The Art of Seuss

There isn’t a person reading this who won’t be familiar with the work of Dr Seuss. My kids adore him, all three of them can recite The Cat in the Hat by heart, and my daughter is completely obsessed with Green Eggs and Ham.

Theodor Seuss Geisel is famous for his children’s stories and illustrations, and arguably he has done more to fire young imaginations than any other author. During his lifetime he wrote 46 books, which sold over 200 million copies. He was also a political cartoonist, an advertising illustrator and a documentary filmmaker, but it was his amazing nonsensical children’s books for which he will always be revered. His stories are full of tongue-twisters, made-up vocabulary and word-play, as well as clever pictures.

In the serious and pretentious art world, Dr Seuss wasn’t considered to be a proper artist. This is a mistake. He was actually a highly imaginative artist, creating some amazing surrealist work during his lifetime. Combine his vivid imagination with a deep understanding of human nature, and you can see profound truths within his crazy, playful paintings. Disguised as nonsense for kids, when examined more closely they reveal a unique artistic vision. During his lifetime, he dabbled in Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, and his images were always bold, colourful and uniquely Seuss. You simply can’t look at his art without feeling uplifted and enlightened.

Not all of his paintings were published, and not all were suitable for children. His rather odd Myopic Woman (see above) demonstrates both surrealism and cubism, and seems positively indecent if you study it closely. (Incidentally Seuss’s wife was crazy about cats, which is why they feature so extensively in his work. As everyone knows, cats are cleverer than humans.)



Gosh Do I Look As Old As That? is based on a character he invented called La Jolla Birdwoman, a “species which functions in its native habitat of luncheons, parties and charity balls.” (From this we conclude that I am, in actual fact, La Jolla Birdwoman, as Seuss clearly has my personality nailed.)



But my favourite ever Seuss character is the bird in Fooling Nobody. An astute insight into an artist’s ego, the message in the painting is clear: No matter how inflated our ego, we’re not fooling anybody. Others can see straight through the image we portray, and in the end, we are better off just being ourselves.

So does Seuss create a pot pourri of nonsense, a “phantasmagorical cocktail of inventions,” or rather does he demonstrate a witty and brilliant insight into human nature? In the end, I am left with the uneasy realisation that Seuss was forever laughing at us all.