Storybook Marriage of Alice and Martin Provensen


THE ART OF ALICE & MARTIN PROVENSEN

by Alice and Martin Provensen

With essays by Leonard Marcus, Robert Gottlieb and Karen Provensen Mitchell

THE BOOK OF PROVENSEN TALES

Compiled and illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen.

12 days ago my house burned down. I heard what I thought was a little hand crumpling a piece of paper and I tried to sleep again but the sound got louder. I followed the sound to the bathroom and looked up. Small, orange flames crackled like fragile thorns inside the exhaust fan. I woke my husband and he tried to put out the fire with the fire extinguisher. We didn’t know that yet, but the flames were already starting to spread through the attic. As the smoke settled on us, my sons, husband and I fled with our dog and two cats. We left everything so we could take ourselves.

After the fire, my family and I toured the house where I had lived for 14 years and collected what was left (as if it had fallen from a dead tree): a spatula, a measuring tape, a bag of singing gems I bought for my son Eli. Hanukkah.

For the last 12 days, I’ve been looking for a recoverable one. Among the two survivors are “The Art of Alice and Martin Provensen” and the “Book of Provençal Fairy Tales” because I had just started writing about them and for some reason left them in the unburned part of our kitchen. I wanted to take them to my office where they would surely be turned to ashes.

The last 70 pages of “Alice & Martin’s Provençal Art” have been thickened by water damage, but wearing it in such a striking monograph is oddly plausible, because it feels like it had been rescued from a fairytale sea or an enchanted castle, even when undamaged, submerged by a spell. In its content, never-before-seen paintings seem to have escaped, if not ruined, then forgotten – plus family photos, sketchbooks, memoirs, conversations, and personal reviews documenting a couple’s life and work. pretend you don’t know. But you do.

From the late 1940s to the late 1980s, together they created more than 40 children’s books in a fluttering style, from primitive Americana to Impressionism to Expressionism, none of which landed completely. They won the Caldecott Medal in 1984 (“Glorious Flight” is a picture book about aviator Louis Blériot who flew the English Channel 18 years before Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, and has been awarded the Times Best Picture Children’s Book seven times between 1952 and 1978.

Even if you didn’t read his books as a kid, you can recognize his handsome anthropomorphic foxes in his blue vest and scarf, his smiling lions, and his bears in overalls. It takes you back to your childhood. Even if this childhood is not yours, it is a childhood worth spending a day in.

Silent drawings sometimes seem like watercolors on bone – they feel that bone deeply. I was rubbing the pages, hoping the paint would get on my fingers. All of a sudden it looks like it’s still wet and dried out at least a thousand years ago.

Alice and Martin Provensen lived in a picture book as much as they lived in a picture book. In the first pages of the monograph, the photograph of their home and barn studio at Maple Hill Farm in Dutchess County, NY, later turned into a painting so seamlessly in “Animal Fair” (1952) that I had to turn the pages. to check if the photo is really a photo from the beginning. The wood is stacked, the sheep are grazing, the dogs are running, and cherry blossoms mean early spring. The lines drawn by artists are indistinguishable from the lines of the world they live in. Indeed, the lines between their lives and art seem so beautifully blurred that I wouldn’t be surprised if, after staring at the painting of Maple Hill Farm for a minute or two, a door opens and Alice and Martin come out.

“Animal Fair” (A Giant Golden Book)full of animal stories, poems and riddles – it was the first of many books the couple had written and illustrated. “You see,” said Alice once, “we were a real collaboration. Martin and I were really one artist.” The miracle of finding a mate whose hand is an extension of your heart and whose heart is an extension of your hand is the secret plan within this working life.

Out of the 12 stories in “The Provensen Book of Fairy Tales”, first published in 1971 and finally reprinted, Henry Beston’s “Lost Half Hour” is the story I’ve been turning around. To entertain a princess in it, a fool named Bobo is sent to find impossible things: a white crow’s feather, a glass of dry water, a square wheel. The drawings have the quality of peeling paint, as if the backs of the painting were to be revealed. It’s like the impossible thing to find has been here all along.

One day the princess falls asleep and Bobo is sent on a journey to find his missing half hour. Of course he does, because it’s a fairy tale. He lies in “a small square coffin made of ebony”. Bobo should not open the box until the time is right; otherwise it will fly away and be destroyed forever.

Entering Alice and Martin Provensen’s world is like finding not just one half hour lost, but hundreds – half an hour we didn’t spend listening to bears, chickens, trees, horses, farmers, cities. goats. His drawings create an opening in time, like a tear in soft fabric, neither past, present, nor future. They have the signs of infinity. Leave the wildly real behind and go inside. This place is great. The Provensens, with their pens and paintbrushes, extended the hour to give us another chance to see how much beauty there is in this desolate world.



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