ART REVIEW : The Rest of the Story : Pictures can kindle imaginations young and old, and the works of some illustrators tell more than the tales in children’s books.

When I was a child, my parents rarely took me to art museums, but they showered me with books.

In a way, the illustrations were my museum. Some struck me as ravishingly beautiful (like the vibrantly detailed paintings--influenced by Russian folk art and Art Nouveau--in the “My Book House” series); others conjured imaginary or far-off worlds (the John Tenniel illustrations for “Through the Looking Glass,” Wanda Gag’s “Millions of Cats”).

There were comforting illustrations (Clement Hurd’s cheerful, color-saturated illustrations for “Goodnight Moon”) and frightening ones (I could barely stand to look at the horrific pastel drawing of wild-eyed Grace Poole tipped into my father’s Heritage Edition copy of “Jane Eyre”).

These days, when I pick out birthday and Christmas books for my 6-year-old niece, I pay special attention to the illustrations.

Even though times have changed--what with TV show tie-ins and package deals involving large stuffed animals--I look for some of the same qualities that attracted my younger self: attention to detail, a good sense of color (neither garish nor saccharine) and an air of wonder and fantasy that retains a plausible connection with real life.

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Children’s books illustrated by artists known outside the world of illustration are rare. One that crossed my desk recently is “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me,” with a warmly idiomatic text about everyday courage by poet Maya Angelou and paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, $14.95).

The 16 paintings span 1981-84, prime years for the artist, who died in 1988 at 27. They incorporate his trademark stick figures with toothy, mask-like faces, various scribbled texts and occasional explosions of hot color.

Although fairly well matched to the imagery evoked by the text, there is no getting around the fact that--despite the untutored, childish look of some of the imagery--these paintings were never intended for children.

Only a few of the images--such as the jaunty crowned dinosaur on the cover, from “Pez Dispenser” (1984)--resemble the bold but clear and appealing illustrations usually found in picture books.

Most of the paintings are fragmentary and erratic in a way that makes sense artistically (there is an internal logic to the work) and culturally (life is like that) but ignores children’s craving for order and stability.

My childhood self would have said “Yecchh!” to the chaotic nervous energy of paintings such as “Boy and Dog on a Johnnypump,” reproduced on page 11 to illustrate the words “Bad dogs barking loud.”

I’m ready to concede that imagery a suburban child in the late 1950s might have dismissed as an ugly mess may speak more urgently to a contemporary kid familiar with violence on TV and in real life, not to mention graffiti and high-pitched contemporary commercial imagery.

The idea of linking two notable black artists was a good one. But although editor Sara Jane Boyers provided capsule biographies of the poet and artist, they are clearly intended for adults.

A simplified (and, for drug-addled Basquiat, sanitized) children’s version might have been been a good idea; even bowdlerized biographies of famous people can be inspiring to a child searching for role models.

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Another recent venture in offering art reproductions to children is “Talking to the Sun: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems for Young People,” selected by poets Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell (Metropolitan Museum of Art, $22.50).

The poems are strong and fresh (poets include such choices as Frank O’Hara, Rainer Maria Rilke and a teen-aged David Shapiro), and the couplings of image and text are truly inspired. (Unlike the Basquiat book--in which painting titles are relegated to a hard-to-read list on the “credits” page--names of artists and works appear alongside the text and reproduction.)

The images come from the museum’s vast holdings of Western art as well as Persian miniatures, Native American art, Chinese painting and African and Egyptian sculpture.

Some pairings seem perfect, if obvious (such as Carl Sandburg’s “Fog” and Edward J. Steichen’s moody, gum-bichromate photograph, “The Flatiron”). Other couplings, such as Philippe Soupault’s “Sporting Goods” (“Brave as a postage stamp/he went his way . . . “) and Morris Louis’ “Alpha-Phi” (bright trickles of color running diagonally across a bare canvas) are equally perfect and utterly unexpected.

For the postmodern generation, Lane Smith’s “The Happy Hocky Family” (Viking, $13.99) is both hip and endearing. The tiny vignettes give irony and black humor a perky, childlike spin (“Today was Henry’s day to do the dishes. Can you guess how many dishes this many pieces make?”). Pet ants escape into the kitchen; Grandma comes and stinks up the house with perfume; the lullaby Holly sings to her doll wakes up her tired father.

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Printed on oatmeal-colored paper, the spare, cheery illustrations combine flat shapes of red, black and pale yellow with imitation patterning, product labels and bits of newsprint. The characters all have cartoon-like round faces with stick-on features, and they live in a flat, simple world with just as many objects (or crawly creatures) as they need to trip them up at any given moment.

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One of the loveliest picture books I’ve seen for very young children is Ed Young’s “Seven Blind Mice” (Philomel Books, $16.95), a version of the parable about the blind mice who each have a different erroneous idea about the identity of an elephant. Young, who was born in Tientsin, China, produces vividly hued images with large, elegant silhouettes that dovetail with the simple text.

When the Green Mouse perches on the elephant’s tail, for example, it appears as a large, curving piece of fleecy, wrinkled gray paper on a black background. The mouse thinks he’s resting on a snake--visualized on the next page as a flat, translucent emerald-colored creature with a thumbtack eye and Chinese dragon-style jaws.

The exquisite purity of the images might keep a bored parent off autopilot and serve as the springboard for a child’s own games and fantasies.

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Maurice Sendak’s new children’s book, “We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and Guy” (HarperCollins, $20)--an updated interpretation of two Mother Goose rhymes--has been the target of much book-review-page controversy in recent weeks.

To be sure, it isn’t from quite the same universe as the beloved “A Hole Is to Dig” from 1952 (with Ruth Krauss, HarperCollins paperback, $3.95) or even “Where the Wild Things Are” from 1963 (HarperCollins paperback, $4.95).

But times change. And the great thing about Sendak is that he has figured how to incorporate the real world of sadness, fear and poverty in a picture book stocked with his usual crew of lovably squat, round, big-toed figures with expressive faces and painted in subtle, sensitive shades of blue, rose, lavender and yellow.

Much has been made of the homeless children with bald heads (surely a sign of AIDS, several reviewers have noted), the clothing fashioned from newspapers with upscale ads or recession news and Sendak’s bitter view of the Greed Decade (rapacious rats in diamond-patterned robes win one of the bald kids in a game of cards, as Trump Tower looms in the background).

But the overarching theme is love of one’s fellow creatures, and the narrative is driven by the sort of satisfying physical retribution found in Saturday morning cartoons.

Two young toughs who initially scorn homeless children change their minds and become the protector of a little black boy. (“. . . And they found a little boy / With one black eye / Come says Jack let’s hit him on the head / No says Guy let’s buy him some bread.”) A giant white cat dispatches the hapless rodents and frees the kittens they stole.

Rather than conclude with the image of Jack, Guy, the child and the kittens asleep on an accommodating bald moon, Sendak brings the whole crew down to earth on the last page, which returns to the urban encampment where the tale started.

Although he shows all but one character cozily asleep--the comforting ending of so many children’s books--they are still homeless. Without preaching or resorting to shock imagery, Sendak raises issues to stir the heart of any thoughtful child.