A Blog of Bosh

Why is it de rigueur for members of the avant-garde to try to stump us? Think of the Surrealists and the Dadaists, with their deadpan refusal to make sense; the authors of the French nouveau roman, with their poker-faced descriptions of trivial things; and the inexplicable mathematical games of Raymond Queneau. The present-day heirs of this tendency are conceptual artists, with their penchant for inscrutable brainteasers. When did ”experimental” become synonymous with ”mystifying”? Mark Ford’s smart new biography, ”Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams” (Cornell University, $35), hints at a novel answer: with Roussel (1877-1933), a strange and possibly mad French poet and fantasist whose following has included many of the most influential avant-gardists of the 20th century. Roussel’s power is that for them he functioned as a kind of proto-Andy Warhol. They could never be sure if he was pulling their leg.

The New York Times Book Review

Les illustrateurs jeunesse
Cette sélection présente un nombre important d’illustrateurs et d’auteurs-illustrateurs pour la jeunesse, classès par ordre alphabétique, par nationalité et par époque. Cette liste est régulièrement mise à jour. Elle signale les artistes confirmés mais aussi ceux moins connus. Chaque entrée introduit à une biographie de l’illustrateur, une bibliographie, à une série d’illustrations de l’artiste, ainsi qu’à des liens éventuels.
Régulièrement, de nouvelles images, visibles en format vignette, sont intégrées à cette base.
[A very complete database.]

Picturing Childhood: Illustrated Children’s Books from University of California Collections, 1550�1990
Welcome to Picturing Childhood, an online version of the catalog produced to accompany an exhibition held at UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Los Angeles, April 16 through June 29, 1997. The catalog was published by the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts and the Department of Special Collections at the University Research Library, UCLA.
[This exhibition seems to completely ignore Lear’s production.]

University of Delaware: WORLD OF THE CHILD – Two Hundred Years of Children’s Books
An exhibition at the Hugh M. Morris Library
University of Delaware Library
February 17 – June 12, 1998

Exhibit Essay for Hey Diddle Diddle: A History of Children’s Book Illustration
An exhibit featuring books from the University Library’s Special Collections, Multicultural Children’s Literature Curriculum Collection, and Private Collections.
McHenry Library
University of California, Santa Cruz
January 3 – March 19, 2001

A comic strip that sang
If Walt Kelly had written “regular” books, he might be recognized today as one of the finest satirists of the 20th century. As a wizard of wordplay he might well be mentioned, if not in the same breath with Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, then in the very next.
But he didn’t. He drew a comic strip, which was then, as now, a low estate, and most of the books he produced were compilations of his strip, “Pogo,” featuring Pogo Possum, Albert the Alligator and a whole raft of animals inhabiting Kelly’s highly imaginative rendering of Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp. And so Kelly, while not exactly an obscure figure, is remembered primarily by a fiercely loyal band of enthusiasts.
Chicago Sunday Times

Manas: Culture, Indian Cinema- Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray was born into an illustrious family in Calcutta in 1921. His grandfather, Upendra Kishore Ray-Chaudhary, was a publisher, musician and the creator of children�s literature in Bengali. His father, Sukumar Ray, was a noted satirist and India’s first writer of nonsense rhymes, akin to the nonsense verse of Edward Lear.
Does anybody know anything of this Sukumar Ray?