Art in China after 1989: Theater of the World

Morgan Library, New York, NY, June 14 through October 6, 2019

Maurice Sendak’s Morgan show is an exhibition built to dislodge him from the single, immovable pedestal of “children’s-book genius” and reintroduce him as something else, too; a late-blooming stage designer with obsessive craft habits and a director’s appetite for spectacle. “Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak’s Designs for Opera and Ballet” gathered nearly 150 objects, drawn primarily from the more than 900 preparatory works he bequeathed to the Morgan, alongside select loans, props, and costumes. (The Morgan Library & Museum)

What makes these models (the show and its supporting materials often call them dioramas) so arresting is that they are not slick maquettes in the “professional miniature set shop” sense. They look and behave like drawings that have insisted on becoming objects. The Morgan’s own conservation writing gets wonderfully specific about how they’re built: drawings in ink, watercolor, and/or graphite on paper, adhered to thick paperboard; the paperboard edges then hand-cut to the contour of the image.

That handmade, cut-edge materiality is part of their spell. In a museum vitrine, you can read the models two ways at once. From one angle they’re stagecraft: proscenium elements, flats, and props arranged to test sightlines and depth. From another, they’re “Sendak objects,” close cousins to the pop-up and the toy theatre, like paper engineering that preserves the intimacy of drawing.

There’s also a practical reason they exist at all, and it matters for understanding why they feel so unusually complete. Sendak was new to stage design when he began work on Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and he took an “extra step” to translate two-dimensional designs into three-dimensional installations. The Gardner Museum’s guide (to the same body of work) puts it plainly: these hand-rendered dioramas let him create miniature models of how sets would appear on stage, synthesizing earlier sketches and fully integrating art-historical references into the final designs. (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) That last phrase, integrating art-historical references, helps explain why the models have such density.

The Magic Flute is a good place to start because it’s both origin story and proof of concept. The New Yorker notes that Sendak began designing a new production in 1978; it debuted in Houston in 1980; and a dozen stage projects followed. When you look at a Magic Flute diorama (particularly ones that frame a scene as if it’s already lit and in motion), you can almost feel him using the miniature to choreograph the audience’s attention, where the eye enters, what it collides with. The model as a rehearsal for perception.

And then there’s the “dollhouse” paradox: miniatures make you powerful. They give you a god’s-eye view of a whole world. But Sendak, never interested in pure comfort, uses that power to display vulnerability. Paper becomes a stand-in for stage machinery; the illusion is elaborate, but the means are fragile. That fragility isn’t incidental; it’s the point. Opera and ballet are colossal, expensive, and collaborative, yet they’re also vanishing arts: the moment passes, the curtain falls, the image dissolves. A diorama is a way to hold the moment still without killing it.

The Where the Wild Things Are material pushes this logic further because it makes explicit what was always implicit in Sendak: the desire to make drawings move. The Morgan’s conservation blog, discussing a diorama of Max’s sea journey, describes it as composed of nine separate objects, including left and right panels of a flower proscenium and the figure of the Sea Monster; multiple pieces designed to stand, layer, and occupy space like a tiny, modular stage. Smithsonian also highlights a “Diorama of Moishe scrim and flower proscenium,” stressing the same hybrid construction: watercolor, pen and ink, and graphite on paperboard. These are drawings as built environment.

These details matter because they counter the easy assumption that a set model is just a “preview.” In Sendak’s hands, the model is its own artwork and its own argument about theater. The Morgan’s video page lays out the show’s scope: storyboards, preparatory sketches, costume studies, luminous watercolors, and meticulous dioramas spanning The Magic Flute, Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, and an opera based on Where the Wild Things Are. But the stage set models feel like the moment where all those categories stop being separate. The storyboard gives you sequence; the costume study gives you character; the watercolor gives you atmosphere.

One of the Morgan exhibition’s smartest contextual moves is also relevant to why the models succeed. The show notes that Sendak “borrowed gleefully” from a personal pantheon of artists he encountered at the Morgan… works by William Blake, Mozart, and Domenico and Giambattista Tiepolo shown alongside his designs. In a two-dimensional drawing, an art-historical quotation can sit decoratively. In a diorama, quotation becomes structure: it affects the architecture of the scene, the weight and rhythm of the space. You can see him not only citing images but staging them.

Sendak’s stage set models aren’t just “preparatory.” They’re philosophical and they show him thinking about narrative as a built space. They are something you enter, wander, fear, laugh at, and escape. They also show him refusing the common hierarchy where “real art” is the finished painting and “applied art” is everything else. In these dioramas, he makes the applied work feel like the most intimate form of authorship: a private theater, built to convince himself.