A Child’s Eye View

If you were a reader as a child, you may still remember the muscular realism of N.C. Wyeth’s painted illustrations in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island.” Or, Disney notwithstanding, it may be John Tenniel’s defining images in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” or Ernest H. Shepard’s fine-lined whimsies in A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh” that resonate in your memory.

If you were asked if such works were “art,” would you say yes? Would you say the same of Theodor Geisel’s signature Dr. Seuss drawings, or Chris Van Allsburg’s “Jumanji” fantasies?

The fact is that illustration in general is held by purists to be something of a stepchild of the fine arts--which makes children’s book illustration by far the humble orphan. It’s commercial, it’s ostensibly aimed at juveniles and it usually exists as an adjunct to another art form--literature.

But in recent years there has been a growing interest by museums, dealers and collectors in children’s book art, demonstrated by escalating sale prices for original works and recent exhibitions by serious art museums.

Does this simply reflect adult nostalgia and our proven willingness to indulge the child within? Or does it indicate an increasing respect for a different aesthetic?

Perhaps both.

Opening Wednesday at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art is “Picturing Childhood: Illustrated Children’s Books From University of California Collections, 1550-1990.” Presented by the museum and UCLA’s Grunwald Center for Graphic Arts, it is an eye-filling display of more than 300 books, original works on paper, old toys, games and even 19th century pop-up books, all in remarkably fine condition.

The exhibition traces the social and technological evolution of children’s books--mostly English and American, where the collection’s strengths are--beginning with strictly educational and moral instruction primers, and with those adult classics that were accessible to children in the 16th century, such as “Aesop’s Fables.”

The main focus, however, is on the artists who decorated and interpreted the written word.

“One of the reasons that we as an art museum are undertaking this exhibition is to show how artists can influence book illustration and, I hope, to show a sense of the progression from a time when not only were the artists unknown, but illustration was not seen as an integral component of a book,” said Cynthia Burlingham, associate director and senior curator of the Grunwald Center, who co-curated the exhibition with the center’s associate curator Karen Mayers and Dr. Patricia Waldron.

“Yes, illustration is still seen as a kind of lesser-ranked medium,” she said, “but I think this exhibition shows that we don’t have to draw lines; there’s a lot of intersection.”

Works on display range from rudimentary wood-cuts by anonymous 16th century artists and “chapbooks” (cheap books), which proliferated in the 18th century, to Gustave Dore’s 19th century wood engravings and work by 20th century icons Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak.

The images also reflect technical innovations and such art movements of the 19th century as Pre-Raphaelitism, Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau. These found fertile ground in the burgeoning popularity of the picture book, in the varying designs of such artists as Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway and Randolph Caldecott, for whom children’s book illustration’s highest honor is named. (The Caldecott Award, given annually by the American Library Assn., is for “the most distinguished American picture book for children.”)

“The whole idea of an important artist who becomes an important illustrator, the whole idea of bridging the gap between fine arts and illustration really starts to enter into it in the late 18th and early 19th centuries with the works of [English caricaturist] George Cruikshank,” Burlingham said.

“So, clearly you have some accomplished book illustration before, but what comes in the mid-19th century is this great influx of important artists doing important children’s book illustration.”

The importance of such work is very much on the mind of art historian Nick Clark, who co-curated the recent exhibition, “Myth, Magic and Mystery: One Hundred Years of American Children’s Book Illustration,” for the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va.

“The premise of our exhibition,” Clark said, “was that we felt the time had come to recognize children’s book illustration as [fine art], although there are still a lot of people out there who are reluctant to accord it that status.”

The Chrysler received the support of the Henry Luce Foundation, based on what it saw as the “significance of this project to the study of American art,” Clark said.

“Not only was it nice to have their financial support, but we felt that that made a very strong philosophical statement.”

Artist Barry Moser, whose work is featured in both the Chrysler and the Armand Hammer exhibitions, puts it somewhat differently. “Illustration isn’t the object, the object is the book. And books,” he stressed, “certainly rank with painting and sculpture and architecture [as fine art].”

Moser, a National Book Award winner whose preferred medium is the venerable tradition of hand engraving, has illustrated limited editions of “Moby-Dick,” “The Divine Comedy of Dante” and “Alice in Wonderland.” Children’s book illustration’s low regard is “absolutely nothing but simple blind prejudice,” he said.

“Just compare the federal government’s budgets for weapons systems that we don’t need to that for education, which we do. We undervalue children. A lot of people think if someone is doing a painting for a children’s audience, that painting itself is only slightly above the level of a child.”

Yet Lois Sarkisian, owner of the Every Picture Tells a Story gallery on Beverly Boulevard, points to a “definite” change in buyers since the gallery opened in 1989, specializing in original children’s book art. (As does its nearest competitor, Storyopolis, co-founded in 1995 by Sarkisian’s former partner, Abbie Phillips.)

“It has broadened. A lot of people now buy intellectually as well as emotionally. I have museum collectors now and there are auctions that support the prices.”

The gallery has sold Moser works for more than $4,500--works that “used to sell for $1,000,” Sarkisian said. “Hilary Knight will get $6,000 for an ‘Eloise’ painting, and the last Chris Van Allsburg painting I sold, from ‘Polar Express,’ went for $40,000.”

At art auction house Christie’s in New York, Francis Wahlgren, head of Christie’s books and manuscripts department, has also noticed a climb in prices. Recent sales of children’s illustrated books “far exceeded our expectations and their estimates,” he said.

And, although Maurice Sendak’s much-lauded book art is housed at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, Christie’s has had some $20,000 and $30,000 Sendak drawings, while a December sale of children’s books illustrated by Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham and Kay Nielsen “did double the high estimate,” Wahlgren said.

He pointed to dealer excitement over Christie’s upcoming Beatrix Potter collection sale on Wednesday. “There are a lot of dealers now in children’s book art,” he said.

Michael Hague, whose illustrations for “Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” are part of the Hammer exhibition, is a collector himself. He’s noticed a difference in the treatment of children’s book art, both from publishers and collectors.

“I think it coincided with publishers’ newfound respect for children’s books,” he said. “It wasn’t too long ago that the children’s book section was considered a dead-end in publishing. When sales began increasing dramatically in the ‘70s and ‘80s, it became the way to move up in publishing.”

But are increased sales indicative of a climb up in the art world hierarchy, or is children’s book art just gaining higher-end status in the buy-and-sell world of collectibles?

Like Hague, Helen Younger, co-proprietor of Aleph-bet Books Inc., a company described by Wahlgren as a “cutting-edge dealer in children’s books and art,” judges that growing interest in illustration goes hand in hand with the increased interest in children’s books.

“They’re bringing very huge prices at auction,” she said, “and I think that brings this art more into the public eye. Even now I don’t think I could say that it is art. Someone can be an illustrator but not really be regarded as an artist. There are people who will separate the two fields.”

Indeed, Hilton Kramer, editor and publisher of the culture journal the New Criterion, calls much of today’s children’s book illustration, “a parody of fine art, of avant-garde art.”

“There’s no real substitute for real narrative drawing,” he said, referring to what he calls a “period prejudice” in the publishing industry. “At every level now, people are mad for color.”

Still, Kramer adds, “it’s not really a question of hierarchy, so much as it is the quality of the individual work. He points to the “crossover aspects” of Sendak’s career, for which the artist “has probably been taken more seriously by people outside the children’s book world than any of his contemporaries.”

Whether children’s book art, in all its abundance of technique and mood, should be or is being taken seriously as fine art, however, has little bearing on one given: the evocative pleasure it brings to admirers, young and old.

At the Armand Hammer show, Burlingham pointed out, that pleasure can be found in discovering the 18th century origins of “Little Goody Two Shoes,” or in seeing what is regarded as the very first children’s picture book: John Amos Comenius’ “Orbis Sensualium Pictus” (1658). It can be found in observing 400 years of artists’ interpretations of the alphabet, or 200 years of “Cinderellas,” beginning with Charles Perrault’s 17th century rendition, one of several classics shown in various editions for comparison.

“It’s amazing so much has survived,” Burlingham said, “especially since its only recently that children’s book art has been considered important and valuable.”

The show’s 20th century charms include Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, the fantastic fairyland of Arthur Rackham, Moser’s bold, black line “Alice” engravings, or the painted exotica of Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielsen, including 19 watercolors Nielsen created for an unpublished book.

Throughout the exhibition, videos will display pages other than those in the necessarily protected, static enclosures, and children and adults can indulge their urge to touch the treasure trove in a hands-on “family activity room,” with trade versions of many of the editions available for handling, including pop-up books.

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* “Picturing Childhood,” UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. Wednesday through June 29. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission, $4.50, with discounts for senior citizens and students; free to museum members and children ages 17 and younger. Thursdays free from 6 to 9 p.m. (310) 443-7000; TTY: (310) 443-7094.