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PrintSeuss on the Loose (in Jackson, not Moose!)
Theodor Geisel’s Lorax drawings teach process, conservation at the National Museum of Wildlife Art.
Rarely seen sketchings from The Lorax are on display this summer at the National Museum of Wildlife Art.
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As a cultural force of nature, Dr. Seuss speaks his own poetic dialect. He has riddled generations of young minds with colorful cooing and delighted their elders with funny-bone wooing. Seuss’ fantastical children’s tales, set in surrealistic worlds inhabited by otherworldly creatures, have attained universal appeal, putting him in a league of his own.
Consider: Since 1991, the year that Seuss put down his pen for the last time, more than 300 million copies of his books, from The Cat In The Hat and Horton Hears A Who!, to Green Eggs and Ham and How The Grinch Stole Christmas, have been sold worldwide. Less celebrated are the talents of Theodor Geisel, the American storyteller behind the pen name, as a fine artist and rabble-rouser of society’s conscience.
Opening this summer at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson and running through Labor Day is a special exhibition “The Lorax: Original Illustrations by Dr. Seuss” that features drawings from one of Geisel’s most enduring environmental fables.
The Lorax was published in 1971 at the dawn of the modern environmental age. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio had burned from pollution in 1969, the first Earth Day had been held in 1970, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was a bestseller on college campuses, and up north, in his own state of California, Geisel read stories about some of the last great redwood groves being rapidly razed.
The Lorax was his reply.
Inhabited by wondrous Brown Bar-ba-loots, Humming-Fish and Swomee-Swans, the Truffula Forest where the Lorax lived is an idyllic realm that falls within the greedy gaze of the villainous Once-ler. The reader becomes witness to ecological devastation and the ever-remorseful Once-ler, serving as tour guide, recounts the toppling of the Lorax’s Trufulla paradise and why its wild denizens all went away.
There are many elements of the Lorax exhibition that make it fitting for audiences in Jackson Hole, and it provides provocative fodder for the wildlife and art-loving public, though none quite so intriguing as the biography of Geisel himself.
Born in 1904 in Salem, Massachusetts, Theodor Seuss Geisel (his friends called him Ted), was the son of German immigrant parents. His father was, among other things, a brewmaster, and his mother had been raised in a family of bakers.
Geisel went off to Dartmouth College, demonstrating an interest in writing and became editor of the campus humor magazine, only to be fired for throwing a beer party. He continued to submit pieces using the pseudonym Seuss. And, for the record, he never became a medical doctor.
Instead, he went to Oxford, met his first wife, Helen, an American (who died in 1967), and pursued his self-taught ability to draw, landing jobs as a newspaper cartoonist back in the States.
