ABSTRACT
One of the most striking trends in contemporary picturebooks is the frequent, and often highly sophisticated, visual allusions to art works. Many of today’s picturebook creators are master recyclers of art. Yet, in spite of the fact that this is a widespread phenomenon that can be found in books from many countries and for all age groups, the subject has received surprisingly little critical attention, as I fi rst discovered when preparing a paper on “Paintings, Parody, and Pastiche in Picture Books” for the Children’s Literature Association Conference on “Children’s Literature and the Fine Arts,” held in Paris in July 1998.1 More than a decade later, this situation has not changed. In her ground-breaking book, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms, Linda Hutcheon has argued quite convincingly that parody, in the broad sense of any “revisiting” or “recontextualizing” of previous works of art, is a characteristic shared by all the arts in the postmodern world (11).2 Although Hutcheon doesn’t mention children’s literature, picturebooks are certainly no exception. In many countries, unconventional, innovative works by picturebook artists challenge habitual thinking about the picturebook and explore and develop the potential of the genre as its own unique art form, one in which artistic allusion and metadiscourse on art play a signifi cant role.
