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Wild New Ways: Maurice Sendak's Animal Kingdom

Presented by Rosenbach Museum and Library at Rosenbach Museum and Library

August 24, 2011-January 8, 2012

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When Wild New Ways premiered at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming, Harper’s Bazaar hailed it as one of the “hot exhibitions” of the season.

From common pets to mythical beasts, nearly all of the 90-some books illustrated by Maurice Sendak include animals of some kind. This exhibition will showcase the domestic things and, well, Wild Things among Sendak’s many illustrated creatures. This veritable bestiary includes dogs, farm animals and well-behaved bears, as well as those famous Wild Things and other untamed beasts and monsters. The 30 original illustrations on view show the range of styles with which Sendak captures the textures of fur, feathers, and scales, such as his precise pen and ink drawings for The Bat-Poet and the soft watercolors of Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present.

Visitors can glimpse Sendak’s sketch of apes at the Central Park Zoo from the 1950s and read an early draft of Where the Wild Things Are in which a wolfish Max teaches some monsters “wild new ways.” Together, the pictures not only show Sendak’s fascination with an array of wildlife, but provide insight into the artist’s liberating ideas of “wildness” itself.