Happy Birthday, Maurice Sendak!
June 10, 1928 – May 8, 2012
Maurice
was never interested in supplying children with momentary distractions
or reliable soporifics; he wanted to make rich, complex, even dangerous
art for them. He risked everything and dared anything, even failure, to
uncover truth. He pushed at the boundaries of his form to expand its
expressive capabilities, its capacity for generating meaning. He was
protean, and over the years, his books became stranger, darker, more
complex and more magnificent. He was a very serious artist. With a depth
of feeling and intensity that might seem odd in an author and
illustrator of children's books, Maurice believed in art.
His grateful readers and adoring friends loved him because he told us the truth; he warned us, in book after book, that death divides the living from the loved, and also, impossibly, that love lasts even when life doesn't. Do we believe him? Somehow, through some potent magic he possessed, we do.
His grateful readers and adoring friends loved him because he told us the truth; he warned us, in book after book, that death divides the living from the loved, and also, impossibly, that love lasts even when life doesn't. Do we believe him? Somehow, through some potent magic he possessed, we do.
-from an article by Tony Kushner
published in The Guardian, December 22, 2012
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