The Marginalian
The Marginalian

My Favorite Things: Maira Kalman’s Illustrated Catalog of Unusual Objects, Memories, and Delight

Four decades after Barthes listed his favorite things, which prompted Susan Sontag to list hers, Maira Kalman — one of the most enchanting, influential, and unusual creative voices today, and a woman of piercing insight — does something very similar and very different in her magnificent book My Favorite Things (public library).

Kalman not only lives her one human life with remarkable open-heartedness, but also draws from its private humanity warm and witty wisdom on our shared human experience. There is a spartan sincerity to her work, an elegantly choreographed spontaneity — words meticulously chosen to be as simple as possible, yet impossibly expressive; drawings that invoke childhood yet brim with the complex awarenesses of a life lived long and wide. She looks at the same world we all look at but sees what no one else sees — that magical stuff of “the moments inside the moments inside the moments.” Here, her many-petaled mind blossoms in its full idiosyncratic whimsy as she catalogs the “personal micro-culture” of her inner life — her personal set of the objects and people and fragments of experience that constitute the ever-shifting assemblage we call a Self.

The book began as a companion to an exhibition Kalman curated to celebrate the anticipated reopening of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. But it is also a kind of visual catalog sandwiched between a memoir, reminding us that our experience of art is laced with the minute details and monumental moments of our personal histories and is invariably shaped by them. Between Kalman’s original paintings and photographs based on her selections from the museum’s sweeping collection — the buttons and bathtubs, dogs and dandies, first editions of Winnie the Pooh and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Proust’s letters — are also her childhood memories, her quirky personal collections, and her beautiful meditations on life.

Kalman writes in the introduction:

The pieces that I chose were based on one thing only — a gasp of DELIGHT.

Isn’t that the only way to curate a life? To live among things that make you gasp with delight?

And gasp one does, over and over. As Kalman makes her way through the vast Cooper Hewitt collection, her immeasurably lyrical interweavings of private and public expose that special way in which museums not only serve as temples to collective memory but also invite us to reopen the Proustian jars of our own memories with interest and aliveness and a capacity to gasp.

“Whoever invented the bed was a genius,” Kalman writes in her simple homage, inspired by a trading card ad from 1909. “When you get up from bed, get dressed in pants and socks.” The pants: French silk and linen breeches from 1750–1770; the socks: French knitted silk stockings from 1850–1900.

Her painting of a pair of yellow American slippers from the 1830s is really a love letter to walking, something Kalman sees as an existential activity and a creative device:

The ability to walk from one point to the next point, that is half the battle won.

Go out and walk.

That is the glory of life.

Beneath her painting of a quilted and embroidered silk Egyptian cap from the late 13th or early 14th century, Kalman hand-letters the perfect pairing — Pablo Neruda’s 1959 poem “Ode to Things”:

I love crazy things,
crazily.

I enjoy
tongs,
scissors.

I adore
cups,
rings,
soup spoons,
not to mention,
of course,
the hat.

As an enormous lover of Alice in Wonderland, I was particularly bewitched by Kalman’s painting of a photograph by Lewis Carroll, which calls to mind the real-life Alice who inspired his Wonderland:

There is also Kalman’s wink at Darwin’s despondent letter:

Painting a set of dolls made by Mexican nuns, Kalman notes in her singular style of wry awe:

The nuns have sensational fashion sense.

Emanating from the entire project is Kalman’s ability to witness life with equal parts humor and humility, and to always find the lyrical — as in her exquisite pairing of this early nineteenth-century European mount and a Lydia Davis poem:

The objects Kalman selects ultimately become a springboard for leaping into the things that move her most — like her great love of books, woven with such gentleness and subtlety into a French lamp shade from 1935:

The book. Calming object. Held in the hand.

Indeed, the screen does no justice to the magnificent object that is My Favorite Things, an object to be held in the hand and the heart. It follows Kalman’s equally enchanting The Principles of Uncertainty and Various Illuminations (Of a Crazy World), which she has complemented with such wonderful side projects as her illustrations for Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and Michael Pollan’s Food Rules.

For a dimensional tour of Kalman’s mind and spirit, see Gael Towey’s wonderful short documentary.

Illustrations courtesy of Maira Kalman / HarperCollins; photographs my own


Published October 21, 2014

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/10/21/maira-kalman-my-favorite-things/

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