A Summer for Adventurers of All Ages: New Worlds Imagined through the Creativity of Book Artists at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

BOSTON, MA (June 03,2022) - This summer, visitors to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (ISGM) will encounter wondrous worlds through rarely-seen works by renowned, yet very different, book artists. The Museum’s major exhibition, Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet, explores another side of beloved children’s book author and illustrator, Maurice Sendak (1928-2012), who had a second career as a set and costume designer for opera and ballet. Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak's Designs for Opera and Ballet was organized by the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, and reimagined by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the exhibition’s second venue, for its Boston showing. The Gardner Museum’s dossier exhibition, Close Up: Bourdichon’s Painted Prayers, reveals the miniature masterpieces of a gilded Renaissance prayer book illuminated by Jean Bourdichon (about 1457–1521), court painter to French kings. Both exhibitions will be on view at the Gardner Museum from June 16 - September 11, 2022. To further celebrate book artists, the Museum has commissioned Oliver Jeffers to create a public work of art, Universes, for the Museum’s façade. Audiences can be further transported from the page through the Gardner Museum’s public programs which range from weekend studio arts for families and visitors of all ages to a conversation with playwright Tony Kushner about his friendship with Sendak and book readings by Oliver Jeffers. This suite of summer happenings is in the spirit of Isabella Stewart Gardner who loved books and their ability to take us to faraway places.

“As a connoisseur who collected children’s books alongside medieval manuscripts, Isabella would be so pleased with the Museum’s lineup celebrating the extraordinary art of book illustrators,” shares Peggy Fogelman, Norma Jean Calderwood Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “Although Maurice Sendak, Jean Bourdichon and Oliver Jeffers are distinctly different, they each have the power to capture our imaginations through their picture-making. There will be something new — and something very old — for visitors to discover at the Gardner Museum this summer.”

Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet
Hostetter Gallery
(June 16 - September 11)

Maurice Sendak’s magical and mysterious drawings for theater are the focus of Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet. Best known as a children’s book author and illustrator, including for his 1963 picture book Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak (1928-2012) started his own successful “second act,” beginning in the late 1970s, creating set designs for opera and ballet. Sendak was a master at inventing imaginary places for his characters to live in, and these visions come to life on stage with the same beauty, charm, wit and complexity of his picture books. Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet features more than one hundred of Sendak’s illustrations, watercolors, storyboards, dioramas, and costumes for four stage productions — Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and Sendak’s own Where the Wild Things Are.

The exhibition offers new insight into the artist’s creative process, including the influence of art historical and musical sources on his work. His signature muted color palette and whimsical yet sophisticated designs reflect his interest in Old Master paintings while also alluding to popular animation, folklore and comic and picture book art.

For the opera adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are (a story of a mischievous boy named Max who sets sail to an island inhabited by frightening creatures), Sendak’s storyboards, 3-dimensional dioramas, and sketches of complex costumes — including one for a wild thing dubbed Moishe (the author’s own Yiddish name) -— are on display. For Nutcracker, Sendak sought inspiration from the darker elements of E.T.A. Hoffman’s original tale from 1816. Though perhaps less saccharine than other Nutcracker productions, Sendak’s is no less enchanting as evidenced by his awe-inspiring stages and costume for the Tiger Boy character. Visitors will be greeted by images of the wide-eyed Nutcracker character, who (like Moishe) Sendak found inspiration from within, referring to the giant, discomfiting figure as “a very good self-portrait.”

The influence of art historical sources on Sendak’s designs is clear in The Love for Three Oranges and The Magic Flute. Three Oranges’ colorful and playful costumes and sets bear a striking resemblance to the drawings of eighteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727–1804). Sendak’s set illustrations and several costumes are juxtaposed with Tiepolo’s lighthearted ink drawings, like Dancing Dogs with Musicians and Bystanders, 18th century. Sketches for The Magic Flute, an opera that blends drama and humor, like Sendak’s books, are also on view, alongside Old Master works from Isabella Stewart Gardner’s collection. These include The Virgin and Child with Infant Saint John the Baptist and Six Female Saints, (about 1497–1500) by Italian Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506).

This exhibition, on view in the Museum’s Hostetter Gallery, will appeal to audiences young and old. The installation includes a play stage and reading nook — where visitors of all ages can express their inner thespian or get cozy with a favorite Sendak, Jeffers or other picture book. A special family guide inspired by the Sendak exhibition sets families on their own adventures in the Museum’s Tapestry Room.

Interpretive labels in Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet provide context on Sendak’s multifaceted lived experience as a Jewish gay man who came of age in the shadow of the Holocaust and in an environment of pervasive homophobia. This experience formed his mission as a children’s author and illustrator: providing young readers with stories to help them negotiate their own complicated emotions as they grow up in an inevitably flawed world. Sendak brought this complex sensibility about identity, childhood, and the role of fantastical stories to his design.

“We are excited to introduce visitors to a lesser-known aspect of Sendak’s career – a part that Isabella, as an avid opera fan herself, would have been particularly enthusiastic about, says Diana Seave Greenwald, Curator of Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet, and Assistant Curator of the Collection, ISGM. “This subject matter lets us dig into Sendak’s multifaceted identity and how he brought it to bear on his art.

Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak's Designs for Opera and Ballet, the first exhibition dedicated to Sendak’s set and costume design, was organized by the Morgan Library & Museum (New York) from its collection of 900 works bequeathed by the author. The exhibition has been re-envisaged by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum to focus on four productions and incorporate additional biographical and interpretive material as well as opportunities for interactive experiences for families. The exhibition will travel to the Memphis Brooks Art Museum in Tennessee, where it will be on view from October 2022 - January 2023.

Isabella Stewart Gardner and Maurice Sendak

Although they lived very different lives at different times, Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840 - 1924) and Maurice Sendak shared much in common, including their love of art, art history, literature, music, and performance. Both native New Yorkers, each had a deep appreciation for music, especially opera, and its capacity to inspire creativity and complement the visual arts. In fact, at the Gardner Museum’s opening night in 1903, Gardner’s carefully selected program included members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra performing the overture to The Magic Flute by Mozart, Sendak’s favorite composer and one of his first theater sets. Additionally, Sendak’s spirited design frequently references Old Master paintings from collections of historic art like the ISGM (where he lectured in 1991). Like Gardner, Sendak conjured enchanting multidisciplinary environments combining visual art, music and performance. Both of these creative spirits were avid book collectors with a passion for literature.

Close Up: Bourdichon’s Painted Prayers
Fenway Gallery
(June 16 - September 11)

Close Up: Bourdichon’s Painted Prayers reveals, as never before, the Gardner Museum’s 500-year-old prayer book by French Renaissance artist Jean Bourdichon. With masterfully painted pages gleaming in vibrant colors and gold leaf, this Book of Hours is the only complete example by Bourdichon outside of Europe and considered the crown jewel of Gardner’s collection of rare books. Known by many as the “Boston Hours” (in reference to Isabella’s purchase and transfer to her adoptive city), the pages of this precious devotional are displayed unbound for the first time, allowing visitors to see all fourteen of its full-page miniature masterpieces, as well as eighteen of its smaller illuminations. Court painter Jean Bourdichon (French, about 1457-1521) earned the title of “painter to the king” at the age of twenty-four and, over forty years, served four successive sovereigns. His artistic legacy endures with impeccably painted and gilded “books of hours,” containing a cycle of daily prayers created for French nobility. Bourdichon’s “Boston Hours” tells biblical stories through vibrant and lavish illustrations, many adorned with architectural columns and golden arches. These miniature paintings, where devotional figures appear as if framed by a theatrical set design, remain as vivid today as they were five centuries ago. “It is an enormous privilege to share this treasure with our audiences and offer the opportunity to see its dazzling pages together, and in a new light,” shares Nathaniel Silver, WIlliam and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection, who curated Close Up: Bourdichon’s Painted Prayers. In the summer of 1890, Isabella Stewart Gardner was on her annual pilgrimage to Venice when she purchased the exquisite Christian prayer book for $1000, the single most expensive item that she acquired that year. Part of her introduction to collecting Renaissance art, illustrated books were Gardner’s first love.

Conservation Analysis of the Boston Hours

In 2014, conservators at the Gardner Museum disbound the Boston Hours to relieve pressure on its pages (its binding was not original). In 2015, the book was analyzed by Gardner conservators using X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy to inspect and characterize the painter’s pigments. One astonishing finding was the discovery of Tyrian purple, a purple dye produced from the secretions of a sea snail. Bourdichon used this dye — one of the oldest, costliest, and most prestigious, historically reserved for the clothing of emperors — to shade the architectural frames around the miniatures. He also deployed ultramarine, a precious blue pigment ground from the gemstone lapis lazuli (mined in Afghanistan) for important areas, like the Virgin’s mantle. The artist used shell (powdered) gold in the architectural frames of the illuminations and lead-tin yellow, probably to modulate the tone of the gold. Close Up: Bourdichon’s Painted Prayers is part of the Museum’s Close Up exhibition series, shining new light on singular masterpieces in Gardner’s collection.

Universes: Oliver Jeffers
Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade
(June 3- October 4)

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has commissioned Oliver Jeffers, known for his distinctive and delightful picture books, to create a new work of art for the Museum’s Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade. Jeffers continues his exploration of the cosmos and creating spaces of wonder in Universes (2022). This large-scale work depicts a woman in her own universe at home engrossed in a storybook while outside the blue night reaches up and out of the frame. The glow from her window is bright and warm, and above her the stars and other planets extend through the vast blue cosmos. Universes can be enjoyed by the public on the exterior of the ISGM building on Evans Way. It is fitting that the display of this work coincides with an exhibition of Sendak, a hero of Jeffers.

“Jeffers’ visual world unites curiosity and humor, and brings so much joy to people of all ages,” explains Pieranna Cavalchini, Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art at the ISGM.

Oliver Jeffers is a Belfast-born artist who makes art and tells stories. Jeffers is known for his distinctive characters, uncanny, vast worlds, and handwritten text. Jeffers’ critically acclaimed picture books include the best-selling "Here We Are." His next, "Meanwhile Back on Earth," will be released in October 2022.

Public Programs

This summer, the Museum is offering a range of public programs honoring literary and performing arts. On June 23, Diana Seave Greenwald will talk to Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright, Tony Kushner, about Sendak’s designs and Kushner’s close friendship with the illustrator. At Free First Thursdays on August 4, join us for Storytime with Oliver Jeffers as he reads aloud from his picture books. The Gardner Museum’s popular Open Studios — offering artmaking for visitors of all ages — is being expanded to take place every Saturday and Sunday from 1 - 4 p.m.

Gift at the Gardner

A range of books and gifts related to this summer’s special exhibitions are available at the Gardner Museum’s shop, Gift at the Gardner. Adults can pick up Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet, the first major museum catalog of Sendak’s work (produced by the Morgan Library & Museum and DelMonico Books) or Close Up: Bourdichon’s Boston Hours featuring the history of this rare manuscript and its journey to Isabella’s collection (produced by the ISGM). In addition to books for adults and children, by and about Maurice Sendak, the shop will offer items featuring Sendak’s beloved characters. Gifts related to ballet and opera, including The Magic Flute, loved by both Sendak and Gardner, will also be available, as well as a limited-edition fine art print of Universes signed and numbered by Oliver Jeffers.

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