Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination

by Ghislaine Kenyon

  And, on the other side, there are now also countless French readers, publishers, artists and institutions who have become committed Blakeophiles. This chapter is about the strong French corner of Blake’s identity, and looks at how he and his work are seen in the country with which he feels so connected.

  Cultural encounters

  At school Blake learned French, the modern foreign language that everyone did, at the time. As it happened, the headmaster Dr McGregor Williams was the author of La Formule, the French textbook used by the school, so the language may have had an extra cachet. In any case, Blake has two stand-out memories of how he benefited from school French: the first is of hearing Charles Trenet’s iconic song La Mer, which was played during a ‘French Culture Day’. First recorded by Trenet in 1946, the song was a recent hit, and would have seemed something modern in the classroom. Trenet briefly trained and practised as an artist and perhaps Blake’s imagination was touched by poetic images of the lyrics: sea dancing along the bays of southern France, past reedy ponds and white birds. Even more important though to Blake though was as we have seen the 1945 film directed by Marcel Carné, Les Enfants du Paradis. This film introduced the teenage Blake to the notion of ‘the mime element, which is an important part of illustration . . . of telling the story by acting it’.

  Telling the story by acting it is exactly what another of Blake’s early and enduring heroes, Daumier, did. Also while still at school, Blake made another London visit. Since they are specifically mentioned, these trips to the capital – only 15 miles from home – seem to have had great significance for Blake. They meant escaping from Sidcup to the lively place where art, theatre and film were to be found, and perhaps the taking home of something precious from the big city had a symbolic value. In this case, Blake brought back a volume of Daumier lithographs, which he has kept: a large beautifully produced hardback volume of 1946,1 with the artist’s characterful HD signature printed large on the faded beige cloth cover.

  Inside, Blake was enthralled by a selection of black-and-white lithographs, which originally appeared in the nineteenth-century French weekly illustrated newspaper Le Charivari, published in Paris between 1832 and 1937. In the book, these images, containing both political satire and social comment, are reproduced at actual size, and are full of the wit and, even more importantly, the sense of everyday drama that were later to characterize Blake’s own work so strongly. It was also the most expensive book he had ever bought, costing two guineas, and he remembers his mother asking him (in a concerned but sympathetic way, Blake emphasizes) whether he really wanted to spend all that money on a book. This memory also nicely illustrates the point about what home does and doesn’t contribute to a young person’s development – Blake, the best-known book illustrator of his times, remembers very few, if any books at home. His mother’s incomprehension at the sum of money spent and his own certainty about the book’s value to him both suggest how confident Blake already was to follow the path that seemed to be opening up before him.

  In 1952, a couple of years after leaving school, Blake was able to visit France for the first time. He went to Bordeaux with a school friend to visit another who was at the university there. Here too the memories are of book buying: a volume of eighteenth-century French drawings which he found in a bookshop in the Place Gambetta, and another of French posters of the Belle Époque by artists such as Steinlen and the innovative poster-designer Cappiello. All three of these books of French art are still in Blake’s possession, and he says that he realizes now how much the works he found in them were to mean to him later. Taken together, the art in these three volumes points towards some key aspects of Blake’s work, the ones which make his production so unmistakable and so powerful. In addition to the humour and drama of Daumier’s lithography, there is the fluid and elegant drawing of the French eighteenth-century masters such as Watteau and Fragonard, and lastly, in the book of posters, comes a strong sense of both design and colour: how to use a page for greatest effect and, maybe most important of all, in works such as a poster by the illustrator Cappiello advertising an aperitif, the fact that these kind of images are really both about art and about ordinary life at the same time.

  One other French artist should be mentioned in the context of French heroes, but, unlike the others, this was a man who Blake met and got to know a little: the artist and illustrator André François (1915–2005). François had been born into a Hungarian family but moved to Paris at the age of 19 where he stayed for the rest of his life. He studied at the Atelier Cassandre, where he learned a great deal about design from its eponymous founder. Cassandre developed among other things an innovative poster style, which paid dues to the art movements of its moment – cubism, surrealism and futurism – but which was also individual and striking (his 1930s adverts for companies such as Dubonnet and various transatlantic shipping companies are particularly recognizable). François himself went on to become a painter, sculptor, set designer, and graphic designer as well as a book illustrator. Today and in the UK he is especially remembered for the cartoons and magazine/newspaper covers that he produced for Punch (then under the maverick but enlightened editorship of Malcolm Muggeridge), The New Yorker and Le Nouvel Observateur, and for many book covers, illustrations and his own authored children’s books (his best-known one is Crocodile Tears).

  These were drawn in his painterly style, at first glance a naïve one, but with many highly sophisticated elements. Blake especially admired the ‘rough and improvisational quality of the urgent draughtsmanship’ and acknowledges that he found in François a ‘sense of liberation in that lack of British sobriety’.2 The work is indeed always characterized by a sophisticated sense of play, fantasy and the surreal, which takes him into another realm, which is all his own. As Blake says, ‘He could draw a rhinoceros in socks or a man getting out of bed and stretching out his wife’s fur coat as a rug, all without ceasing to create a work of art.’3 What Blake learned from him was lessabout style, more something about free-ranging imagination and a lot about the illustrator’s profession. While Blake was still in his early twenties and doing occasional work for Punch magazine, he came across François’ name and his work in Lilliput, a small-format British monthly magazine of humour, short stories, photographs and the arts, published during the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and to which Blake himself once contributed.

  Blake was already impressed by an incident he had heard about from an advertising agency, in which François had been asked by the agency on behalf of a client to make some changes to a picture of a cockerel. As the story goes, the client expectantly opened the package containing the revised drawing only to find a picture of an elephant. According to Blake: ‘François didn’t want to change anything, he just wanted to go on creating something.’ The idea of being ‘allowed’ to do what you want was an enabling one for Blake: as well as understanding that experimentation is one way of finding out who you are as an artist, he learned about self-confidence. This also included the idea that you could draw with anything: Blake says that there was a story circulating that François would trawl the post offices of Paris, stealing the worst pens he could find, in order to get a scratchier line. We have already seen in the chapter on drawing what scratchiness means to Blake.

  With some courage, Blake sought out François’ address outside Paris and asked for an interview, which to his surprise, he was granted. Blake remembers marvelling at Francois’ ungrand lifestyle: he picked Blake up from the station himself and drove him to his home. Here Blake found a striking example of an artist’s living space (very different to his own where his art is mainly safely tucked up in plan-chests):

  In his sitting room there was a wonderful trompe l’oeil drawing of shelves, with things on the shelves, which he’d done . . . which were very effectively trompe l’oeil, but actually didn’t deceive you . . . they were three dimensional, but you still knew they were drawing. And the other thing I found rather touching [was that] he hadn’t finished it. It was something that he was doi
ng when he had time to do it.

  While at François’ home Blake also witnessed one end of a phone call from the Pirelli company, which had commissioned a piece from François but was dissatisfied with the result. Again, Blake was delighted to hear the great man say: ‘No, no, that’s all right, I don’t want to do it again, just send me the rejection fee.’ Blake concedes that Francois’ by-now highly respected status allowed him to confront clients in this way, but, he says, it was ‘strengthening’ to a young artist to see this happening in front of him and it was a piece of valuable advice he was later able to pass on to his own students at the Royal College of Art. Something else that Blake experienced with François, and which he has always practised himself, was generosity and support to the younger colleague: Blake was somewhat astounded, and honoured, when François appeared, also bringing along his distinguished publisher Robert Delpire, at the private view of Blake’s Paris exhibition in 1999 at the L’Art à La Page gallery on the Left Bank.

  François was already drawing for Punch in the year that Blake’s first cartoon was published there (1948). This magazine also had a sort of genetic connection to France since on its first edition in 1841 the masthead proclaimed it as ‘the London Charivari’. This direct credit to its Parisian satirical predecessor came from Punch’s founders, the wood engraver Ebenezer Landells and the writer Henry Mayhew, who used the French magazine as a model. It may have been a happy combination of this history and the fact that Punch’s then-editor Muggeridge had been brought in to revitalize the publication that provided Blake with another engagement with France. He produced a double-page spread of cartoons of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists, A propos des Maîtres (1957), captioned entirely in French; something that would, to the previous editorial regime, have seemed outrageously and foreignly intellectual.

  Muggeridge had dispensed with the ‘pastoral sketches, illustrated poems and quaint anecdotes about marriage and women’, sacking chief cartoonist E. H. Shepard of Winnie the Pooh fame, and giving the publication a modern feel. In particular he experimented with the cover, which had had an unchanged format since the early days. These French artist drawings of Blake’s are looser and more fluent than some of his others of the period; he thinks this may be thanks to the extra space they were given: ‘the little ones were so cramped’. But perhaps drawing ‘in another language’ (a theme which is taken up later) also in some way liberated him from the tradition of British Punch; the theme of drawing art and artists may also have been a freeing one.

  The French is very correct and the art-historical references sophisticated – in the first picture the scrawny model is drawn in a Renoir pose and is advised that she will eat better ‘chez M. Renoir’ (who would of course have preferred a more rounded female form). In the second, a couple is in bed, but the woman senses a small black-bearded man painting her – here Blake refers both to a (not particularly well-known) painting by the notoriously short Toulouse-Lautrec, and to a Thurber cartoon. (Blake acknowledges that the writer, John Yeoman, who is a strong linguist, also helped with the jokes.)

  Unserious as these cartoons undoubtedly are, the understanding of both art and French in such early works is yet more evidence of how imprinted with French Blake was, already in his early twenties. By then he had been exposed to, or had discovered for himself, artists who were to mark his own practice. In an extraordinary synthesis, his personality, imagination and education met their ideas, techniques and approaches, and the result, as we will see later, is particularly well recognized in France.

  French editions

  It was not surprising therefore that Blake’s French radar would be extremely sensitive to the good things about France and the French. We cut to a weekend 20 years later, in the mid-1970s. By this time Blake is an established illustrator and is teaching at the Royal College of Art, but his success has by no means affected his down-to-earth sense of play: he is on his knees on the floor of The Children’s Book Centre in Kensington, doing something he revels in, though nowadays perhaps no longer on the floor: a large roll of paper is stretched out in front of him and he is drawing, to the joy of his rapt audience of children and parents. Among them that day was the French woman Christine Model, who was later to marry the manager of the bookshop, Robin Baker. Model was immediately captivated by the scene: by the man, by his work and by the response to it. When, a few years later in 1979, she joined the French publishing company Gallimard Jeunesse (the children’s book branch of Gallimard), one of her self-confessed intentions was to ‘reveal Quentin Blake to France as a genius illustrator’.

  The story of Blake’s reception in France is a paradox which reflects both Christine Baker’s and Blake’s differing views of French culture, especially literary culture: to Baker it is a monolithic nationalist structure, with a large glass penthouse where the classic giants, the philosophes, Proust and Gide, Sartre, live. She sees children’s literature, and in particular the illustrators who are often also its authors, languishing in the basement of this edifice, largely invisible and unvalued. Baker describes a children’s book publishing scene in 1970s France which was quite unlike that of the UK or even the USA in the same period. In this country a new wave of author-illustrators such as Brian Wildsmith, John Burningham, Janet and Allan Ahlberg and Pat Hutchins, in addition to the emerging Quentin Blake, had all exploited the opportunities offered by new high-quality colour printing techniques to produce a highly innovative and individual array of works. In France, says Baker, there was very little of interest or quality on the shelves of libraries or children’s bookshops; the diet was either the book versions of Disney films, Saint-Exupéry’s enduring Le Petit Prince or seasonal heritage classics such as Caputo’s evergreen Roule Galette, illustrated by Pierre Belvès, and first published in 1950. This is a story about a ‘galette des rois’, that most traditional of French cakes which appears in bakeries after Christmas, to be eaten on the Feast of the Epiphany, 6th January. According to Baker, the book’s success is more due to its unique place in seasonal celebrations than it is to the quality of text and image. Where, asks Baker, was our Very Hungry Caterpillar or Mr Magnolia?

  To Blake, on the other hand, France was the home of his hero artists and writers, and to be connected to them in some way by being published by Gallimard, France’s most literary publishing house and home to that almost mystical imprint, Pleiade, would be an accolade. So when Baker bought the French rights for the Dahl and Blake picture-book The Enormous Crocodile and some of the earlier books which he had produced with the author Russell Hoban, Blake was more than prepared to do the self-help marketing that publishers expect their authors to commit to: promotional appearances in libraries, bookshops, book fairs such as Montreuil and even in schools. For Baker and the new Gallimard Jeunesse section, led by its individualist and autodidact founder Pierre Marchand, there was now an opportunity to present French audiences with high-quality, sophisticated and well-designed children’s books. Gallimard (the house which has been described as having, ‘the best backlist in the world’) could now extend its policy of discovering and publishing the best new voices in literature for adults, to provide the same for children.

  From these beginnings grew a relationship with Gallimard which has bloomed brightly and persistently for over thirty years: virtually all Blake’s books for the UK market are also published in France; there are even a couple which have appeared exclusively there: one of these is Promenade de Quentin Blake au pays la Poésie Française. This anthology of French poetry for young people includes relatively few of the classics normally crammed into the heads of young citizens, and a refreshing number of little-known verses such as ‘Sardines à l’huile’ by Georges Fourest, a mid-nineteenth-century poet of the burlesque.

  Choices such as this one offered Blake rich opportunities to encourage young readers to engage with a form that is still sometimes considered difficult, and his choice of the works and their order of appearance are made with a special care for this: it is no coincidence that t
he book opens with two daft poems about sardines, then moves gradually into the elegiac with the Renaissance poet Du Bellay’s famous sonnet ‘Heureux qui comme Ulysse’ and a poem about the old station of Cahors; at this point it can safely plunge into two tough works about war, the plaintive ‘Gordes, que ferons nous’ by De Magny and de Musset’s ‘Chanson de Barberine’, before finally lifting the mood again with the Brassens’ ‘La Canne de Jeanne’ and a surreal and jolly poem about a pelican by Robert Desnos.

  Gallimard’s confidence in their British author-illustrator is to be seen in the fact that they published Dix Grenouilles (Ten Frogs) in France before it appeared in the UK; they also risked publishing a work which did not sit comfortably in any of the highly compartmentalized sections of bookshops or libraries (usually the cause of a book’s early demise in sales terms): Vive Nos Vieux Jours (2007) is a unique combination of art, humour and therapy to be enjoyed by people of all ages; a commentary-free suite of images from the series (known as the Kershaw Pictures) which Blake made for an NHS ward of the same name. This ward was a residential diagnostic unit for older adults, who were often confused and unhappy. But in these joyful pictures, grey-haired people cavort companionably in treetops, reading, making art, playing the trumpet; doing the things they once did and, in the right circumstances, might still be doing. It was only in the following year that the work was ‘translated’ for the UK as You’re Only Young Twice and published by Andersen Press.

  Despite Christine Baker’s sense that children’s literature and its creators are generally undervalued in France, it does seem that Blake enjoys a particular kind of celebrity there. This may be thanks first to the broad spread of his work – which starts with books for children such as the Dahl novels (which enjoyed huge success in France in the 1980s and 90s), and includes his own Armeline Fourchedrue (Mrs Armitage), Le Bateau Vert (The Green Ship) and Clown (no translation needed) as well as books for children and everyone else such as Nous les Oiseaux or Vive Nos Vieux Jours – and second to the fact that this range is visible both to the general public and to professionals, in the physical spaces of bookshops. Because of current strict anti-discounting laws in France, the internet book trade is smaller than in the UK, and bookshops still do exist as places to visit and spend time in, often in great numbers (for example, Tours, a French town of 140,000, currently (2014) lists 27 while St Alban’s in the UK, with a similar population and demographics, has 5). Public libraries also still play a major cultural role in France, being relatively well funded and often easily accessed through their central locations. As a result there are many more professionals such as booksellers and librarians with expert knowledge of their stocks, who are able to guide book buyers and borrowers. Between about 1980 and 2005 Blake made dozens of popular appearances in the places where librarians, booksellers and also teachers meet – book fairs, bookshops, exhibitions in libraries, and schools – and so his recognition is extremely high. For Blake and his publishers the ultimate tribute occurred in 2013 when Promenade de Quentin Blake au pays la Poésie Française was included in the Ministry of National Education’s influential list of recommended books for primary-age children.