Where the Precious Things Are: Maurice Sendak's Art Collection to Be Auctioned

New York Times

16-04-2025

A pre-eminent writer and illustrator of children's books, Maurice Sendak, who died in 2012 at 83, was also a passionate art collector. The two pursuits were intertwined. 'I'm not a collector who collects just for collecting,' he said in 1984. 'Things have to refer back or give me some turn-on in my work.'
On June 10, at Christie's in New York, the Maurice Sendak Foundation is auctioning a hefty sampling of the treasures he accumulated, and some of his own drawings, the auction house announced on Wednesday. (An online auction will run from May 29 to June 12.) The funds will go to maintain the foundation's house in Ridgefield, Conn., where he lived for more than 40 years, and the programs there.
Still filled with Sendak's belongings and looking much the way it did during his lifetime, the house annually hosts four illustrators who are awarded four-week residencies to study his work. Sendak established the program two years before his death, a time when he was struggling with severe bouts of a lifelong recurrent depression. 'It really revitalized him,' says Lynn Caponera, executive director of the foundation, who knew Sendak from the time she was a young girl. 'He was beginning to feel not relevant. It helped him get back interested in publishing.'
With Jonathan Weinberg, the curator and director of research at the foundation, who also was a child when he first met Sendak, Caponera selected works for the auction that she says were duplicated by other pieces or were too valuable and delicate to store and display in Ridgefield.
'Things of mine when I'm no longer in this world, I intend to leave in my will that they be auctioned off again,' Sendak said in an interview. 'I don't want to leave them to anybody because I had so much fun getting them. I'd like them all dispersed. They don't 'belong' to anybody. You don't 'own' those things. You just have possession of them during that brief period of time you're here.'
Sendak began collecting in the late 1950s. After the huge commercial successes of 'Where the Wild Things Are,' published in 1963, and 'In the Night Kitchen,' in 1970, he could afford to purchase more expensive things. He also traded his original art for books and drawings held by Justin G. Schiller, the leading dealer in children's literature. It was thanks to Schiller that he obtained his two most valuable artworks: first printings of William Blake's hand-illustrated books, 'Songs of Innocence' and 'Songs of Experience,' each estimated to fetch between $1 million and $1.5 million at auction.
Asked who was the greatest writer for children, Sendak once said, 'William Blake is my favorite — and of course, 'The Songs of Innocence' and 'The Songs of Experience' tell you all about this: what it is to be a child — not childish, but a child inside your adult self — and how much better a person you are for being such.' He kept his rare editions of the two books in the drop desk of his bedroom, which is in the original part of the house, dating to 1790.
To the left of his bed, matted but unframed, hung a beautiful Blake watercolor illustrating Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' The drawing, which Christie's estimates will bring $400,000 to $600,000, depicts Titania and Oberon resting on two white lilies. 'For Maurice, having something the artist actually touched in his hands was something he really wanted,' Weinberg said. Because he savored having these valuable works nearby, Sendak ignored any quibbles about whether he was protecting them adequately. 'It's not air-conditioned,' Caponera said of his bedroom. 'It's not a safe place to keep them.'
When he began collecting, Sendak couldn't afford Blake. Instead, he went after the work of Samuel Palmer, a younger Blake acolyte. Sendak owned three versions — one is being sold — of Palmer's moody Romantic etching, 'The Lonely Tower,' in which two youths gaze at a light shining in a hilltop tower against a star-studded nighttime sky and a crescent moon. It is heavily cross hatched in a Victorian style that Sendak adored, adopting it for the illustrations in 'Higglety, Pigglety, Pop! Or There Must be More to Life,' his 1967 chronicle of the imaginary adventures of his Sealyham terrier, which he said was his favorite of his books.
An introvert who, Caponera says, 'didn't like leaving the house,' Sendak found continuing companionship with Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst who was his partner for 50 years, and from his beloved dogs. He was a great admirer of George Stubbs, the late-18th-century English painter who specialized in depictions of animals. According to Caponera, Sendak's favorite Stubbs was an etching of two endearing foxhounds. But the showstopper, acquired by Sendak in 2000, is an enamel-on-copper oval plate of a lion devouring a stag, which Stubbs made in collaboration with Josiah Wedgwood. 'Maurice kept it in his bedroom on a five-and-dime stand on his dresser,' Caponera said. Christie's estimates its hammer price at between $100,00 and $150,000.
Another figure in Sendak's artistic pantheon is Philipp Otto Runge, a German Romantic of the late 18th century. In 1982, Sendak bought a set of Runge engravings, 'The Four Times of Day,' in which naked children revel atop lily-like flowers that, strangely enough, are partly composed of embracing children. Delicately drawn and whimsically lyrical, 'The Four Times of Day' was displayed in the Weimar music room of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, after the artist presented the suite to him as a gift. When Sendak illustrated the cover of 'Caldecott & Company,' a book of his essays about artists he loved, he riffed on Runge's style. Weinberg also credits Runge as the inspiration for 'Outside Over There' (1981), the story of a girl who has to rescue her little sister from goblins — and 'in particular the way Maurice depicts the goblins as if they were giant babies.'
Henry Fuseli, a Swiss-born painter with an eccentric erotic bent, lived much of his life in London, where he influenced Blake. Much later, he captivated Sendak. Among the works being auctioned is 'Callipyga,' an ink drawing of Mrs. Fuseli, seen from behind and baring her buttocks, as she stands by a dressing table supported by phallic columns.
'I think one of the things that appealed to Maurice about the late 18th and early 19th century was the way that artists like Fuseli were not uptight about the body,' Weinberg commented. 'Because Maurice is a children's book author, people forget that he was very much a product of the 1960s and the counterculture. Mickey is naked in 'In the Night Kitchen' at exactly the same time as the famous production of 'Hair' on Broadway and its famous nude climax. And it was also the year of Stonewall.'
Indeed, the stylized rendition of Mickey's full-frontal nudity caused an uproar, with some librarians using a marker or paintbrush to cover him. 'Apparently, a little boy without his pajamas on was more terrifying to some people than any monster I ever invented,' Sendak remarked.
An outlier in the Sendak collection, which tilts heavily toward the 19th century, is a Picasso etching from the 1934 'Suite Vollard,' of a blinded Minotaur guided by a young girl. As with many of the works Sendak collected, it is an image that encapsulates a narrative. And it had other resonances for the artist. A monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man, the Minotaur lived in a cave, and Sendak was fascinated by caves, which have not only a dimensional complexity but also a metaphorical suggestion of psychological exploration. (Sendak was in psychotherapy for much of his life.) Also, as Weinberg pointed out, one of the Wild Things is a horned bull-like creature. It is featured in the original artwork that Sendak made for a library poster, included in the auction.
An opera lover and bibliophile, Sendak also had a taste for popular culture, particularly for Mickey Mouse, who entered the world in the same year as he did: 1928. With their big heads and little neckless bodies, his Wild Things can be seen as descendants of Mickey. Sendak only began seriously collecting Mickey figurines in the late '60s, while working on 'In the Night Kitchen,' whose protagonist shares Mickey's name. 'I needed things from my childhood, and the Mickey Mouse things were my favorite,' he explained. 'They helped me kind of taste that time and time again.'
A jewel departing the collection is a rare German tinplate toy from the 1930s of Mickey and Minnie Mouse on a motorcycle, estimated to fetch between $30,000 and $50,000.
The house is full of Mickey memorabilia, but not just any Mickeys. 'He only liked to collect Mickeys from 1928 to 1939,' Caponera said. 'He taught us at an early age that the only Mickeys to get are the ones with pie eyes. Later they became too mouselike and too realistic.'
As Weinberg added, 'What this lesson in Mickey Mouse physiognomy taught was that it didn't matter in what category you put a work of art — high or low, illustrative or abstract, art for children or for grown-ups. What matters is quality.'