Maira Kalman, and a pop quiz

I have in front of me two books by Maira Kalman: one, Smartypants (Pete in School) which is a children’s book that involves a dog who eats an encyclopedia and momentarily earns most favored canine status in the narrator’s grammar school; the other, Various Illuminations (of a crazy world) is the catalog for a retrospective of Kalman’s work that was at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philly earlier this year; it is currently at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and will be moving on to the Skirball Cultural Center in LA (where I’m wondering if someone has done a Skirball Skeeball installation; thinking now of an exhibition of major cultural institutions reimagined as arcade games – the Guggenheim in NYC could be a great gumball dispenser) and then to The Jewish Museum in New York.

The retrospective includes a host of Kalman’s paintings, primarily gouache on paper, as well as a number of installations of objects -- such as some incredibly well-preserved onion rings -- set out in vitrines, on ironing boards, and in a pie chest. I think I first saw her artwork in the book Stay Up Late, in which she provided illustrations for lyrics to the David Byrne song; the characters who populate her books and paintings remind me a bit of the long-faced figures in Modigliani portraits, if those Modigliani models would ever be allowed to let their hair down and maybe get a hot dog from one of those street-corner vendors who fish the wieners out of water that has been on a high simmer since the spring of 1973.

I like Kalman’s focus on everyday objects – a Snickers bar, a hole punch, a rubber band -- as well as her eye for the extraordinary in the day to day – the sight of a disheveled sofa upholstered in a cabbage rose print on a city sidewalk, an elaborate black lace bow in a woman’s hair, someone’s carefully preserved collection of “mosses of Long Island.”

She’s also really good at creating visions which take the everyday stuff of everyday life and replacing it in a world that is familiar but just slightly more fantastical than the ones we have gotten used to. In Smartypants, the food in the cafeteria line becomes a boxed set of paints; Pete the dog devours a box of crayons, the math teacher’s pants, and a 34, 591 pound block of cheese; people’s hairdos communicate their ideas and anxieties, which for the narrator include the fear of being “stupid in front of the whole class” and pop quizzes – one of which concludes the book itself (a heads up for the wary: two of the question involve stating your name, and making a mistake will actually help you complete the quiz).

Pop quiz for today:

1. Who is the artist discussed in this entry?
2. Who is the person responsible for taking the author of this blog entry to the Maira Kalman exhibit at the ICA (hints: she is a former Maple Queen of Somerset County, and her superpower is the ability to instantaneously fall asleep while riding any form of public or private transportation)?
3. What is it about eggbeaters?
4. Name the illustrator of a recent edition of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (hint: the answer is the same as #1).
5. What do you want to eat for dinner?