Not What the Doctor Ordered : In an Uneven Exhibit, ‘Seuss Is Loose’--but He’s Not as Fresh or Fun as He Should Be

In 1933, 29-year-old advertising man Theodor Seuss Geisel drew the Moto-raspus, a long-necked creature with a bashful smile and deadly grip, whose sole reason for existence was to show what happens when you didn’t use Essolube 5-Star Motor Oil.

Twenty-two years later, Seuss lopped off his last name and added an unearned “Dr.”--the remnant of a ploy to appease his father after dropping out of a graduate program at Oxford University--to introduce another useful creature, the Cat in the Hat. The suavely mischievous feline single-handedly solved the problem of how to produce a lively narrative with a 225-word vocabulary. In the process, children’s literature acquired a new look and the good doctor’s name became a household word.

The Cat and other Seuss inventions are the subjects of “Seuss Is Loose! Original Drawings From Four Classics” at the Laguna Art Museum Gallery at South Coast Plaza (through May 5), a disappointingly uncreative and unfocused exhibition based on Seuss’ sketches for “Horton Hears a Who!” (1954), “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” (1957), “The Cat in the Hat Comes Back” (1958) and “Happy Birthday to You” (1959).

Like most brilliant inventions for children, the Dr. Seuss characters retain their appeal for grown-ups. For this viewer, one of the intriguing aspects of the drawings is the way Seuss translated the Roaring ‘20s sophistication of his young manhood, and the sort of fantastic visualization he had used years earlier to animate ad campaigns and the covers of Judge, a humor magazine.

The Cat’s debonair white gloves and red bow-tie, his cross-legged pose, his elegant thumb-and-forefinger grip on his doffed cap, the way he fastidiously holds his tail above the snow as he skis into the lives of the nervous children in “The Cat in the Hat Comes Back”--these are the habits of a boulevardier, circa 1925, exaggerated to the point of parody.

Amusingly, the secret substance that the Cat uses to clean up after a juggling trick went awry is “something called VOOM.” As if mocking the silly symbolism of old-fashioned ads for household cleaners, the capitalized letters VOOM are shown attacking a flock of pink spirals. (Typical Seuss touch: pink dirt.)

The exhibition also includes cells from Chuck Jones’ animated versions of “Grinch” and “Horton.” Granted, these TV specials were approved by Seuss, and Jones is a local guy (he lives in Corona del Mar). But the magical thing about Seuss is that the characters on his pages are already animated.

Seuss’ serpentine line rockets through his books, elongating body parts, turning hills into Everests, making the simple action of shaking out a bedspread look like a Chinese ribbon dance. Liquids splash with baroque exuberance, and solids ripple and stretch as if they were made of rubber.

*

Objects are constantly multiplying and stacking on top of each other, as if rhyming with the singsong repetition of the book’s language (which the author also stretches--into nonsense words). Seuss’ imagery and plots involve a near-constant state of gravity- and imagination-defying expansion, defying the cozy norms of the 1950s.

No wonder the X Generation has fallen in love with Seuss all over again. His images recall both the innocent thrills of childhood and the spacey unreality of a drug trip. For latchkey kids of the past two decades, the idea of cool, unsupervised high jinks with a debonair weirdo must have sounded almost plausible. The Cat in the Hat’s towering red-and-white headgear, worn at many a rave, has become a symbol of happy anarchy.

In a year when Esprit, just a few doors away at the mall, is selling sweatshirts emblazoned with the Cat’s likeness, it seems odd that the show doesn’t acknowledge the special niche Seuss characters have in X-er lore.

Obviously, museum education curator Margaret Maynard didn’t set out to duplicate “Dr. Seuss From Then to Now,” a full-scale 1986 retrospective at the San Diego Museum. But by failing to work up a fresh contextual interpretation of the material, she missed a great opportunity to ally museum education with some of the concerns of curators of contemporary art.

Even on its own terms, as a straightforward treat for children and their parents, “Seuss Is Loose” is disappointing. Because the book paste-ups are already in almost-finished form, they don’t give grown-ups a sense of Seuss’ creative process. How much insight do you really get by seeing the word “goo” replaced by “mess,” or the removal of a few extraneous zigzags?

More significant is the contrast between Seuss’ low-tech drawings (pasted-on bits of paper with typed verses, graphite lines blackened so firmly they shine, a painfully limited range of colored pencils and markers) and the slick look of the “kiddie” portion of the show.

Terminals equipped with a CD-ROM that uses Seuss characters as an alphabet-teaching tool demonstrate how easily genius spawns pabulum when there’s a buck to be made.

*

In the end, the best parts of the show are the Seuss books themselves, amply supplied in an inviting children’s book nook at the rear of the exhibition.

It’s a good bet that the chief reason for mounting this show was to use Seuss’ popularity as a hook to attract more casual visitors and their kids to the museum--viewers buoyed up (as pages of positive comments in the gallery visitors’ book attest) by seeing the familiar images.

So why not examine Seussiana as a cultural phenomenon, a strangely apt mingling of sensibilities from different eras? We should look to our museums to provide not only good visual materials but new ways of looking at them.

* “Seuss Is Loose! Original Drawings From Four Classics,” at the Laguna Art Museum Gallery at South Coast Plaza, 3333 Bristol St., Suite 1000, Costa Mesa. Hours: Monday through Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Thursday and Friday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Through May 5. Free. (714) 662-3366.