Talking Pictures

Everything important is evident from the beginning. Maira Kalman surfaced first as an illustrator in 1987, with the irresistible “Stay Up Late.” Taking the David Byrne song as its text, “Stay Up Late” embodied Kalman’s signature themes--life’s giddy abundance, rules gleefully bent--though her own words weren’t on paper yet. No matter. It was already clear that she was the goods, an original, irrepressible force in the field of books that find their youngest admirers among the preliterate.

The very next year, Kalman’s own text joined her pictures, and her chief and enduring hero--Max, a genial beagle with pretensions to artistic glory--appeared on the scene in “Hey Willy, See the Pyramids.” His colorful and highly variegated career was further chronicled in “Max Makes a Million” (1990), the 1991 “Ooh-la-la (Max in Love)” (with a pink-gowned Parisian Dalmatian musician), and “Max in Hollywood, Baby” (1992), though in the vocation guide for dreamers, “Chicken Soup, Boots” (1993), he’s on sabbatical. Now, as Kalman’s latest effort, “Swami on Rye: Max in India,” hits the shops, her devotees seem to be rivaled in number by her imitators, none of whom can touch her for color (literally and metaphorically) and vitality.

Kalman’s painting belongs to a latter-day urban naif school. It has the simplicity, daring and panache of the art that children produce before they get intimidated by the local dictates of representation. The adult sophistication she brings to the style only makes it richer, rather than arch. Kalman is also a fervent colorist, and her printers do her proud, reproducing off-beat pastels and lavish jewel hues tempered by acid funkiness. Her idol, her lodestone, is Henri Matisse, though she’s not immune to Marc Chagall and lovingly quotes in passing such people as the young Pablo Picasso singing the blues and that suavely wistful colorist Marie Laurencin. Kalman’s imagery is complemented by an increasingly wacky use of typeface, which cannily links what’s seen with what’s said.

And what, you may want to know by now, are Kalman’s specific subjects? What does her imagination dwell on and elaborate? First off, art; next, foreign climes, with the corollary of running away from home. “Max,” Kalman tells us, the instant we meet him, “wanted to live in Paris and be a poet. In the evening, Max would tiptoe down the hall, with a suitcase, trying to sneak out of the house.” (He lives in cozy domesticity with Aunt Ida and Uncle Morris, otherwise childless, who have given their surname, Stravinsky, to their pet.) The secure nest you can count on returning to is another Kalman basic, and permits human youngsters as well as dogs with dreams to voyage out with impunity to the realms of adventure.

Kalman specializes in faraway places mythologized through a bundle of cliches: Japan, Paris, Hollywood, assimilated-Jewish New York and now India. Of these, the French capital registers most pungently, perhaps because Kalman has made a heady period in that city’s life her equivalent of heaven. For her, the glamour of Paris in the ‘20s is a kaleidoscopic vision that expands from the painters her work echoes to embrace (I choose these examples at random): the principles of Dada and surrealism, Gertrude Stein accompanied by one of her eternal poodles, Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, redolent of ethereal beauty and exoticism, and Josephine Baker’s banana bikini.

Kalman loves the home front and the home team with nearly tantamount devotion. She invites her reader to take for granted the haimish richness of a large, close-knit family, whose members’ virtues and peculiarities are enveloped in an atmosphere of warm, fragrant nostalgia, yet are too bizarre and spunky to encourage sentimentality (the scourge of art). Kalman pays homage to what I assume--with cause--is her own history: parents, siblings and a goodly portion of aunts, uncles, cousins and neighbors who are the constellations of a lucky child’s universe. Primarily, I’d guess, she’s inspired by her offspring: Lulu and Alexander (“the miniature midget”), who in turn keep alive in her the child she was--and blessedly remains.

Kalman’s minor subjects are engaging, too. The oddest things obsess her, and her obsession is contagious; you start viewing the world with her eyes. For instance, she’s got this thing about plaid. It appears, with deadpan naturalness, in clothes, particularly in the splendid rakish wardrobe of Lulu (a stand-in, surely, for the young Maira). It spills over to the spines of the books, each debonairly painted a different plaid, so you can pick out your favorite story from your stack of Kalmans even if you’re still too little to read the lettering. And then there are the “plaid people”--abundant in the population of her New York City. In two words Kalman describes and hymns the gloriously motley racial panorama of my home town. She’s similarly intrigued by--and intriguing on--the motif of twins and related multiplications. (See for yourself.)

A prime cause of Mairakalmania is the ebullient relationship the author-artist maintains between text and image. She sends you bouncing between scene and tale as if you were a Ping-Pong ball shuttled back and forth in an invigoratingly erratic rhythm. And lots of stuff happens in the pictures that’s not accounted for in the story, at least not explicitly, so your eyes are kept busy and happy. Actually, the main folks and events of the narrative aren’t necessarily prominent or even immediately apparent in the matching art. It’s fun to hunt for them, and correspondingly pleasurable to be sidetracked in the search.

Admittedly, Kalman’s texts aren’t quite as terrific as her pictures, but they’re plenty good. To my mind, these are the three best things about them: 1) They use words and expressions that you probably wouldn’t utter in socially ambitious situations yet are the natural idiom of kids and the more authentic class of grown-ups. “What’s that scary looking shack with those creepy monsters sticking out?” (the Cathedral of Notre Dame); 2) They play blithely with words, insouciantly assuming, by the way, that you have a smattering of the lingua francas Yiddish and French. 3) They refuse to be dumbed down. Merrily, defiantly, they draw on vocabulary the youngest members of the audience are unlikely to understand, though they’ll enjoy the sound of, say, pandemonium, and maybe, through context, intuit its meaning. This upper-level language neatly becomes an in-joke for older readers--of all ages.

Another fine thing about Kalman’s texts is that they present no problems and no moral--except for a gentle nudge in the direction of accepting human nuttiness. They’re not instructive in the dictatorial or saccharine modes that have consistently undermined literature for the young. These books, manifestly sprung from earthy realities, are in effect rampant flights of fancy. Outlandish is the adjective the big-shot reviewers light on, hoping to reconcile their disarmed delight with what they deem fit for the rising generation of a well-behaved bourgeoisie. The word is inappropriate, seeming to dismiss or attempt to control the forces from which Kalman’s work arises: a manic energy, very much like that of exuberant children; an instinctive sense that the rejection of authorized order allows serendipity to prevail; and a gaiety that is the outward mask of a profound joy.

Splendid though Kalman is, she has her lesser moments. The 1991 “Roarr: Calder’s Circus,” for instance, comes off suspiciously as a job of work. The photographed images of Alexander Calder’s ingenious, ramshackle super-toy and Kalman’s text--itself hobbled by informational obligations--fail to mesh. Yet Kalman rightly identifies with Calder; both are artists whose work reads as play.

An additional weak spot in Kalman’s oeuvre is, unfortunately, her newest book, “Swami on Rye.” Some of the painting in this Indian travel fantasy is the most gorgeous she’s ever done. And here her love and reverence for Matisse glows brighter than ever. Still, several of the illustrations--generally the jampacked vistas--don’t work. They’re muddled in composition, muddy in hue. And the typeface-gone-berserk that earlier contributed to the vivacity of the work is merely jumpy, knowingly with it, gimmicky looking, as if Kalman had become one of her copycats.

Here, too, a problem that only lurked in the margins of her previous books claims your attention. The portrayal of “foreign parts,” always based on cliches, but cliches presented with an endearing combination of affection and irony, now seems patronizing, if not downright insulting, to the natives. Has Kalman--God forbid! A Dieu ne plaise! Z’ul Gutt upp-heetin! --exhausted her initial impulses and decided to stay in the game, feebly counterfeiting herself, for the fame and money she once earned justly? All too often, the best part of a career is that first, unconscious (or, at any rate, unself-conscious) surge.

The Max series / Written and illustrated by Maira Kalman

HEY WILLY, SEE THE PYRAMIDS (Viking: $15, hardcover; $4.95, paperback)

MAX MAKES A MILLION (Viking: $15.99)

OOH-LA-LA (Max in Love) (Viking: $15)

MAX IN HOLLYWOOD, BABY (Viking: $15)

SWAMI ON RYE (Max in India) (Viking: $14.99)

****

Also written and illustrated by Maira Kalman:

CHICKEN SOUP, BOOTS (Viking: $15)

ROARR! Calder’s Circus (Doubleday: $16.95)

SAYONARA, MRS. KACKLEMAN (Viking: $14.95)

STAY UP LATE. By David Byrne. Illustrated by Maira Kalman (Viking: $14.95, hardcover; $5.99 , paperback)