendak, the author and illustrator of children's books, is a man who deals in images even more than in words. So it is fair to begin with an image: He is sitting in a straight-backed parlor chair in the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia. His breakfast cereal is uneaten, his Evian bottle unopened, and he has a hand on each knee as if set for takeoff. The windows are behind him and he faces an expensive sofa and a Peaceable Kingdom-esque print that bears the biblical admonition: "A little child shall lead them.

With the poise and the polish of a major world leader, Maurice Sendak was wittily fending off the news media's queries about the Wild Things that inhabit his fantasies and his fiction. Sure, his award-winning picture books are populated by monsters. But they don't frighten Sendak. "I'm so easily scared, if I saw my work as scary, I couldn't go through with it," Sendak said recently. On the other hand, he reminded his interrogators, "children take a great pleasure in being scared.

I was moved to tears Tuesday when a colleague phoned to say that Maurice Sendak, the celebrated children's book author and illustrator, had died. Sendak's books have been an important presence in my life for almost as long as I can remember. My very first childhood book-related memory is of my brother's copy of Sendak's most famous book, Where the Wild Things Are, which won the Caldecott Medal in 1964. When my own children came into the world, this is a book I read to them over and over again, partly out of nostalgia but mostly out of a recognition that Sendak's stories and pictures serve to validate the unique and complicated perspective that children have of the world around them.

Wild things, young and old, will be gathering at the Rosenbach Museum and Library on Sunday afternoon for "Let the Wild Rumpus Start!," an exhibition of Maurice Sendak's original drawings from 1963's Where the Wild Things Are. "Sendak used thousands of fine ink lines on fields of colors. The result has an almost fireworks-like look to it," said Derick Dreher, the museum's director. Sendak won't be there in person, but a wild thing named Moishe will make an appearance. (Moishe is the Yiddish equivalent of Maurice.

From conception through gestation through delivery, Last Dance is an involving work of process art, inviting the audience to witness the birth of "The Selection," a dance piece that made its debut in 1999. In this case, art makes for very strange bedfellows. The parents of this remarkable brainchild are author Maurice Sendak, his partner Arthur Yorinks, and the Pilobolus Dance Theater under the direction of Robby Barnett, Michael Tracy and Jonathan Wolken. Those familiar with Sendak know that, like the Brothers Grimm, he is an artist of the graphically rendered grotesque.

I was moved to tears Tuesday when a colleague phoned to say that Maurice Sendak, the celebrated children's book author and illustrator, had died. Sendak's books have been an important presence in my life for almost as long as I can remember. My very first childhood book-related memory is of my brother's copy of Sendak's most famous book, Where the Wild Things Are, which won the Caldecott Medal in 1964. When my own children came into the world, this is a book I read to them over and over again, partly out of nostalgia but mostly out of a recognition that Sendak's stories and pictures serve to validate the unique and complicated perspective that children have of the world around them.

Maurice Sendak, 83, artist and writer, who told stories about the truth, light and dark, to children and adults alike, died Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He had had a stroke four days before. Studded with groundbreaking successes such as Where the Wild Things Are (which won the 1964 Caldecott Medal, for the best American picture book for children) and In the Night Kitchen (1970), Mr. Sendak's 65-year career was that of a son of immigrants, a high-school graduate who carved out a singular, permanent place in writing history - and not only for kids.

CHILDREN'S AUTHOR Maurice Sendak began his life in Brooklyn and lived in Connecticut until his death Tuesday, but his heart — his work — lives on in Philadelphia at the Rosenbach Museum and Library . The museum has more than 10,000 pieces of Sendak's work, spanning his career from the '40s to the early 21st century, and will mount a memorial exhibition in June. Reacting to the beloved author's death, the museum opened its doors for free to the public yesterday and will again Wednesday from noon to 8 p.m. The gallery is exhibiting "From Pen to Publisher: The Life of Three Sendak Picture Books.

'I'm not feeling great," Maurice Sendak is saying. "I've been rather sick, to tell you the truth. I can make believe I'm well. " You can hear it in his voice. Sendak, 82, on the phone from his Connecticut home at 3:30 p.m. Friday (pretty much when the night owl's workday gets going), sounds gravelly and stuffy. "I'm old," says the author and illustrator of dozens of children's books, including Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen . "It could be anything.

The 2010 Sendak in Spring Festival, honoring the work of children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, will be celebrated on Saturday and Sunday at the Rosenbach Museum and Library. Workshops from noon to 4 p.m. each day will explore the art of storytelling, illustration, spoken word, and bookmaking, taught by Philadelphia storyteller Linda Goss and book artist Jude Robison. From 1 to 3, Wild Things Whirligig, created by Karen Saillant, artistic director of the International Opera Theater, will be performed.

The Rosenbach Museum & Library is presenting a series of exhibits and events coinciding with the film adaptation of the award-winning children's book Where the Wild Things Are, which opens in theaters today. The museum houses the original artwork created by author Maurice Sendak, recipient of the Caldecott Book Medal in 1964, the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1970, and the National Medal of Arts in 1996, among his literary achievements. The exhibition "It's Still Hot: Where the Wild Things Are" explores the book's popularity for almost 50 years.

Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are , with its rumpus-ing monsters and riley kid protagonist, is a book of sublime simplicity (338 words - just a handful of tweets), but also of depth to the Earth's core. Picture the image of Max, in his white wolf suit, astride the Minotaur giant as he and the tiger-toothed critter with the striped pullover and the yellow eyes parade through the trees. Or the panel with the Wild Things and Max howling and dancing beneath a big, fat moon.

When Spike Jonze was a little kid - back when he was little Adam Spiegel of Bethesda, Md. - he latched on to Where the Wild Things Are, the story of misbehaving Max, sent to bed without his supper, tumbling into a land inhabited by horned, clawed, anarchic monsters. And Max, in his wolf's pajamas, becomes king of the Wild Things. "I would look at those pictures - where Max's bedroom turns into a forest - and there was something that felt like magic there," Jonze says about the treasured Maurice Sendak title, a 37-page, 338-word picture book first published in 1963.

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)

Can the Opera Company of Philadelphia do Wagner? One way to find out is to program H?nsel und Gretel, which the company performed Wednesday night for the first time in its three-plus decades. It's not Wagner, of course, but it's close. For the two title roles, it's constant sustained singing. Even the little aria for the Sandman, brief though it may be, is taxing in its way. It wasn't for nothing that the composer, Engelbert Humperdinck, sat at the feet of Wagner, and then, with this one great opera, reclaimed for his artform a measure of German pride.