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Childhood Dreams: The Wondrous World of Winsor McCay
| Article
# : |
14582 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1988 |
1,576 Words |
| Author
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Elliott Stein
Elliott Stein is a film historian, critic, and writer
currently living in New York. |
Winsor McCay was one of America's greatest cartoonists, a master of both the comic strip and the animated cartoon. He didn't invent these forms, but while they were still in their infancy, he helped develop them into lasting popular art through his creative genius. A full-length biography of McCay has been long overdue: John Canemaker's handsomely illustrated and gracefully written book superbly fills the bill.
McCay was this country's first auteur animator. His masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland, is simply the most beautiful comic strip ever drawn, a surreal fantasy filled with lovely and often disturbing images, created in the sinuous, flowering lines of the highly decorative international Art Nouveau style popular at the turn of the century, and blocked with kinetic, near-cinematic narrative paneling.
Household World
In 1966, When McCay's work was featured in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nemo was singled out for high praise by the New York Times' art critic, John Canaday. Yet even today, the artist's name is far from a household world, except among cartoon aficionados and animation buffs. One ardent fan is the brilliant illustrator Maurice Sendak. In his foreword to Canemaker's book, Sendak writes: "My book In the Night Kitchen is, in part, an homage to Winsor McCay. He and I serve the same master, our child selves. We both draw, not on the literal memory of childhood, but on the emotional memory of its stress and urgency. And neither of us forgot our childhood dreams."
McCay passed a none-too-happy childhood in a
... (1998 of 9485 Characters)
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