From Illustration to Fine Art

Time was when children’s books were mostly about bunnies and spiders and billy goats, and the pictures were mostly pastel-hued and nondescript. Those days are gone.

“There is now represented, under this umbrella of children’s books, basically every school of art, from avant-garde imagery to the primitive to impressionistic,” says Abbie Phillips, children’s book aficionado and entrepreneur.

Original art from children’s books is increasingly being exhibited and sold as fine art--and commanding prices that can reach into five figures--in bookstores and in galleries such as the one Phillips co-founded two years ago in Los Angeles, Every Picture Tells a Story. This October, another gallery for children’s-book art opened as part of the new Books of Wonder in Beverly Hills.

“We specifically set out to do something new with the art,” Phillips says, “to present it as a fine art, to knock at that brick wall that divides illustration and fine art.”

The idea of selling the pictures was not new; children’s-book illustrators have been privately selling their originals for many years. But only in about the past decade have these artworks found their way into the commercial fine-art market, according to professionals in the field.

“It’s part of the evolution of the way that we view children’s books,” says longtime children’s-book collector Michael Cart, retired head of the Beverly Hills Public Library. Cart directs the art gallery at Books of Wonder. “Around the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, the academic community began recognizing that children’s literature was a viable body of literature (and) began giving serious research and critical attention to children’s books.”

At that time, libraries were the big buyers of children’s books. But as government funding for libraries shrank, publishers saw their sales fall and “a retail market sprang into being,” Cart says.

To appeal to that market, publishers began putting out books with a richer, more glamorous look.

“Because publishers were giving a new emphasis to picture books, young artists and illustrators were encouraged to enter the field, because suddenly there was an expanding marketplace for their work,” Cart says. “This led, in turn, to the happy creation of what is now an honest-to-goodness golden age of children’s-book illustration.”

Take, for example, the work of William Joyce, author-illustrator of such books as “Dinosaur Bob and His Adventures With the Family Lazardo” and “George Shrinks.” Joyce’s originals are among the better sellers at Every Picture, Phillips says.

A painter before he began illustrating children’s books, Joyce says he has always considered his children’s book pictures to be fine art.

“I never felt like I was really doing art until I started doing children’s books,” he says. “I was looking for something, and I never felt my art quite reached what I was looking for until, by accident, I married the ideas of these kinds of odd, Gothic-looking images I had running around in my head with a narrative form. And all of a sudden, everything felt great. . . . Everything I know about composition and color and mood, and all the classical education that I may have had or soaked up, goes gurgling into those illustrations. Every movie I’ve seen, every story I’ve loved, everything that excites me come together in that one form.”

Maurice Sendak, author-illustrator of the hugely popular “Where the Wild Things Are” and many other books, is widely acknowledged as the master in his field. He maintains that the recognition of children’s-book illustrations as art is long overdue.

“When I was young,” Sendak says, “fine art meant you cut your ear off, or you died of starvation before the age of 34. Commercial artists got fat and sleek and smoked cigars and made a lot of money. So there was this contempt for commercial art, and illustration was commercial art.”

But recently, it seems buyers of all stripes are snapping it up for their walls.

Who buys children’s-book illustrations?

“Everybody,” says Peter Glassman, co-owner of Books of Wonder. “I’ve never found a common denominator except they love them. College students, artists, doctors, lawyers, dentists . . . basically anybody with the economic wherewithal to buy.” To that list, Phillips adds “librarians and parents and fine-art collectors” as well as “people that are creative in the Hollywood community.”

Many buyers, in fact, are not even familiar with the book that the pictures come from, Glassman says.

“When people are buying a piece of art to put on their wall, they are a lot more conscious of it as a piece of art than as a representation of a book,” Glassman says.

Glassman has watched the market develop for more than a decade. His first Books of Wonder store opened in New York in 1980 (he now has a second store there), selling original illustrations along with children’s books.

Other galleries have come and gone since then, most of them part of some larger enterprise. At least two galleries in the nation now are devoted exclusively to art from children’s books: Every Picture Tells a Story, and the Elizabeth Stone Gallery in Birmingham, Mich. Both opened just over two years ago.

The appeal of children’s-book art is hard to explain, illustrators and gallery operators agree.

“I think there’s something so primal and powerful about a fine children’s book. In those few pages, they suggest long-forgotten triumphs and agonies and dreams,” illustrator Joyce says.

“Childhood is such a haze for everybody who’s a grown-up. Once you get tall, I think our society encourages us to forget all about what we were like as children. The fact of the matter is that we’re just taller versions of our childhood selves.

“When we see a book like ‘Wild Things,’ it triggers long-forgotten memories of what it was like back then to be short, and nothing was made to your size. The world was made for giants. Car doors were so hard to get in and out of. You never knew what was on top of the kitchen counter. You were too little to see. And those books take you back to somewhere in that realm.”

So strong is the appeal that consumers are willingly spending thousands of dollars for the original illustrations. A page of Ludwig Bemelmans’ classic “Madeline,” by contrast, commands $15,000 or more. Original art by Chris van Allsburg (author-illustrator of “The Polar Express”) or Don Wood (illustrator of “The Napping House”), Phillips says, can sell for about $20,000. The majority of pieces fall into the $500-to-$2,500 range, the gallery owners agree.

Whether children’s-book illustrations will prove to be a good art investment is a matter of some debate. “This market is growing at a rate faster than the general art market,” Phillips observes, adding that she has seen prices double yearly for the past four years. “I think that anyone who invests in any form of art should love the piece. But it’s definitely collectible as an investment. Every sign points to the fact that it is.”

But Glassman says: “What I always tell customers is, I don’t believe in buying art as an investment. . . . The reason to buy art is because you love the imagery, you want to look at it every day, and you want to make it a part of your life. If it goes up in value--how nice.”