BEFORE THEY WERE ARTISTS

In graphic format, profiles of six illustrators that focus on their words, groundbreaking works, and early influences.

Following up on her Before They Were Authors (2019), Haidle pays tribute to another worthy and diverse set of creative talents: Wanda Gág, Tove Jansson, Hiyao Miyazaki, Yuyi Morales, Maurice Sendak, and Jerry Pinkney. As children’s-book illustrators go, animator Miyazaki is really an outlier here, but the author wedges him into the general scheme by analyzing his character types and his views on visual art in general. Sticking to her own low-key, chromatically restrained figures and visual style (to the point that even the iconic covers of favorites like Where the Wild Things Are and Millions of Cats are unrecognizably altered), she takes each of her subjects from childhood to well-launched career, pointing to the effects of family situations and tracing the development of artistic aspirations. Their later years are rushed, but she includes nods to significant personal as well as professional contacts, such as Jansson’s same-sex partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, and Sendak’s relationships with both his life companion, Eugene Glynn, and his editor Ursula Nordstrom. Direct quotes, printed in red, make up major portions of the narrative, placed in and around the neatly arranged geometric panels, so even though young audiences may struggle to find any visual evocation of these illustrators’ distinctive spirits and styles, some impression at least of their voices and approaches to art do, in the end, come through.

Quirky choices, but readers will be left knowing these iconic figures better.