Eric Carle Has a Seahorse

It may look like I'm on vacation, but in fact we're getting a lot of predicate homework done up here above the Mason-Dixon line!

The first of these (many) accomplishments involved a visit to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, tucked pleasantly into an apple orchard on the grounds of Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.

I once asserted in an art history paper (on a topic that needed some livening) that one's first priority when arriving at a museum should be to head for the restroom. Well, when you've woken up before dawn to ride 4.5 hours on the (sketchy!) Greyhound bus and caffeinated yourself accordingly, this truism turns out to be truer than ever. And I must say, not only was there NO line in the Eric Carle Museum's restroom, but the visit was well worth prioritizing!

And so, we begin our journey with a toilet shot -- cause, look how cute the tiles are! They're showing the musem's colorful bathroom tiles, each featuring an animal from Carle's book "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" They were adorable.

And à propos too -- because the exhibition of Carle's work on view at the museum was dedicated to the "Brown Bear" images. And as it turns out, "Brown Bear"-- a book less familiar to me growing up than, say, Carle's "Very Hungry Caterpillar" or "Mixed Up Chameleon" -- is perhaps one of the most predicational of Carle's books.

The book, written by Bill Martin Jr. and illustrated by Carle, introduces a series of colorful illustrated animals, shown in succession, and each of which floats against its own stark white background. Sound familiar? And of course, each animal has textual accompaniment -- the book introduces each animal in turn by addressing it by name and color -- "Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?" The page turns between animals are facilitated by each animal's response. "I see a red bird looking at me," Brown Bear responds, so you turn the page to have the beautiful red bird revealed to you.

A lot of Carle's books, especially "Brown Bear," remind me of bestiaries, books in which a series of animals are depicted and accompanied by stories or poems about their characteristics and behaviors in order to allegorically imply lessons in human behavior. The tradition can be traced back to antiquity, but a number of modern artists took it up too. My favorites are Touluse-Lautrec's "Histoires Naturelles" (right) of 1899 and Picasso's "Histoire Naturelle" of 1942 (left).

Carle's books always use the qualities of animals to tell kids stories about human behavior -- we all grew up with his hard-working spider, the late-blooming cricket who can't find his voice, and especially the chameleon in identity crisis. And books like "Brown Bear," as this exhibition showed, display not only Carle's virtuosity at rendering all the animals of the world using only tissue paper and paint but test the kid's ability to bend her mind around the likes of a purple cat, a blue horse, and other such oddities.

Major highlight: Upon visiting the (amazing, comprehensive) book store at the museum, we learned that one of Carle's more recent animal heroes is a Seahorse Who Rejects Conventional Gender Roles! Carle's "Mister Seahorse" is the story of a father seahorse who floats through the ocean, carrying Mrs. Seahorse's eggs in the pouch on his belly (rejecting conventional gender roles and all) and all the other dedicated father fishies he meets along the way. It also includes the racy seahorse-mating/egg transfer scene at right.

Deal is, predicate, ink. likes this museum. It strikes a great balance between art museum and kid's museum making it, like children's books themselves, a great thing for adults and kids to do together. They treat the works in their collection -- which includes the work not just of Carle but of a number of important illustrators -- as art to be preserved, exhibited, and historicized, but they also have a highly educational mission and they definitely cater to the young'uns. Perhaps the best part is the art studio where you can make your own tissue paper collages and other art projects with the guidance of nice hippie kids from the surrounded 5 colleges. We were definitely the biggest kids in there and they didn't even bat an eyelash.