That’s where the wild animals live! Five things you’ll learn at the Maurice Sendak exhibition in Skirball

“Where the Wild Things Are” has sold over 50 million copies worldwide since its publication in 1963 and has been translated into dozens of languages.

The book is about a boy named Max who gets up to mischief one night and is sent to bed without dinner. While he is locked in his room, a forest begins to grow around him. Trees and vines spread out and the walls reveal a view of the outside world. Then Max jumps on a boat and travels across the sea. When he disembarks, he finds himself in a land of giant beasts with “terrible claws” and “terrible teeth.”

Now the classic children’s book and its author and illustrator are the focus of “Wild Things Are Happening: The Art of Maurice Sendak,” an exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center in West LA that runs through early September.

With over 150 sketches, storyboards and paintings, it is the largest collection of Sendak’s work exhibited since his death in 2012. It also cements the writer’s role as an artist who continues to shape thinking across cultures and generations.

Sarah Daymude, the exhibition’s senior co-curator, said she appreciated that Sendak “never shied away from telling dark or complex stories.”

“Many of us, including adults, can learn that it’s OK to talk to children about difficult things. And it’s OK to tell those stories because it’s important to acknowledge children’s feelings,” she said.

She also likes that the main characters in Sendak’s works are always brave, “even when they find themselves in frightening situations.”

I recently visited this great exhibition. Here are some of the things you will learn there:

ONE: Sendak, a New Yorker and the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, had a “desperate aversion” to high school and was not a good student. But he was already a talented artist: despite failing physics, his teacher commissioned him to illustrate a book about the atom bomb.

TWO: Sendak and his partner Eugene Glynn considered their dogs part of the family. Their dogs appeared frequently in Sendak’s work. To help visitors spot them in the exhibition, Skirball provides a gallery guide that includes cutouts of one of the puppies and a sailboat like the one Max used to visit the Wild Things.

THREE: Sendak loved Mickey Mouse and the Disney character’s large head, big feet and small body influenced his work.

FOUR: Sendak enjoyed classical music and developed a drawing practice called “fantasy sketches,” in which he would listen to a piece by Beethoven or Schubert and challenge himself to draw a story that had to be completed before the last note.

FIVE: Sendak also worked as a set designer. The exhibition features a tiny stage model of the opera “Brundibar,” a nod to Sendak’s time at the Chicago Opera Theater. This opera, too, was performed by imprisoned Jews in a concentration camp in the Czech Republic in 1943, and almost all of the children involved were killed.

The reading room at the end of the exhibition invites you to leisurely read Sendak’s books.

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Skirball Cultural Center

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BONUS: The exhibition concludes with a living room with comfortable sofas and a faux fireplace, where visitors can relax and read books that Sendak wrote and illustrated, as well as books that inspired him.

“I thought it was important to give people the opportunity to sit down and really immerse themselves in the stories,” said co-curator Daymude. When visitors go to museums, she added, they often have a desire to touch and feel the objects, so she and her team made it a point to provide a space for that.

At the end of the exhibition there is also a professional drawing table with lots of paper and pencils. Daymude wants visitors who feel inspired to make use of these tools.

“Who knows? Maybe we’re dealing with the next Maurice Sendak,” she said.