Laurent de Brunhoff, the artist who made Babar famous, dies at 98

Laurent de Brunhoff, the artist who made Babar famous, dies at 98

Laurent de Brunhoff, the French artist who nurtured his father’s creation, a beloved, very Gallic, very civilized elephant named Babar, for nearly seven decades – sending him, among other things, to a haunted castle, to New York and in space. – died Friday at his home in Key West, Florida. He was 98 years old.

The cause was complications from a stroke, said his wife, Phyllis Rose.

Babar was born one night in 1930 in a leafy suburb of Paris. Laurent, then 5 years old, and his brother Mathieu, 4 years old, had difficulty sleeping. Their mother, Cécile de Brunhoff, a pianist and music teacher, began telling the story of an orphaned baby elephant who flees the jungle and runs to Paris, conveniently located nearby.

The boys were captivated by the story and, in the morning, they ran to tell it to their father, Jean de Brunhoff, an artist; he embraced the tale and began drawing the little elephant, whom he named Babar, and fleshing out his adventures.

In Paris, Jean imagines, Babar is saved by a rich woman – simply called the Old Lady – who introduces him to all kinds of modern delights. Armed with the Old Lady’s purse, Babar visits a department store, where he rides up and down the elevator, irritating the operator: “It’s not a toy, Mr. Elephant.” » He buys a suit in “a suitable shade of green” and, although it is 1930, a pair of gaiters, the elegant, gaited shoes of a 19th-century gentleman.

He drives the Old Lady’s automobile, enjoys a bubble bath and receives lessons in arithmetic and other subjects. But he misses his old life and mourns his mother, and when his younger cousins ​​Arthur and Celeste find him, he returns to the jungle with them – but not before equipping Arthur and Celeste with their own clothes.

Back home, the old elephant king died after eating a bad mushroom (these things had a tendency to happen) and the rest of the elephants, impressed by Babar’s modernity – his nice green suit, his car and his education – make him their new king. Babar asks Celeste to be his queen.

“History of Babar,” an oversized, beautifully illustrated picture book in which Babar’s escapade is recounted in Jean de Brunhoff’s looping storyline, was published in 1931. Six other picture books followed before Jean died of tuberculosis in 1931. 1937, when he was 37 and Laurent was only 12.

The last two books were only partly colored when Jean died, and Laurent finished the work. Like his father, Laurent trained as a painter, working in oil and exhibiting his abstract works in a Parisian gallery. But at 21, he decided to continue Babar’s adventures.

“If I became a writer and artist of children’s books,” Mr. Laurent wrote in 1987 for the catalog which accompanied an exhibition of his work at the Mary Ryan Gallery in Manhattan, “it wasn’t because I had in mind to create children’s books; I wanted Babar to continue living (or, as some would say, my father to continue living). I wanted to stay in his country, the world of elephants which is both a utopia and a gentle satire of human society.

His first work, “Babar’s Cousin: That Rascal Arthur,” was published in 1946. Mr. de Brunhoff went on to write and illustrate more than 45 other Babar books. In the early years, many readers did not realize that he was not the original author, so perfectly did he understand Babar’s world and its essence: its quiet morality and serenity.

“Babar, it’s me,” M. de Brunhoff often repeated. Clearly, the artist and the elephant shared the same Gallic urbanity and the same optimistic vision.

In the 1960s, Babar was indeed a very famous elephant.

Charles de Gaulle was a fan. Babar’s books, he said, promoted “a certain idea of ​​France”. So did Maurice Sendak, although Mr. Sendak said he was traumatized for years by Babar’s origin story: the brutal murder of his mother by a hunter.

“This sublimely happy childhood lost, after only two full pages,” Mr. Sendak wrote in the introduction to “Babar’s Family Album” (1981), a reissue of six tracks, including Jean’s original.

Mr. Sendak and Mr. de Brunhoff, however, became friends, and the latter encouraged the former, as Mr. Sendak wrote, to abandon his “frantic Freudian excavations.”

“I calmed him down” Mr. de Brunhoff told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “I said bluntly that the mother died to let the little hero deal with life alone.”

There have been other criticisms. Many have accused Babar of being an avatar of sexism, colonialism, capitalism and racism. Two early works were particularly offensive: Jean de Brunhoff’s “Babar’s Travels” (1934) and Laurent de Brunhoff’s “Babar’s Picnic” (1949) both depicted “savages” drawn in the cruel style of their era, like cartoon images of Africans. In the late 1960s, when Toni Morrison, then a young editor at Random House, Babar’s publisher, objected to the images in “Babar’s Picnic,” Mr. de Brunhoff asked that they be removed from the impression. And he made sure to eliminate the racist scenes from “Babar’s Travels” when that title was included in “Babar’s Family Album.”

“Should we burn Babar? “” asked author and educator Herbert Kohl in the title of a 1995 book subtitled “Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories.” Well no, he concluded, but he nonetheless argued that Babar’s stories were elitist because they glorified capitalism and unearned wealth. Where did the Old Lady get her money? asked Mr. Kohl, annoyed by the implication “that it is perfectly normal and indeed pleasant for some people to have wealth for which they do not need to work.”

This is absurd, Mr. de Brunhoff told the Los Angeles Times, in response to an earlier Marxist analysis of his stories: “They are stories, not social theory. »

They were also works of art, and critics compared Mr. de Brunhoff’s use of color and his naïve style to painters like Henri Rousseau.

“With “Madeline” by Bemelmans and “Where the Wild Things Are” by Sendak,” The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik wrote in 2008When the Morgan Library exhibited the sketches and models of Jean and Laurent de Brunhoff’s early efforts, “the Babar books became part of the common language of childhood, the library of the precocious mind.”

Like Babar, Laurent de Brunhoff was born in Paris on August 30, 1925 into a family of artists and publishers. His father’s siblings all worked in the magazine business: his brothers, Michel and Maurice, were editors-in-chief of French Vogue and La Décor Today Hui, an art and design magazine, respectively; his sister, Cosette, a photographer, was married to the director of Jardins de Modes, a fashion magazine, and it was under the imprint of this magazine that Babar was first published.

Laurent worked differently from his father, who conceived his stories as a whole, narration and images in tandem. (Jean had also wanted to include his wife as a co-author, but she flatly refused. “My mother was absolutely against it,” said Laurent, “because she thought that even if she helped the idea, the whole creation was the work of my father.”) For Laurent, the idea and the images came first: what if Babar was abducted by aliens, or practiced yoga? – and he then began to draw and paint what it might look like. When he married his second wife, Mrs. Rose, professor emeritus of English at Wesleyan University, they often collaborated on the text.

The couple met at a party in Paris in the mid-1980s – Ms. Rose was working on a biography of Josephine Baker – and fell in love. “After dinner, we sat on the couch together,” Mr. de Brunhoff told an interviewer in 2015. “She said, ‘I love your work.’ I said, “I don’t know your work, but I like your eyes.” And that was the beginning.

Mr. de Brunhoff joined Ms. Rose in Middletown, Conn., in 1985, and brought Babar with him. The couple married in 1990 and later lived in New York and Key West.

In 1987, Mr. de Brunhoff sold the licensing rights for his elephant to a businessman named Clifford Ross, who then sold those rights to a Canadian company, Nelvana Ltd., with the understanding that Mr. Ross would continue to participate to the design. future products. What followed was what the New York Times described as “an elephantine lineup” of Babar-abilia – including Babar pajamas and slippers, wallpaper and wrapping paper, perfume, fruit drinks, backpacks, blankets and bibs. There was “Babar: The Movie” (1989), which critics called boring and violent, and, the same year, a television series, which critics called less boring and less violent.

And then there was a dispute. Mr. Ross found Nelvana’s designs tacky and demeaning to Babar’s wholesome image, as he charged in a lawsuit. Mr. de Brunhoff, with his typical serenity, remained aloof from the fray.

“Célesteville is a kind of utopian town, a place where there is no theft and no crime, where everyone has good relations with everyone else, so there is really no need for lawyers there,” he said. declared Mr. de Brunhoff to the New York Times.

Federal District Court Judge Kenneth Conboy agreed.

“In Babar’s world, all colors are pastel, all rains are brief and all enemies are more or less harmless,” he wrote in his decision, finding that Nelvana had unfairly excluded Mr. Ross from the licensing. “The plots celebrate the persistence of kindness, industriousness, patience and perseverance in the face of ignorance, discouragement, indolence and misfortune. If only Babar’s worldly values ​​were evident in the documents filed in this trial.

Besides his wife, Mr. de Brunhoff leaves to mourn his brothers Mathieu and Thierry-Jean; a daughter, Anne de Brunhoff, and a son, Antoine de Brunhoff, from his first marriage to Marie-Claude Bloch, which ended in divorce; a stepson, Ted Rose; and several grandchildren.

“Babar and I both lead a friendly family life,” Mr. de Brunhoff wrote in 1987. “We take the same care to avoid excessive dramatization of events or situations that arise. If we take the appropriate and effective steps, we both believe that a happy ending will come. When I write a book, my intention is to entertain, not to convey a “message.” But we can of course say that there is a message in Babar’s books, a message of non-violence.

Babar’s stories have been translated into 18 languages, including Japanese and Hebrew, and have sold several million copies. Mr. de Brunhoff’s latest book, “Le Guide de Babar à Paris”, was published in 2017.

“Laurent’s idea of ​​a good story,” Ms. Rose said by telephone, “is: something bad happens, no one panics and everything goes well.”

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Mattie B. Jiménez

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