ABSTRACT
Elegant and ideological, playful and nostalgic, picturebooks can seem to be distillations of childhood and of universal advice for all children. Picturebooks are basic, short, compact. One such questioning of the picture-text relationship began during a classroom conversation on picturebook history. Examinations of the picture-text relationship often make comparisons between the picturebook and fine art or handicraft, and focus on the homespun, interactive qualities of the picturebook as a mode. Picturebook creators orchestrate visual-verbal sequences in a way often related to musical performance and improvisation. Maurice Sendak credits classical music and opera as inspirations for many of his picturebooks, and strives for a symphonic harmony among words and pictures. The picturebook sequence – like the art object or mass image – carries an excess of signification, dealing in page-to-page, verbally/visually interdependent information. A generic picture-text relationship may seem to be a given, the unquestionable and universal essence of the picturebook throughout the history of this mode of production.
