SCREAM WITHOUT A VOICE

Surrealism and Expressionism in Picture Books

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Scream without a voice: Childrens picture books as a potent artistic space. Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesnt actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of . . . . The writer darent actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies. Ted Hughes

Memory is the most important asset that an artist has. . . . We remember things that we don't want to remember. Well, I'm haunted by them, anyway. But also, memory, imagination is a function of memory. Without memory, you can't imagine. And my idea of imagination is rearranging your memory. Allen Say, 2012 interview Picture books use the body of the book--page formatting, side-by-side juxtaposition and page turns, as well as size, color, and pictorial effects-- as a small theatre of still and silent images. Most picture books are not artistically motivated. That is, most picture books, like most books in general, are primarily motivated by other purposes-- education, socialization, and entertainment. A picture book can serve these other purposes while also being artistic, but the primary potency of an artistic picture book is, I argue, to symbolize childhood truths that could not be said. Almost all of the best artistic picture books are designed by one person, the auteur. Every choice in an artistic picture book is ultimately guided by an existential truth that is in some way unspeakable. Artistically motivated picture books have a uniquely difficult censor to pass because picture books are intended for children. Adults who publish mainstream picture books must decide that the book is appropriate for a child audience. But it is in the nature of truths that could not be said that there will be something disturbing and even unbearable in the truth expressed by an artistic picture book. Artists who find a way to get past the censors and successfully publish in this field must have an exceptional talent for smuggling, to uses Hughess metaphor, not only past the public censor but private ones as well. At the same time, I do not suggest that this means that the deepest meanings of artistic picture books are accessible only to a sophisticated adult audience. Quite the contrary. In the following exchange with Tania Elias, Anthony Browne expresses frustration and even anger at those who underestimate the perception of children:

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TE: You've said that "in some ways children have a surrealist view of the world" in that they see things from fresh perspectives. How do you feel about views that your books and the surrealism in them might be too complex for children? Have children commented to you about these aspects in your work? AB: When I hear someone say that my books are too complex for children I know that I'm hearing someone who either knows nothing about children, or someone that doesn't value children or give them credit for their abilities to understand complex ideas. Children have never commented about these matters to me, only adults.
Today I want to talk about two movements associated with the early 20th century avant-garde expressionism and surrealismand their use in contemporary picture books. Expressionism and surrealism are particularly associated with the Great War and its aftermath. Paul Fussells influential book The Great War and Modern Memory argues that World War I changed the face of art and literature in specific ways. The generation who fought in World War I underwent unbearable trauma that they could not speak about in society. There was an unbridgeable chasm between their experience and ways that the older generation spoke about war and its meanings. This chasm between conventional symbols and unbearable experience gave impetus to modern experimental movements in literature and art. Whereas traditional art forms valued symmetry and balance and continuity, these movements valued shocking juxtapositions and the depiction of extreme emotiona kind of anti-art. Only through performing these discontinuities did artists feel they could express the private experiences they felt compelled to symbolize. Expressionism and surrealism both predate 1914. In fact, some of the most iconic examples of these movements come from the 19th century. Expressionism refers to the representation of extreme experienceterror, grief, agony, frenzy through images that embody this extremis both in style and content. Edvard Munch and Vincent Van Gogh can both be considered expressionist in their depiction of extreme psychological states through figures and landscapes. Munchs expressionism often takes the compositional form of the top half of a human figure at the bottom of the frame with a psychological landscape above and surrounding the figures head.

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The Scream of Nature, 1893 Van Goghs expressionism can be seen in the brush strokes, hallucinatory colors, and distortions of his landscapes, and in the tortured eye contact of some of his portraits.

Van Gogh Wheatfield with Crows and Self-Portrait

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Expressionism is particularly associated with printmaking and drawing in addition to painting, and because prints could be used easily as reproductions in books, expressionism quickly entered books both as graphic reproductions and as part of narratives. (Indeed, the first expressionist artists book to highlight the gulf between child and adult consciousness may be said to be 1789 Songs of Innocence by William Blake.) The artistic picture book closely parallels expressionism in its origins and artists. In fact, wordless graphic novels were created as early as the 1920s using expressionist prints showing a figure experiencing the human condition in the modern world.

Frans Masereel, Passionate Journey Wanda Gag, considered the first American picture book artist, was also a printmaker. Her dark, distorted domestic interiors are infused with expressionist feeling and sensory life:

Ludwig Bemelmans and Dr. Seuss both used expressionist line in the 1930s to create movement and feeling in picture books. Bemelmans remarked that a picture should have the freshness of a pie thrown at a wall. He also declared that there were times in the middle of the night that the mental creation of his picture books kept him from shooting himself.

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The juxtaposition of whimsy and anguish is characteristic of Bemelmans. Bemelmans himself escaped service in World War I by emigrating to the US at the age of 16, but many of his compatriots died in the war, and he felt a survivors anguish and guilt. Probably the most characteristic expressionist symbol is a heavy black line that looks as though it had been slashed onto the page. Emil Nolde:

http://www.germanexpressionism.com/printgallery/nolde/images/EN01023.jpg

Surrealism

In contrast to expressionisms appearance of wild creation, surrealist art often looks painstakingly composed and painted, but the content is absurd and disorienting. Surrealism as an official artistic movement came later than expressionism, but surrealist logic in literature and art may well be said to have its roots in 19th century childrens literature. The bizarre mixing of orders of magnitude and forms of consciousness that we associate with surrealism are characteristic of Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland and Edward Lears nonsense poetry.

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Tenniel, Alice Too Large (1865); Magritte, The Listening Room The absurd disconnection between Alices experience underground and her older sisters sappy rehearsing of it at the end of the book gives a hint of this chasm between conventional meanings and existential experience. Surrealism is associated with dream logic, hallucinatory experience, and other non-ordinary forms of experience. Surrealist logic in the sense of an absurd chasm between conventional expression and ones deepest experiences holds an organic relation to the consciousness and experience of childhood. There are two hugenesses implicit in childhood experience: the hugeness of parents and the adult world in comparison to oneself, and the hugeness of ones own experience in contrast to what one can say. When failures of care create terror, grief, alienation, and despair, this gulf becomes unspeakable. Art provides a public space for the expression of the unspeakable. Single image paintings are one such space for expression, but the world of high art is insular and traditional, and many artists at the beginning of the 20th century rejected this insularity and embraced emerging technology that allowed wider publication of their work, including four-color newspaper comics, movies, and picture books. These three formats all provide a potential space for surrealist and expressionist narratives, and all three were quickly used to represent childhood experience. The first printed surreal stories about childhood consciousness came in the Sunday newspapers at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century in the tabloid size images of Winsor McCay and Lyonel Feininger. These two artists are giants in the development of surreal plot logic through imagery and juxtaposition of child and adult worlds. Both depict the absurd coexistence of different orders of magnitude and forms of consciousness as a surreal representation of

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childhood experience.

Lyonel Feininger, a German-American artist who was living in Paris in the early 1900s at the center of artistic innovation and excitement, also produced perhaps the first published cubist work of art in his 1906 Sunday full-page feature comic Wee Willie Winkie in the Chicago Tribune newspaper (this was a year before Picasso painted Les Demoiselles DAvignon, and the term cubism had not even been coined):

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Lyonel Feininger 1906 (detail)

George Braques 1910

(left) Lyonel Feininger. Wee Willie Winkie. November 11, 1906. Lithographed comic strip, page: 23 1/2 x 17 13/16" (59.7 x 45.2 cm). Publisher and printer: Tribune Company, Chicago, Illinois. (right) Georges Braque, Les Usines du Rio-Tinto L'Estaque, automne 1910. Oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm One could thus say that cubism as well as surrealism began in a narrative text-image format about childhood consciousness. Sadly, Feiningers amazing comics did not succeed in selling newspapers, and they were dropped after only a few installments, and publishers of childrens books at that time did not have the vision to invite Feininger to continue his work in book form. Feininger was not deterred, however, from having a long and productive career as an artist of single-image paintings. Picture books, like panel comic strips, provide a potent space for displaying a surreal gulf from a childs perspective through juxtaposition of adult conventional meanings and raw childhood experiences, but modernist art styles were not welcome in picture books until the 1920s, probably because of the historically more conservative agenda of childrens books. The first American picture book to use low art style in an expressionist picture book may be said to be Dr. Seusss 1937 And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which was famously rejected by many publishers partly because of its cartoony conventions and line drawing. Significantly, Dr. Seusss first picture book for children expresses the impossibility of a boy telling his father what he has seen and experienced, both through its plot and its switch from black and white to color:

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The gulf between a childs consciousness and adult conventional perception may be expressed through a variety of means provided by the picture book format: alienation can be shown by a chasm between word and image, a disjuncture between pictorial styles, a split consciousness between left and right pages, or a change of consciousness through page turns. Mulberry Street introduces many of these techniques, including the technique of excluding parental faces from the images, which has become a hallmark of many artistically motivated picture books. (Side note: This device probably derives from stories of sentient toys that exclude images of humanssee, for example, William Nicholsons illustrations for The Velveteen Rabbit, published in 1922.)

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My own approach to artistic picture books focuses on the perceived relationship between the artist and two kinds of figurescharacters-- in their picture books. Commonly, artistic picture books feature a child SELF figurethat is, a child whose experience is the organizing principle of the book, and who is in some sense an alter ego of the artist. In this sense, artistic picture books can be seen as analogous to self portraits in single-image painting and print-making, with the obvious difference that the SELF is not oneself at ones present age but as a child. In addition to the child SELF figure, artistic picture books either present or pointedly avoid images of parental FACE figures. FACE figure is my term for the character who is the primary attachment figure of the child SELFthe childs YOU. It is the face that orients the existence of the child SELF. SELF = the central character, almost always a child figure, whose interior life is expressed through the organization and display of the picture book. FACE = the significant YOU of the central character, in whose face the SELF may be said to live. This will almost always be a parent in picture books. In picture books, SELF figures are commonly pictured in the images even though they are the locus of the books consciousness. FACE figures may or may not be pictured in the images even though they are mentioned in the text. Probably the paradigmatic example of SELF and FACE figures can be found in a 1950 book by William Steig that is now out of print. This book is not a childs picture book, but it shows the potency of the space for the purposes of displaying child SELF and parental FACE and VOICE:

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Images from Agony One expressionist technique that could be used to represent a private, unspeakable experience of a child SELF is to show the figure of the SELF in a simultaneous shot-reaction shot with a traumatizing parental FACE. In William Steigs Agony in the Kindergarten, the potency of this vision is demonstrated in the first image, Willie!. But this view is very rare in childrens picture books, at least in the United States; its just too disturbing. In fact, angry parental faces are very rare in American picture booksI collect rare examples to demonstrate how they violate our sense of what a picture book is for. This image never fails to get a rise, since it violates two sacred cows at once:

Phil Parks illustration for cover of Santas Twin, by Dean Koontz.

Another technique is to represent alienation and disconnection through left-right splitting:

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Come away from the Water Shirley In this extraordinary spread from come away from the water Shirley, Shirley is depicted from the back but we share her perspective on the ocean. What she sees has nothing in common with what her parents see, and she has no voice in the book. Even though we see her in the image, we understand the view behind her as representing her perception. As Maria Nikolajeva has pointed out, picture books rarely have true point-of-view images that literally take the angle of vision of a child SELF character. Here are two side-by-side examples from Ludwig Bemelmans Madeline:

In the works of the three artists Im focusing on today, there is a marked contrast in how child SELF and parental FACE figures are handled in images. In the time remaining, Id like to comment on how three contemporary picture book auteurs--Chris Van Allsburg, Anthony Browne, and Allen Sayrepresent SELF and FACE figures in their books. Galbraith 13

Before I begin, let me say that many others in our field have weighed in on the topic of surrealism in picture books and many of them have written commentaries on these particular artistsparticularly Browne and Van Allsburg. Among the many scholars of childrens literature who specialize in picture books, I acknowledge the 4NsMaria Nikolajeva, Perry Nodelman, Philip Nel, and Peter Neumeyer as pioneers in taking picture books seriously as an art form, and commenting in particular on surrealism and the avant-garde in picture books. What I say here today is mostly my idiosyncratic perspective, and those of you who would like to pursue this topic will want to get a fuller perspective by reading the ideas of these other scholars. I will gladly send you a bibliography if you provide your email address. Intro Anthony Browne slide here The work of Anthony Browne uses the shorthand of the child SELF as chimpanzee and parental FACE as gorilla. Using animals to represent humans is a conventional trope in childrens books, but Anthony Browne uses this trope in a specifically surrealist, existential, and autobiographical way. Browne has been quite open about his identification of his own childhood self with Willy, the chimpanzee SELF figure in many of his picture books, and his use of gorillas to represent his father, who was a large and imposing man he compares frequently to King Kong. In contrast to many picture book auteurs such as Maurice Sendak and David Shannon in his David books, who show an ontological gulf between themselves and a parent figure by not picturing parental FACE at all, Anthony Browne commonly provides powerful images of parental FACE in his books in addition to many clear images of the child SELFs face and body. In many instances, images of a parental FACE are the climax of the story, and almost all his books contain powerful moments of eye contact between the SELF figure and a FACE figureusually a gorilla, but sometimes other apes or a sibling figure. The gorilla is sometimes a hostile and aggressive figure, and sometimes a sweet and loving figure, but it is always the center of attention.

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These silent encounters between SELF and FACE figure are given heartbreaking backstory by Brownes statement in interviews that the gorilla figure in his work represents his fatherfor me, the original Kong (King Kong dedication). Anthony Brownes 1994 book King Kong is an adaptation of the classic black and white 1933 film into a large and beautifully produced lushly illustrated book in full color.

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In King Kong, Brownes book based on the 1933 black and white film, Kongs final moment with his beloved Ann is a moment of ultimate eye contact. The text is poignant:

He fought long and bravely but in vain. The planes just kept coming, and at last, weakened by his terrible wounds, Kong stumbled, and seemed to know that he was dying. Ignoring his enemies he picked up Ann and looked at her with great sad eyes, then put her back on the ledge and stroked her tenderly with his tfingertips. Then in 2000, Anthony Browne added details about his father that added excruciating weight to these images. When Anthony Browne talks about the day his father died, he goes into a reverie of total recall. "I had just been promoted to the first rugby team. It was a perfect, wonderful coming of age. My brother was already in the team and my father had come to watch us. We went home and my father died in front of me. Horribly, in about half an hour. He had a heart attack." Anthony Browne was 17 that day and he has been painting images of his father ever since . . . . In one book, Gorilla, a fantasy gorilla becomes a stand-in father for a lonely young girl. In another, King Kong's fall from the Empire State Building becomes "the image of my father falling dead in front of me". Galbraith 16

--Julia Eccleshare interview

A moment of excruciating eye contact occurs in almost every picture book by Anthony Browne. In addition to portraits of a parental FACE in eye contact, the moment of vision, this moment is also depicted from the opposite perspective as a counter shot, a SELF portrait of the witnessing child--here in Gorilla:

Brownes convention of using a chimpanzee to represent himself extends to his adult self as artist. On the cover of Willies Pictures, the artist depicts himself realistically in the self portrait painted by Willie:

Brownes work displays a whole vocabulary of existential symbols that travel from book to book, suggesting that the sensory specifics of the unspeakable moment when everything changed are frozen in a tableau of significance that repeat themselves in every story he tellsthe armchair, the wallpaper, the brick wall, the moment of eye contact, the complex fusion in that moment of love, rage, agony, terror, and grief. What is not represented is sound.

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Browne also uses allusions to surrealist painters and surreally altered masterpieces over and over in his picture books.

His most common altered allusions are to Magritte and to Edvard Munchs Scream. [insert images of Magritte and scream] Rene Magritte has a special magnetism for picture book artists who use surrealist techniques and allusions. Magrittes work has specific similarities with at least two of the picture book auteurs under discussion: he uses himself as a model for a recognizeable SELF figure (bowler hat, umbrella) and his wife as a recognizeable FACE figure, he uses words and images in uncomfortable or enigmatic tension with each other, and his body of work seems to point again and again to an unspeakable early experience: in the case of Magritte, the suicide of his mother.

Allusions to Magritte begin with Brownes earliest picture book, Through the Magic Mirror (1976), which predates his gorilla and chimpanzee trope:

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Anthony Brownes pervasive and repetitive allusions to Magritte suggest that Magrittes work resonates profoundly with own experience. Edvard Munchs The Scream often turns up tucked away in Brownes images, almost as a Wheres Waldo device:

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f (detail from Voices in the Park) The Scream, of course, serves as a master trope for the agonizing gulf between private experience and public perception. The title refers to a sound not emitted by oneself, but heard against ones will. According to Edvard Munchs diary entry during the time he created The Scream, the image was based on an experience Munch recounts in his diary for January 22, 1892: I was walking along a path with two friends the sun was setting suddenly the sky turned blood red I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. Thus, the picture is of a SELF engulfed in an experience not shared with others. It is not the SELF that is screaming, but Nature (the original German title translates as The Scream of Nature).

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The SELF figure is covering his ears to block the sound. This scream that no one else can hear and that I cant stop hearing is, I argue, precisely what is smuggled into Anthony Brownes artistically realized picture books. Chris Van Allsburg In contrast to the intensely frontal portraits of SELF and FACE figures in Anthony Brownes picture books, and the artists candid descriptions of autobiographical connections to his work, Chris Van Allsburgs representation of SELF and FACE figures is shadowy and obscure, and connections to his personal childhood experience are slippery at best. Van Allsburgs artistic training was as a sculptor, and his images commonly treat the human figure as a series of classic geometric planes rather than in a more conventional way focusing on facial features. While many auteurs avoid picturing the parental FACE, Van Allsburg goes further; he avoids picturing the child SELFs face, at least in frontal view in full lighting:

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In many cases, even when the child SELF is present in the image, the figure is so small that it is difficult to find, as in the following detail from Just a Dream:

On the few occasions that his images present a frontal view of an adult face, the face is almost always distorted in pain, shock, or surprise, with mouth open

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or eyes wide and upside down (whites visible above the pupil).

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In no case do I see an adult face in Van Allsburgs picture books that is identifiable as a parent to a SELF figure. Mostly, faces of both children and adults are not the central focus and are seen in shadow, from behind, or from above or below. The angle of vision varies wildly from image to image, but it almost always avoids a frontal view of a character. In The Polar Express, the child SELFs face is clearly visible in only one image, next to Santa Claus, with the visual focus on Santas lit-from-below face:

The child in The Polar Express is only clearly visible in 5 out of 15 of the books images. In fact, no human figures are individually distinguishable in 7 of the books images. The only moment of human comfort, and its the only such image I could find except in Bad Day at River Bend when the cowboys comfort the man covered in crayon, was the children on the train trying to help the boy when he has lost his bell. One of the children looks around for adult help, but there is none.

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But overall, Van Allsburgs work is remarkable, at least in picture books, for its avoidance of conventional pictures of human or animal characters. His images and narratives display a classical detachment from human relations. There are no love relationships shown in any of Van Allsburgs books between child SELF and adult, unless you count the adulatory attachment of the child SELF to Santa Claus in The Polar Express, and this one is based more on the boys fantasy than on actual contact between him and Santa. This fantasy attachment is made especially problematic by the governing allusion of the book to Leni Riefenstahls film about the allure of Hitler, Triumph of the Will. In obvious contrast to both Anthonty Browne and Allen Say, connections to autobiographical moments of heavy significance in Van Allsburgs picture books are speculative at best. When it comes to the kinds of unspeakable childhood events I see the best picture books as smuggling in in potently silent fashion, there is no right way to speak about them publicly, and it is also possible, I grant, that there is no traumatic childhood event lurking in Van Allsburgs work. Van Allsburgs own comments on where his work comes is either humorously tricky or somewhat bland. Brownes openness and Van Allsburgs evasiveness about possible biographical connections are equally legitimate. However, the artists relation to public use of his works may raise some questions in this regardfor example, if The Polar Express is a retelling of Triumph of the Will from a childs point of view, Im dismayed that the film adaptation is used to promote the virtues of uncritical belief, and I wonder about Van Allsburgs attitude toward this. And on a different subject, while I was thrilled when Anthony Browne was named childrens laureate, I worried that the social obligations of this role might pull him off his artists center toward a more conventional and less profound approach to his work. Both Van Allsburg and Browne seem most authentic and brilliant when they are most silentin their art. It must be very difficult to be fulfill the common role of picture book artist while maintaining the integrity of ones art. Allen Says ambiguous SELF/FACE Allen Says handling of SELF and FACE figures is similarly idiosyncratic and complex. Many of his picture books present themselves as nonfictional albums featuring posed-looking images from a SELF figures family history. In his first such album book, Grandfathers Journey, the I of the text is the grandson, presumably Say himself, but the SELF of the text and images is the grandfather: Galbraith 25

Says grandfather is the SELF figure in the expressionist sense as the source of the experiential perception expressed through the images, and also in the text as the center of consciousness.

This SELF figure seems very much alone, even when he is with family members. Galbraith 26

The artist arrives as a child in the story, and the SELF figure shows a special connection to him. The image continues to focus on the consciousness of the grandfather, who looks directly at the camera,

but the text shifts to the memory of I: Galbraith 27

and in the very last pages, the grandson steps forward as the SELF figure of the present, who feels a deep identification with his grandfather. The last page combines a reprise of the formal portrait of the grandfather as a young man with text describing the feelings of the present-day I:

Curiously, Says grandfather is hardly mentioned in biographical resources on Say, so the supposition that Grandfathers Journey is nonfiction is just that. (My guess is that Says grandfather is also a stand-in for Noro Shinpei, Says teacher and, by Says own statement, his adoptive father.) Says nominally nonfictional picture books are moving and beautiful, but they stick to tranquil surfaces. Disturbing experiences of his amazing life, such as World War, dislocation, and traumatic family relationships are alluded to, but not pictured. The intimate feelings of these experiences appear to find more open expression in his fictional picture books Emmas Rug and Stranger in the Mirrorin Hughess terms, they leak out obliquely, smuggled through analogies. The SELF figure in Emmas Rug is Emma, and she has an ambiguous mirror/FACE relationship with a rug. The opening picture shows Emma isolated in her crib, and her mothers body in the doorway. The light from the doorway falls onto the rug that will become Emmas primary attachment figure, and the light from a window casts a cross pattern of light and shadow on her cradle.

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f Emmas rug becomes her mirror, her window, and her space of artistic inspiration.

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But one day her mother washes it, thus ruining it:

In Stranger in the Mirror, the SELF figure is ambiguously a child and an old man, and significant FACE figures are shown reacting in alarm to his appearance. These ambiguous SELF representations resonate with the SELF in Grandfathers Journey, who is ambiguously Says grandfather and himself. Surreal moment in Say: stranger in the mirror

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In these three Say picture books, the SELF does not connect with any parent FACE figure, but he identifies completely with a second SELF figure outside of himselfso much so that that in a sense he IS that figure. When that figure dies, the SELF is thrown into a crisis of being. The SELF being who anchors his sense of himself no longer exists, and after this other beings death he imagines himself reborn as Galbraith 31

this other being. In Emmas Rug, Emma throws out all her paintings and stops drawing until pictures begin appearing around her in the air, as they used to do in the rug. In Stranger in the Mirror, the boy wakes up as his grandfather. In Grandfathers Journey, the grandson creates a picture book in which he takes on the subjectivity of his grandfather. Ending of allen Say segment Artistic picture books, in conclusion, do more than merely allude to surrealist or expressionist works as a kind of wink to those in the know. They exploit the potential of picture books to be vehicles of surrealist and expressionist force through using the body of the book to represent the gulf between child SELF and adult FACE at significant moments, and by picturing specific sensory childhood moments when life changed unspeakably. Such moments still cannot be said, but picture books can bear silent witness in a way that provides a response, many decades later, to the following parental challenge (again, from William Steig):

Well, speak up! What is it?

Coda: Overall, I find that the best artistic picture books say the least. Its often the case that wordless picture books are among the finest, partly because they hold on to the tension they depict between conventional expression and existential symbolic representation. Shaun Tans The Arrival brilliantly portrays the surreal gulf between self and environment by not using words at all except as the stranger tries to decipher the foreign code, and by using surreal landscapes to depict the historical trauma that drove immigrants from their homeland.

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On the other hand, Armin Greders shattering expressionist images in The Island are diluted by the addition of explanatory and allegorical text.

This book would be much more powerful, I submit, with a different text or no text at all. Fully realized artistically motivated picture books mean without speaking. Not to say that they have no wordsmost great picture books have wordsbut that words and images and blank space are performed in a still, small theatre of page turns that carry the weight of the artists world.

Some artists are willing and able to speak in public about the childhood experience that haunts their imagination, and some arent. In either case, this haunting shows, and in either case, their books show far more than they can say.

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